Authors Electric

What am I binge-watching on Netflix at the moment? Well for the past month or more, Andy and I have been glued to the television and obsessed with Homeland. To the exclusion of everything else – I don’t think we’ve even watched a film or browsed Amazon Prime or Disney+ or anything else. Which is good because we were bored with it all and looking for something new to get involved with.  Since early 2020, television has featured far more in our lives. When staying-in became the new going-out, having a smart tv and sharing various streaming subscriptions with our daughter was essential to stave off the boredom. And since downsizing our house in 2018, we now only have the one lounge – I don’t count a bedroom television. I never watch tv in bed – so we generally need to agree on viewing material and I can only take so much Wheeler Dealers and Top Gear !  So we are about to start season 6/8 of Homeland . That’s 60 almost-hour episodes in. And it’s gripping stuff. Twists more twisty ...

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)....

Writers who get their evil on. Bwahahahaha! Just musing, should I murder my ex? Hmmm. A fellow-writer, fictional but then aren’t we all one way or another, Richard Castle in the eponymous TV series, says ‘ There are  two kinds  of folks who sit around thinking about how to kill  people : psychopaths and mystery writers. ’  I’m a crime writer (and not a psychopath at all, honestly. No, really.) And I suspect that quite a few authors have bumped off or tormented in print those they have reason to dislike in ways the law of the land unsportingly refuses to sanction. Advice for writers ‘I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.’ Thus DH Lawrence, and it is obviously true, he must have felt malevolent when he saddled us with his whiney novels and cluelessness about female orgasms. But perhaps writing for spite is more common than gamekeepers shagging posh birds? (Oops, unfortunate kinky image conjured up there! You’re welcome!) ...

It was back in April that I wrote a blog post for Author’s Electric  on the process of promotion that I undertook ahead of the publication of my new thriller Powder Burn . By September I had a new short story on the blocks and ready to go; called The Sniper, it’s a prequel about the antagonist in my Janac’s Games thrillers . I had a cover, blurb, and an edited and formatted manuscript. What I did not have was time to do any promotion. Since I could not see how things were going to improve any time soon, I was left with a choice of holding back the book indefinitely, or going ahead and publishing with essentially no promotion or marketing. I chose the latter for three reasons: 1. I’m impatient. 2. I thought it would be interesting to see what happens when you just push a book out on the major ebook websites without any marketing support. 3. My eventual plan for the book is to drop the price to zero and run it as a loss-leader for the Janac’s Games series, and so I ...

I self-published my first thriller Hamelin's Child back in February 2011 - a giant step after many years of "we love it, but we can't sell it" rave rejections from the traditional publishers. Even being long-listed for The Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger Award didn't seem to make me a marketable proposition.   So I decided to fly solo - but first I needed a cover. My first attempt at cover design was using a lovely graphic by a talented friend of mine that just didn't work as an ebook cover - there wasn't sufficient contrast at the small size you need for amazon and other ebook retailers. But I attracted the attention of a traditional author who introduced me to my current designer JT Lindroos and held my hand through the design process. Thus the cover for Hamelin's Child was born - and I learned a lot in the process. I recently asked JT to design me a cover for the sequel Paying the Piper , which I hope to have out before Christ...

TWICE TIMES DANGER Enid Richemont Here's my latest ebook, originally published by Walker Books. It's a thriller, involving two girls who are doubles, a crazy mongrel called Dracula, a fashion designer who's in deep trouble - and some very scary people. The book's set in West Cornwall , in the little coves and inlets around St Just. To celebrate Chinese New Year - the Year of the Dragon - here are the opening lines of DRAGONCAT, my as-yet unpublished junior novel about a kitten born with extra flaps of skin under its front paws which enable it to glide (a bit like a flying squirrel). The story takes place in and around a small Chinese supermarket in North London. The kittens were born in a cardboard box. Ma showed them to Wing-Yu after breakfast. Wing-Yu tried to pick one up, but Ma wouldn't let him. "They're much too new," said Ma. "You let me hold Mei-Ling," grumbled Wing-Yu. "Mei-Ling was your sister,' sai...

An acquaintance from my dance classes read My Memories of a Future Life last month and has since been seeing me in a whole new light. I can tell by the thoughtful looks he gives me as we wince through stretches and wobble through pirouettes; an expression that says ‘I never knew you had that weird stuff going on...’ After class the other day he said to me: ‘that freaky scene with the hypnosis in the underground theatre... you must have been to something like that?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘It's research and imagination.’ He looked a little disappointed. I stomp on your dreams Had that taken away a little of the magic? Do readers prefer to think they’ve been led through your rearranged memoirs than the fruits of your persuasive art? Some clearly do. There’s a long tradition that people who’ve had extraordinary lives sit down to dash off a novel. Many of them are not writers, and so the actual words came from people of ordinary amounts of courage and glamour, in charge of some...