Be afraid …
Writing is a solitary occupation and like many writers I welcome a reason to get out of the house, whether it is to a CWA conference, Crimefest, or a book launch. I am especially thrilled to be heading to Newcastle at the end of October to the wonderful Lit and Phil, to listen to one […]
Golden Age Treats
This Deadly Ilse: A Golden Age Mystery Map is a perfect gift for the GA fan in your life – or for yourself. It is attractively designed and the captions are written by Martin Edwards – need I say more? Some of the locations and the books associated with them were familiar to me – […]
The Life of Crime by Martin Edwards: a splendid read
This book is the result of a lifetime of reading a vast range of crime fiction. Martin Edwards claims that despite its length – running as it does (with exhaustive indexes) to 724 pages – The Life of Crime is a miracle of concision and that is hardly an exaggeration. Chronologically it spans the late […]
I’m a guest on The First Two Pages
Art Taylor is an award-winning short story writer, whose work I much admire. He has a blog called The First Two Pages for which he invites writers to discuss the choices that they made in writing the first two pages of a story or novel. And today that writer is me and I am honoured […]
Cassandra returns
This week sees the publication of the new CWA short story anthology, Music of the Night. It is edited by Martin Edwards and contains twenty-five stories, some by doyens of the crime-writing world, such as Peter Lovesey, Andrew Taylor, Kate Ellis, including four Diamond Dagger winners, and others by writers who haven’t had a story […]
The Death of the Short Story?
There are so few outlets for short stories these days. It didn’t used to be the case. There was a Golden Age of the short story from the 1880s to perhaps the 1950s when there were lots of magazines like The Strand and John O’London’s Weekly that published them. The Strand, most famous for the […]
Splendid reprints of a forgotten GA author
On a morning early in 1940 Mrs Mudge, the charlady, arrives at Lulverton Little theatre, home of the local amateur dramatic society, whose first performance of Measure for Measure is due to take place that evening. She goes into the box office: ‘with the still whining vacuum-cleaner dragging behind her like an unhappy dog on […]
Criminal Pursuits
Criminal Pursuits, edited by best-selling author Samantha Lee Howe, will be published on October 10th by Telos Publishing, and I am very happy to say that I have a story in it. The royalties are going to an excellent cause: to quote from their website: ‘POhWER is a charity which helps people who, because of […]
Martin Edwards The Crooked Shore
The Crooked Shore got off to a splendid start. I always enjoy a cold case enquiry. Twenty-one years ago, Ramona Smith left the bar in Bowness where she worked and was never seen again. No body was ever found, but there was plenty of circumstantiai evidence and it all pointed to Gerry Lace as her […]