Famously prolific, he has produced a book a year since the Eighties, and writes 15,000 words a week between October and December Dead Air is published next week by Little, Brown.. Fay Weldon caused handwringing when she wrote a novel sponsored by jewellers Bulgari. Now BMW have commissioned crime writer Val McDermid to write a crime novella to mark the launch of their Mission Mini. The story is set in Barcelona, with PI Sam S Cooper on the trail of art thieves.

But the case proves difficult, so budding investigators are invited to take up the challenge by reading Mission Mini and entering a competition. The contest will be global and, in the UK, McDermid's story will be affixed to the September issue of Choice magazine. Winners will fly to Barcelona in November to help close the case. The lucky recipient of the keys, computer, corkscrew (and weekly cleaner) is Jessica Berens, who will use the time and space to finish her third novel. ¿ What with Vermilion about to publish an explicit teenage sex guide by Lynne Franks's daughter, and Bloomsbury's new Sex in the City-style tales for teens, Disgusteds of Tunbridge Wells will have a busy time. Bloomsbury will not roll with Gossip Girl – a series of novels by Cecily von Ziegesar about moneyed schoolgirls with a keen interest in drugs and swearing – until next year.

The firm will be stickering them with "Warning: Adult Content", which should give a nice boost to sales.. Perhaps, on this day, you won't be surprised to learn of a newly published book that tells the story of a pretty and rebellious English princess who almost overthrew a dynasty. Reeled into a gruesome royal family as docile "breeding stock", this feisty consort went on to astonish Europe with her courage and candour. Sick of acting as a "royal cow for service", she discovered that she "lacked all fear", shook the palace old guard, fell adulterously in love with an idealistic doctor, won the people's affection – and produced the "two royal children, which gave her power". Her sudden death in a foreign country, while still young, aroused suspicions of foul play that linger to this day. The English princess was Caroline Mathilde: the youngest sister of George III, married off into the tottering Danish monarchy as a 15-year-old in 1766. After giving a son and heir to the disturbed teenage king Christian VII, she helped her lover – the physician-turned-statesman Johann Friedrich Struensee – to stage a whirlwind revolution-from-above.