Reviews

Invisible is a great thriller. I can’t say too much more about the plot because the twists and turns are the whole point of reading a book that wrong foots the reader at every turn . . . Christine Poulson kept me reading by giving out just enough information to intrigue and puzzle so that I had to read just one more chapter. That’s why, in the end, I just dropped everything else and read the last half of Invisible in one sitting.’

- I PREFER READING BLOG

Known Unto God

Posted on Nov 6, 2014 in Uncategorized | No Comments

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

Posted on Nov 3, 2014 in crime fiction bingo | 2 Comments

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

Posted on Oct 14, 2014 in Robert Player | 4 Comments

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

Posted on Sep 29, 2014 in Crooked Herring, L. C. Tyler, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

 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

Posted on Sep 26, 2014 in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

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 […]

Should I go on a Book Diet?

By that I don’t mean should I read fewer books, but should I stop buying them for a while. Should I have a book-free month in the way that some people have an alcohol-free month? I have an awful lot of books I haven’t read and I am adding to them all the time. There […]

The book that made me cry in the library

Posted on Sep 17, 2014 in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

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 […]