Authors Electric

How green are you? How much do you recycle? How many bins sit at your back door? In this age of recycling so that we don’t all finish up living on rubbish tips, I bet you’ve become adept at separating your waste paper from your bottles and tins. And of course there’s that wee bin for your food waste. But what else do you recycle? Have you thought about those blog posts you write, and the articles you submit to various online and offline publications. How many of those do you recycle by changing a bit here and a bit there? And what about all that research you’ve painstakingly done for your latest article or blockbuster? Once the book is written where does all that information go? Does it nestle cosily in your hard drive for evermore, or maybe it winds up in the salvage you are commendably recycling in order to save the planet? Or do you use it to write articles and blog posts? And then there is the plot we squeeze out of our brains – more painful than giving bir...

Lovely Leonard in work mode & woolly hat, top left. Sheila Johnston and myself (+ big bump!). Early in the new year, an email dropped into my inbox to tell me the sad news that an old colleague, Leonard White, had died on 2nd January. I hadn’t known just how old he was – he always seemed supremely youthful to me – but it turns out he almost made his century. He was born on 5th November 1916 and died on 2nd January 2016. The first time I met Leonard was when he produced my television serial, Shadow of the Stone , for STV, back in 1986. It was broadcast the following year. Having written many hours of drama for BBC Radio 4, I had embarked on writing stage plays and that, in turn, had led to three short one off plays for Scottish Television, on the encouragement of the head of drama, Robert Love, who liked to promote new writers and new writing. Thereafter I managed to secure a commission for a six part Young Adult serial at a time when YA wasn’t really a thing. Shadow of the S...

My first ever visit abroad was to Poland for Christmas 1964, in the middle of the Cold War. I went with my much-loved Polish father, and it was his first trip back there for twenty-five years. It was highly emotional reunion between him and his elderly brothers and sisters, and an education for a British schoolgirl who had never seen a gun in real life, let alone the submachine guns slung over the shoulders of soldiers on every platform and street corner. It was a country full of contrasts; the snow and the horses and sleighs were magical, the shortages and the overcrowded apartments bewildering. I could only speak a few words of Polish, but the whole experience created a love of travel that has never since left me.             I’ve been back many times, but never for Christmas, so this winter was rather special. There is something wonderful about revisiting places with powerful memories, and Wawel Castle hasn’t changed much. The...

As a crime writer I often find myself doing research. This can take many different forms. but sometimes it can take surprising turns. Despite the fact I write contemporary crime novels, I recently did a lot of research on hanging. I now know how to make a hangman's knot which traditionally has 13 loops. However, some hangman's knots have 9 loops. I also now know how to tie a cowboy's Lasso  or lariat knot. These skills are essential in any crime writer's arsenal. Guns, bullets, knives, swords, crossbows, yep, I can tick them all off my list. This probably has me on some sort of government watchlist for my online habits. I'm expecting  the local police, Interpol and the FBI to come storming through my door any minute now. How is this different I hear you say. It's just the sort of research I would expect any crime writer to do. Of course you would be right. However, sometimes research can take a very surprising turn indeed. The little fella in the pictu...

I'm going to assume, for the sake of argument, that everyone else is as knackered as I am after Christmas. I didn't get much of a break, because I had some urgent writing jobs to finish (damn you, Buster Crabb!), some very large plates of Christmas pudden to consume (damn you, Father Christmouse), and the most appalling chest, throat and nose and ears infection which I assumed was terminal and everybody else cruelly categorised as man flu. (Damn the lot of you; it's a pity I didn't die. That [might] have wiped the smiles off...) Any road up, here I am, just out of me sick bed, struggling manfully to carry on, and worrying about me tax return. Does nobody care about me? Jan Stoker Funny you should say that, because maybe someone does. Or then again, maybe not. You be the judge. It was Wilf, possibly the most eccentric of my many eccentric sons, who is studying in Glasgow, but claimed to have got me the most original Christmas present of all time. What's mor...

Yes, so many of them - and from such an early age too. I remember watching the old 'push-and pull' chuff past  my bedroom window before I was five - two green Southern Railway coaches with, between them in a steam sandwich, a 'Terrier' tank engine from the old London, Brighton and South Coast Railway. Sadly not a sandwich, but redolent of those times none the less. Then a mighty experience: an epic (to six-year-old me) journey to the Lake District from St Pancras (Euston had been bombed) - an unconscionably long train of maroon coaches hauled by a hissing monster which seemed to me to be too large for this puny world. This wasn't a holiday: my father, a Post Office engineer, badly shell-shocked after the air raid on Biggin Hill, was being sent there to recuperate by the Air Ministry, who wanted him back at work in a fit state. In black and white as contemporary technology demanded. But it certainly wasn't black and white to me. And then, when the ...