I’ve done it!
Last September I posted a photo of my desk all clean and tidy in preparation for beginning to write a novel. Well, I’ve done it and this is a photo of my desk last week just after I sent off the final draft to my editor. After I’d pressed send, I danced around the house. […]
Bodies from the Library 2019
Not long to go now to the annual British Library event, Bodies from the Library, and I am busy putting together my talk, Murder in Mind: The Crime Novels of Helen McCloy. She is a fine writer who has been unjustly neglected. I intend to put that right. If she is known at all it is for Through […]
Judging a book by its cover
It’s an exciting moment when your editor sends you the cover design for your new novel. It makes the whole enterprise seem so much more real. And I am delighted by what the designer has come up: truly and fittingly sinister, I feel. An Air That Kills is the third in the series and this […]
The Book Stops Here
Long ago when I was doing an English degree I chose an option on American Literature that involved reading a novel every week for a seminar. One week it was Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. It is a long novel – around 600 pages of densely written prose – and though I tried very hard, I […]
What to read in a hospital waiting room
I have a rare congenital eye disease and I have been going to Moorfields Eye Hospital in London for – well, let’s just say over forty years – sometimes travelling a long way to get there. It is an excellent hospital with a world-class reputation and over the years I have spent an awful lot […]
What’s your favourite crime-writer?
Now and then someone asks me who my favourite crime-writer is, as they did last night at my book-group. My mind always goes a blank and I mutter something about still loving Agatha Christie. Last night I did in the end manage to come up with Andrea Camilleri, Michael Connolly (recent worthy winner of the […]
Where were you when . . .
Some people have music on in the background when they are writing. I don’t tend to do that, but there is sometimes a particular piece of music or song that I associate with something I am writing. With Cold, Cold Heart, the Hank Williams classic actually gave me the title as well as playing a […]
I didn’t see that coming!
‘I’ve read so many crime novels that I’m rarely surprised by plot twists or startling solutions. So I was pretty sure that I knew where things were heading when I recently read Fredric Brown’s The Far Cry – but he totally pulled the wool over my eyes. What an ending! So, fellow fans of GA […]
Hidden Gems
‘They must have one,’ I said to my daughter, ‘all good hotels have one . . .’ and this was an lovely little hotel on the shores of Lake Garda. In the end I did discover it on a window sill along a little-used corridor: a small collection of books left behind by earlier visitors. […]
A Fresh Start
It is years, quite literally years, since my desk looked like this. In fact, has it ever looked like this? Today I at last got to work, vacummed cobwebs off the windowsill and washed the window. I took all the papers and miscellaneous stuff off my desk and sorted them and then I cleaned it. […]