Authors Electric

 It's that time of year again when crime authors and readers gather together in Harrogate for the Theakstons Crime Writing Festival. This year was special as it was the twentieth year of the festival, proving the popularity of crime fiction. For me, it was my fifth time and I think my favourite. I travelled up a day early to beat the train strike. It was quite eerie walking round an empty site at The Old Swan on Wednesday evening. Peace didn't last for long though and the place quickly filled up on Thursday. I opted to go to a few panels but I also took part in Grill A Killer, organised by former Chief Superintendent Graham Bartlett, where I got to put my police procedural skills to the test! Working in pairs, we had ten minutes each to try and catch out our murder suspect. I was about to ask a crucial question when our time ran out and we had to hand over to the next pair. But I was proved right at the end! I also attended a Christmas party! Really! It was a launch for Janice ...

  "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, For they shall be filled." - Matthew 5:1:11 New King James. And blessed are those who await hell freezing over. I've personally known three people who were murdered. One was a writer, Susan Berman, another was my former sister-in-law, Lola Steele, another was a noted, much admired Los Angeles Times colleague, Ruben Salazar , murdered by police. Not one of their killers has been brought to justice. One of the murderers, however, has been convicted. That happened in Los Angeles just a week before this writing, but this came a full twenty years after the New York real estate scion, Robert Durst, shot his friend Susan to death at point blank range at her Los Angeles hillside home. The wealthy Durst has appealed his first-degree murder conviction, but getting off - as he apparently has for two other killings, seems unlikely this time. Knowing three murdered people perhaps would not be many if I were an emergency ...

Latest in my research requirements for   Listed Dead , the third in the Bunch Courtney Investigation series, was the ‘right’ breed of dog. Simple you might think, and perhaps it should have been. The dog in question only appears for a few pages, so why would I go to any extended effort?  Simply put, (without plot spoilers) I had a list of requirements to be met that would make said dog both suitable and unsuitable at one and the same time. So down the research rabbit hole I went. Before I even started on filling in all my writerly tick boxes there was one large point to bear in mind.  Listed Dead  is set in 1940 and dog breeding was at an all time low. Why? Because in the summer of 1939 the UK Government produced a pamphlet on the topic which read: “If at all possible, send or take your household animals into the country in advance of an emergency.” It concluded: “If you cannot place them in the care of neighbours, it really is kindest to have them destroyed...

In Her Defence : Bunch Courtney Investigation #2  has hit the stores at last! There is only so much one can say about a book launch.  We have all been there with the drinks and cakes - in this case it was tea and homemade cakes. We went with the alcohol free a s the launch was in the City Central Library, Hanley on a Saturday lunchtime, plus tea and cakes rather fitted the WW2 ethos of a tea party. Books were bought and signed and much chatter occurs. I gave a short reading and then a Q&A session, which was interesting in that many of the questions revolved around my research - how much did I do, was it online or in hard copy etc.   The reading was a little over ten minutes but the questions and answers went on for almost half an hour. But it was great fun. The blog tour on the other hand was more tiring in many ways.   Fielding contacts across various platforms every day was a full time occupation! So here it is – In Her Defenc...

A few months ago I put an eye patch on a postwar, 1940s Los Angeles detective character named Frank Ritz (former Rissoli) in a story that I was working up. I don't know why. Maybe I was desperate for some defining accoutrement to focus my foggy protagonist. Maybe I was thinking of "the Man in the Hathaway Shirt " created by London's legendary "father of advertising" David Oglivy 's that put an obscure, eponymous New England shirt maker on the map. Or, maybe I was thinking of the late, madcap revolutionary San Francisco editor and erstwhile colleague  Warren Hinckle about whom I wrote on these pages in September 2016. Hinckle had lost an eye in a boyhood auto crash. As an adult he made the eye patch a trademark of his provocative, muckraking, buccaneering style of writing and publishing. Then again, maybe I really just wanted to write about a pirate, in which case, I might have also given my character a peg leg. Whatever my reason, the patch did...

My other half and I recently gave in to the wave of nothingness and repeats on Freeview TV and acquired Netflix.  A week on, and several evenings of watching we've only touched the surface the stuff that is available.  When I say that I now have Netflix people often smile knowingly and utter dire warning of  binge-watching, but a week on I can’t say it has been any different to before.  Oh  I admit there is an awful lot more of it, and it is so very easy to access, but that Curate's egg conundrum of good versus bad in more or less equal measures remains. We’ve done a lot of sampling and/or catching up on things that we've missed. Watched random episodes of things that we’ve only ever heard about before. My other half likes super-hero fiction whereas I am fairly indifferent to it so perhaps I have not really indulged in bingeing as such. Watching a whole series in a few days is not exactly new to us.  We have bought enough boxsets to prove that!  ...

Last month, as everyone packed their bags and headed home after another fantastic Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate , I was buzzing. And, as much as I enjoyed the festival, it actually had nothing to do with my feelings of excitement and fear. Sunday 23 July was a big day for me because the third book in my DI Hamilton series, Deadly Friendship, was published. I thought my emotions would be far more contained than they were - not only was this my third book in the series, but, in total, it's the fifth I've published, so I should be used to publication day, right? Wrong! I've realised my nerves build the more I write ... and I'm sure many authors feel this. We're constantly in competition with the last book we've written - if readers loved it, can we match, and even exceed, their expectations? And if they hated it, can we better ourselves and our stories? We all know that we can't please all the people all the time, but gosh,...

The title of this blog could come across as quite rude as this saying now has two meanings. This being a writers' blog it might be a good idea to clarify what I mean. In this case, it's go cycling.  I've recently had my bike returned to me after my two nieces borrowed it. It has been returned in perfect condition which means they didn't use it much. After many years of illness, I have now fully recovered, so it's time for me to get on my bike. I am looking forward to exercising again, and to discovering the Scottish countryside in a different way. In the process I will become healthier and fitter. Win Win, so to speak. What's this got to do with writing I hear you ask? A very good question. It's all to do with perspective and clearing your brain. I've been thinking a lot about perspective lately, and have written about it on the More Than Writers Blog. You can read it here.  When we drive from A to B, we are in a protected bubble. Much ...

In moments of idleness random subjects frequently leapfrog through my mind in rapid succession, turning subjects not merely on their heads but morphing them into something else entirely. Today, whilst making tea and boggling at the latest news headlines drifting from the radio, the process was begun in recalling the quote from Alice that runs, “ Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” (Through the Looking Glass,   ch 5 .)   I am a lifelong devotee of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and its companion Through the Looking Glass .  I loved these books as a child and again in my teens when they were must-read volumes of the ‘flower child’ revolution, and I have loved them ever since. So when I came across a gloriously OTT reading of Carroll’s Jabberwocky’ by Benedict Cumberbatch I was delighted and shared it around with glee. In the very same week  the great actor Sir John Hurt passed on, and in the plethora of obit...