Known Unto God
The First World War poets – Wilfred Owen in particular – were still very much read when I was at school. And I must have been in my teens when I read Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That. Most moving of all was Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, which I read in my late twenties […]
How to play crime fiction bingo
Award yourself a point for each cliché spotted. 1. The protagonist is separated/divorced/widowed/has just emerged from a toxic relationship. 2. Their new love interest turns out to be the villain or winds up dead or possibly both. 3. They had a traumatic childhood (abusive father, alcoholic mother, or whatever). 4. They drink too much (regularly […]
One of my heroes
Last week I went to the opening of Anarchy and Beauty: William Morris and his Legacy 1860-1960 at the National Portrait Gallery. I haven’t been to an opening in quite a while – I’m not really part of that world anymore – and it was fun. But more than that: it reminded me of […]
Is there a more perfect novella . . .
. . . than J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country? Earlier this week I took my friend Sue Hepworth (writer of excellent romcom novels) out for a birthday treat. We went to see an adaptation of A Month in the Country performed in the upstairs room of a local hotel by North Country Theatre. […]
Crime novels that are worth reading twice
To be worth rereading a crime novel has to have a little extra something other than the plot. If the puzzle element is uppermost, then once is enough, unless of course you have managed to forget whodunit. The plot twist was about all I remembered of The Ingenious Mr Stone by Robert Player, which I […]
Something missing in Ludlow
Last week I was on a writing retreat at the Hirst, the wonderful newly renovated Arvon centre in Shropshire (my room was top left). I took a couple of hours off one afternoon to visit Ludlow. It is one of the loveliest small towns in the country with streets of exquisite Georgian houses, the sort of […]
L C Tyler is my guest
Of the sub-genres of crime fiction, I think comedy is the hardest to pull off, but Len Tyler succeeds triumphantly. The Ethelred and Elsie series is one of the very best. It began with The Herring Seller’s Apprentice and the fifth has just come out. I began by asking Len to tell us something about […]
Be afraid . . . be very afraid
Books that have really scared you do tend to stick in the mind. When I was nine or ten I got hold of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. ‘The Engineer’s Thumb’ gave me pause for thought, but ‘The Speckled Band’ frightened me so much that I couldn’t finish the book. I have read them many […]
The book that made me cry in the library
I’m I’m in Birmingham again at the wonderful Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre. It’s the time of year that makes me think of new terms and new beginnings and I remembered arriving in Birmingham as a postgrad all those years ago. I had a couple of hours to spare so this afternoon I decided to hop on […]