MISCELLANEOUS

This is the place for musings, additional bits of information, flights of fancy or anything else which doesn’t fit naturally under any of the other headings.

The start of it all

How did all this start? Why write crime novels? I’ve always written – revue sketches, songs, radio plays, short stories – but novels are big, they call for an extended commitment to a project and I thought I was more of a sprinter than a long distance writer. (I’m also lazy.) Then there was this competition for a comic novel. I started to have a go at it and, after a few weeks, realised I’d managed to produce a fairly thick stack of printed pages, so I carried on and finished it …read more

Research

No, I’m not going to trawl you through all the forensic tomes I mentioned elsewhere. I just wanted to say that some research can’t be book-based. My historical novel is set in Aberdeen in 1840 and features a figurehead carver as its central character …read more

The reader as creator

Now that I've at last been published in the USA, I've had some intriguing reactions from readers but it was one recent one that provoked this blog. He wrote to say that he was halfway through and enjoying Material Evidence very much. I was flattered, wrote back and, in the course of the email, asked 'OK, whodunnit, then?' ...read more

Sauvignon blanc? Or would you prefer blood?

OK, this is the dilemma. I started a chapter with the following:
He considered nailing her hands to the floor but the thought of the delirious headlines which that would generate quickly helped to banish the impulse.
There followed two paragraphs written from 'his' POV. Here's a fragment to give the flavour:
He wanted her to see him, look at him, know that the hopelessness of her condition left him cold. ...read more

Bibliography

• Material Evidence, Piatkus Books 1995. ISBN 0-7499-0301-5
• Material Evidence, Bloody Books, 2007. ISBN 1932859322
• Rough Justice, Piatkus Books 1996.. ISBN 0-7499-0356-2
• Rough Justice, Bloody Books, 2008. ISBN 1932859519
• Missing, in Missing Persons, ed. Martin Edwards, Constable, 1999. ISBN 0-094-79930-X
• Death Ship, in Crime on the Move, ed. Martin Edwards, Do-Not Press, 2005.
  ISBN 1-904316-46-8.
• Other People, in I.D. Crimes of Identity, ed. Martin Edwards, Comma Press, 2006.
  ISBN 1-905583-00-1
• Just Write, (with Kathleen McMillan), Routledge, 2007. ISBN 0-415-39678-6
• Sganarelle, in Comparative Criticism – Humanist traditions in the twentieth century, ed. E.S Shaffer, Cambridge University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-521-80807-3