No AlibisBookstore

David Torrans opened No Alibis on Botanic Avenue in 1997 and made it Northern Ireland's specialist crime-fiction bookshop — though it stocks far more than crime, and has grown a publishing arm, No Alibis Press, and a crime-writing festival, Noireland, out of the back of the till. Torrans runs it himself, and has been called the last independent bookseller standing in Belfast, a description he has spent a quarter-century disproving by simply staying open. It is the kind of shop where the recommendation is handwritten and the author events are frequent — a room organised around a bookseller's judgement rather than a chart. Near the university, on a street that has lost most of its other independents, it holds the line.