Surrealism has caught up with us
Last week I was reading Inez Holden’s diary of the Blitz, It was Different at the Time, published in 1943. This is from the entry of a day after a night of particularly heavy bombardment: ‘One morning I walked back through the park, and saw the highest branches of a tree draped with . . . […]
Loving Endeavour, but what next?
Some time ago, I mentioned that I had finished the Inspector Morse DVDs and had embarked on the follow-up, Lewis. Well, I’ve finished those too and now I have started the prequel, Endeavour. I think it is actually the best of the lot. Shaun Evans is perfect as the young Morse, gauche, too clever for […]
How does she do it?
In my last post, I wrote about the pleasure of getting my reading mojo back when I embarked on Martin Edwards’s new novel, Mortmain Hall. I loved the book, romped through it, thoroughly enjoying it, but the relief was only temporary and when I’d finished it, I was back in my state of reading apathy. […]
Losing my reading mojo
A couple of evenings ago I found myself roaming around the house, looking for something to read. Nothing tempted me. I would pick up a book, flick through it, put it down again. It is not as if there isn’t plenty of choice for goodness sake. I have lots of books that I haven’t read […]
Why I don’t want to be in a Ngaio Marsh
I have finished my Ngaio Marsh binge. I have not read all of them – nor do I intend to – but I have read a lot, around twenty. And a couple of things stand out. One is that by the end of my marathon read, I had a pretty good idea who the culprit […]
Writing a locked room mystery
I love a locked room mystery, so when the call came for contributions to an anthology of stories featuring impossible crimes, I jumped at the chance to write one of my own. My story, ‘The House by the Thames,’ is by way of being a tribute to the master of locked room mysteries, John Dickson […]
Keeping a Journal
I first started writing a journal twenty years ago when I was writing my first novel. At the beginning it was more of a writer’s notebook in which I jotted down ideas, scraps of conversations overheard on trains, anything that might one day end up in a story. Then it broadened out, particularly after the […]