Authors Electric

I write this in greater haste than usual, having forgotten what day it was for all sorts of reasons, some of them more convincing than others! We had an extremely busy July, which was also very frustrating in some ways, involving as it did some chaos in the garden and a series of phone calls to and from the bank because they had decided someone was trying to do something fraudulent with my current account when actually it was only that I had to pay a small fortune to tree surgeons to get rid of a tree that had well outgrown the space in our garden. You will see from the stump that remains how big it must have been. RIP the big tree The only thing that kept me (relatively) sane during July was writing. Despite all the upheaval, I stuck to my regular writing slot almost every day, between 11 am and 1 pm. Incidentally this coincides with the timing for letting the cats out, although of course I couldn't do that while the tree work was going on. Our current cats are rather wary about b...

When I speak to people about my writing, if they haven't felt the urge to write themselves they usually express either blank disbelief - 'why do you do it?' - or mild interest in how I've managed to think of so many ideas. Some of the stories have their roots in real life incidents or situations, though I have only rarely attempted anything that actually depicts real people, so I doubt if I will be bothered by any libel suits in the near future. Actually the only example I can think of is a short story called 'Murder at the Drama Group' that I dashed off in a fury after someone annoyed me at a drama group for young people that I was involved in ages ago. I definitely won't be publishing it as it started with a (real) local council employee being found stabbed in the costume cupboard. I recently found myself using something that had happened in real life quite some time ago as the basis for a mystery novel. This isn't unusual, of course, though in this ca...

Something happened to me recently that gave me a terrible fright. (No, this doesn't have anything to do with Hallowe'en!) I completely lost my hearing overnight. I had caught a really bad cold, possibly as a divine judgement for enjoying a performance of 'The Book of Mormon' at Edinburgh Playhouse or possibly because I'd spent an afternoon playing with my grandson and some bug he had picked up at nursery had breached my defences. At first it was just a normal cold, and then I woke up three nights in a row with earache and had to sit upright in a chair for a couple of hours each time until I was comfortable enough to lie down again. After the third night of earache, I woke up and found I couldn't hear anything. Only the previous day I'd been able to hear music, and audiobooks, and the sound on television, and then suddenly I couldn't. I couldn't even ring the doctor to ask for an appointment, so my son had to do it for me, and then he had to come with...

It can be hard to work out how much reality to incorporate in your fiction. I have just published (yet) another mystery novel in a lengthy series that is set in a fictitious small town on the coast of Fife near the very picturesque real-life village of Culross. Over the years I’ve drawn inspiration for plots and sub-plots from real life in several cases. For instance, a story that revolved around an inheritance was based on something that really happened in my own family, though happily without the murders I introduced into it in the novel. My mother was contacted out of the blue by a firm of solicitors who were trying to track down the relatives of one of her first cousins who had died intestate. The task was particularly tricky because of the number of cousins and the extent to which they had dispersed across the globe. In the novel I brought many of the cousins back to Scotland for an ill-fated family reunion. In real life, however, they just stayed where they were and waited for ne...

Img-Eleanor Spiess-Ferris/ Ds-Roger Carpenter Perhaps this will sound gushy to the prolific masters of mystery novels among my distinguished colleagues here at Authors Electric . But I can't help being over the moon at the moment -- and deserving of a pause to enjoy! I reached another book publishing milepost the other day --  creating a cover for my latest book, putting production on it's final leg towards release, promotion, and, I hope, sales. It's a kick no matter how many books I've published, no matter how many candles on my author's cake. You can't judge a book by its cover. but the cover can get us to buy one, often as not. It sets the tone, particularly when it comes to fiction. It gives us a taste.  The best ones intrigue, tease, whisper compelling secrets and become an icon for the novel, its sequels and adaptations. Sometimes it's clever, morphing typography that tells the story, for example, Joey Hi's design for Lauren Beukes' Zoo City ....

I've been asked if Frank Ritz - the Hollywood private detective in my recently released novel, The Phantom Eye and its forthcoming sequel, Do or Die - is me. I do identify with him in several ways, and we do share some characteristics and attitudes, but my answer is a qualified no. I didn't intend Frank Ritz Mysteries as a memoir, even though lots of its major characters and events are drawn from real life. Among things we share: We're both devout, and soft-hearted cynics whose views blow leftward. We're both feckless, introspective and drawn to outcasts and eccentrics. Frank and I grew up in the Hollywood District of Los Angeles during the noir film era. Both our moms were stage and screen performers. Frank's mother, however, is also a little person, modelled on a departed actress friend. And we've both suffered from depression. Circumstances divide us dramatically, however, starting with age: Frank is of my father's generation having served in World War ...

Me at Eshaness, Shetland Literary festivals aplenty both hither and yon have been honoured with my presence and performance, among them several Crime Festivals. The venues for these are becoming more and more atmospheric Noir-wise, especially with the burgeoning popularity of Scandi Noir. Last November, I was at Iceland Noir, snowmobiling on a glacier, enjoying the spectacular landscape in the four-ish hours of almost-daylight, and meeting some luminaries of Icelandic crime fiction, some of whom are now translated into English. This November, I again headed North, to Shetland for the eponymous Noir instigated by Ann Cleeves who has a series of novels based there, now on TV. View from my hotel bathroom... View from my hotel bedroom... bit wet out there. The festival got off to a thrilling start, with storm Abigail throwing our tiny planes with their cute little propellers all over the sky, until they stopped flying altogether (perhaps the rubber bands got tangled inside)....