"Sadly, critically acclaimed crime fiction authors Diane Wei Liang and Simon Lewis had the graveyard slot at Hay this year: 9am on the last day of the festival. So it gives me great pleasure to be able to write about them here and let you know what you missed.

Both authors - who were absolutely delightful to meet - focus on China and the Chinese with their stories. In Bad Traffic, Simon Lewis uproots Inspector Jian from near the Siberian border and takes him to England in search of his missing daughter. Ding Ming a migrant worker in England is in debt, at the behest of his gang master and is searching for his missing wife. Their lives eventually collide.

On the other hand, Diane Wei Liang sets her novels in China and has created a private detective, Mei Wang, who first appeared in The Eye of Jade and has a second outing in Paper Butterfly. Mei Wang's work is never easy, not least because private detective agencies are banned and illegal in China - her business is registered as 'information consultant'.

Simon Lewis and Diane Wei Liang are both well qualified to write on their chosen themes and settings. Lewis lived in China for a few years, has Chinese friends and has written guidebooks (The Rough Guides to Shanghai, Beijing and China). Diane Wei Liang, who now lives in London, was forced to leave China because of her involvement in the students' revolt that led to the Tiananmen Square massacre. Paper Butterfly draws on the long lasting impact of the massacre in its plot.

I'm looking forward to reading both novels.

At 11:30 we had the second crime fiction treat with the local Phil Rickman (The Fabric of Sin) and Icelandic author Yrsa Sigurðardóttir (Last Rituals).

Rickman has a series with Merrily Watkins as the protagonist: a vicar who is also an exorcist or 'deliverance consultant'. She has a daughter at that 'awkward age'. Rickman draws on the local area and its history in this series. At the end of the session he admitted that 'Hereford Council will be in ruins when I finish the next book' and considered his chances of achieving freedom of the city to be getting 'more and more remote'.

Sigurðardóttir, remarkably, writes on top of the day job which sees her as technical manager of one of the largest hydro-construction projects in Europe. She has previously written books for children and teenagers with Last Rituals being her first for the adult market. She was still writing the novel, thinking only of an Icelandic audience when rights were sold abroad, so she then felt she 'needed to put something touristic in there'.

Paul Blezard, chairing, noted that there are plenty of very dark aspects to Last Rituals and asked Sigurðardóttir if she ever scared herself.

Quick, direct and with a humour than ran throughout, she replied that it is the culture in Iceland to 'scare our children', so nothing scares her anymore. A very generous Rickman who has clearly read the novel, later pointed out that in addition to the dark, there is humour in there.

Blezard asked Sigurðardóttir about the nature of Icelandic humour. She told us it had plenty of sarcasm and was much like the British sense of humour. No surprises then that she went down a treat on her Hay day."

Blog by Rhian Davies