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 […]
Packing Up a Life
My husband, the architectural historian and critic, Peter Blundell Jones, died in August 2016. It all happened very fast. I didn’t think to ask him where he wanted his archive to go and he didn’t leave any instructions in his will. It is an important body of material. In the course of his career Peter […]