Ink and Daggers
It is always nice to get back from holiday and find that a book has arrived in the post and it’s even nicer when the book contains one of your own short stories. I’ve written elsewhere on my website about how much I enjoy the short story form. It is possible be playful and experimental […]
Writing in lockdown, or Cassandra redux
Or should that be NOT writing, or at least, not writing a great detail. Last year’s tally included two short stories and a fair amount of work on a novel, including a lot of research and a synopis. However to date I have only written about 5,000 words of that novel. Not a lot to […]
Ten novels set in the theatre
Along with my good blogfriend Moira at http://clothesinbooks.blogspot.co.uk I am posting my list of ten novels with theatrical settings. Theatres are closed communities of people engaged in a very stressful profession and so make wonderful settings – for crime novels in particular. Actors are good at lying. Deceiving people is what they do for living. And […]
Cosy crime-writers?
It was a pleasure to find myself moderating a Crimefest panel featuring some of my favourite writers. From the left it is Christopher Fowler, me, Jill Paton Walsh, Helen Smith, and Martin Walker. The subject was ‘The Contemporary Cosy: Is there Life Left in the Golden Age?’ and I asked everyone if they considered themselves […]
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 […]
Bath Book
Surely reading in the bath is one of life’s great pleasures? In fact I’d argue that this is one of the best places to read a book. Wallowing in warm water, perhaps scented Neal’s Yard bath oil – though I certainly don’t insist on that – maybe with a glass of wine or, better, an […]
Some Thoughts About Book-buying
For quite a large proportion of my life there have been only two ways to get hold of a book that one wanted to read, either through a library or through a book-shop, which essentially meant W. H. Smith if you lived in the sticks or maybe a second-hand book shop. No remainder book shops, […]