Lockdown!
Twelve days into lockdown and you’d think these were ideal conditions in which to write a novel. After all, apart from a walk every day, I am going nowhere and I am seeing no-one except my daughter – and of course the cats. No trips to London. No lunches with friends. And yet, the time […]
Shall it be The Plague or Right Ho, Jeeves?
When the going gets tough, the tough . . . buy books? I couldn’t be better placed for weeks of social isolation from the point of view of reading. I have enough books here to last for years and years if you count books that I’d be happy to reread. And yet I am still […]
Where it began . . .
When I was invited to submit a short story for an anthology of crime stories based on songs by Joni Mitchell, I was intrigued by the idea. I chose: ‘The Gallery’ on Clouds (1969). This was a song that I used to listen to endlessly as a teenager. I wanted to catch some of the […]
Unexpected pleasures
Something I could never have imagined when I started writing fiction was that I would one day find myself on a panel at the Festival of the International Society of Neglected Tropical Diseases. But so it was yesterday at the Wellcome Institute when I joined Mojie Crigler, the co-author of Under the Big Tree: Neglected […]
Character versus plot
I recently watched The Stranger on Netflix (based on Harlan Coben’s novel of the same name). It was certainly gripping. I watched one of the eight episodes a night and I really wanted to know what had happened to the woman who went missing at the beginning. There was a lot of excellent acting and […]
Nasty People
Last summer at the St Hilda’s crime fiction convention I guessed who the murderer was (Val McDermid!) in the after dinner play. I wasn’t the only one to get it right, but mine was the name picked out of the hat, and the prize was a year’s subscription for a crime novel sent by Blackwells […]
Murder in Mind
I didn’t get round to posting my talk on Helen McCloy, which I gave at Bodies from the Library last year. So here it is now. The title is ‘Murder in Mind: The Crime Novels of Helen McCloy.’ My attention was first drawn to Helen McCloy when her novel, Mr Splitfoot, was listed by H. […]
Goodbye, Inspector Morse. Hello, Lewis.
Rather fittingly, I watched the last episode of Inspector Morse on New Year’s Eve. The first had aired in 1987 and this final one in 2000. I’d worked my way through all thirty-three in four or five months. By the end, the power-dressing of the 1980s was long gone and mobile phones were no longer […]