Reading on the train
This, for me, is one of the great pleasures in life: a long train journey and a good book is a prospect to relish. It wasn’t a very long journey from Sheffield to Bristol and it involved a tedious change at Birmingham, one of the most inconvenient and dreary stations I know. But I did […]
Desert Island Crime Fiction
I’m off to Crimefest – see crimefest.com – on Thursday where I am moderating a panel on the Contemporary Cosy. This has set me thinking about my all-time favourite crime novels and I’ve drawn up a desert island selection of eight classic crime novels or collections of stories that I’d be very happy to read again. In […]
How many books are too many books?
I am tempted to say that you can’t have too many books, but that is patently not true, unless you are the British Library, or the Library of Congress or some other copyright library. I don’t know how many my husband and I have, but it must run into quite a few thousand. Every time […]
Crime-writer Quentin Bates guests
I’ve been a fan of Quentin Bates’s Icelandic mysteries since the first one, Frozen Out, came out in 2011. His latest, Cold Steal, was published on 1 May so this seemed an ideal time to interview him for the blog. I began by asking him to tell us a little bit about his new novel. […]
Shakespeare Knew Everything
Yesterday in Cambridge I was missing a dear friend who died recently. I went into Heffer’s Bookshop (best crime fiction stock of anywhere that I know) and my attention was caught by a book on one of the tables at the front: Poems That Make Grown Men Cry. I’d heard it mentioned on Radio 4. […]
Butcher’s Crossing: An extraordinary novel
Will Andrews leaves his studies at Harvard and goes west in search of the wilderness. It is the 1870s and already on the Great Plains buffalo have been hunted almost to extinction . He falls in with Miller, an experienced buffalo hunter who has an obsession: ten or so years ago he discovered by accident a valley […]
The Pram in the Hall
‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.’ There is some truth in this famous statement by Cyril Connolly. I guess that Connolly was thinking more of male writers and the necessity to support a family and the need to write for money. Still it is worth noting that […]
A Book by its Cover
Some of the problem of deciding which books to pack for a trip away has been solved by having an e-reader. One can take any number. I’ve got the latest Bryant and May by Chrisopher Fowler, the new Fred Vargas, and the latest Sue Grafton all stacked up. I’ve also got The Mangle Street Murders […]
Download a Story
There’s a free podcast of the first story I ever had published on http://crimecitycentral.com. It’s ‘The Lammergeier Vulture’ very ably read by Jonathan Danz. Do visit the web-site, run by Jack Calverley. There are lots of other stories there by well-known crime-writers.
Crime-writer Margaret Murphy: Truth, Lies, and Creative Collaboration
Every now and then I like to invite one of my crime-writing friends to be a guest on my blog. This time it’s the turn of Margaret Murphy. I really wanted to know more about Margaret’s colloboration with forensic scientist, Dave Barclay, and how that works. This is what I learned: A.D. Garrett is the […]