Miss Marple: Proto-feminist? Scarcely, and yet . . .
I’ve been reading with great pleasure Virginia Nicholson’s excellent, Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War. In a chapter on the stereotype of the spinster I was interested to come across this as an example: ‘Agatha Christie’s knitting detective Miss Marple incarnated the spinster sleuth.’ Last week I was reading The […]
Suspension of disbelief
Horror, sci-fi, crime: they are all remote from our experience of everyday life and yet a good writer or director can make them absolutely convincing and have us sitting on the edge of our seat. I thought about this on Saturday when I was watching the last episode of the French crime series, Spiral (in French, Engrenages – […]
Eight of my favourite books set in schools
Today I am blogging about books set in schools and Moira at Clothesinbook.com is doing the same. Our tastes are similar but don’t quite overlap, so I’m always fascinated to see what she has chosen. There are very few fictional schools that one would like to have attended or to have sent one’s own children […]
Interview with crime writer Dolores Gordon-Smith
Dolores Gordon-Smith is my guest today. Dolores is great company and am always glad to run into her. We first met when she was on a panel that I chaired at Crimefest. That was also when I first encountered her series featuring Jack Haldean, set in the 1920s and drawing on the Golden Age tradition of […]
Inspiring photographs by David Wilson
I’ve been busy with some short stories lately. It’s especially interesting, I think, when one is writing to a brief. The first time I did that was some years ago when Ra Page at Comma Press asked me if I’d like to try my hand at a horror story involving modern technology for an anthology he […]
State of the Art
A week or two ago I wanted to track down a short story. I thought it was probably by a writer called Margaret Irwin. I remembered what it was about, but I wasn’t sure of the title. Quarter of an hour later I was reading it on my ebook reader. I’d found the writer on Wikipedia, […]