I’m catching up with Apple’s grim and excellent STAR CITY miniseries, an alternate-history take on a successful Soviet space programme, and finding that its tone and atmosphere resonate with me to an unexpected degree. In 1984 I backpacked by train from Finland to Leningrad on an Intourist visa. I stayed at the Europeyskaya Hotel on…

It would have been early in 2005 when I met Patrick Stewart at Granada’s London offices. He’d relocated back to the UK after Trek and was pondering his options, of which the lead role in Eleventh Hour was one. He was unstarry and had dressed (I think) to avoid being recognised on the street; with…

Sad and surprised to learn of the death in September of crime writer, screenwriter and sometime musician Peter May. Peter and I were among the first clients of Yvonne Heather’s startup agency at the end of the 70s, and we met at her wedding. We last crossed paths at an event a couple of years…

Or, since I was working with Americans, The Traveler. If you already read the Bluesky thread below and just want to see the script, skip what follows and hit the button on the right. When the news broke of Sam Neill’s death there was an outpouring of online appreciation the like of which we rarely…

“Literature fans should welcome AI as a fellow wordsmith,” runs the header on a long (overlong) article I just read. A fellow wordsmith? Pardon my hollow laughter. This week I got this AI-generated message purporting to be from “Kathryn Riggs, a senior editor at Skyhorse publishing”, enthusing about my career and wanting to open a…

On the left is the jacket flap photo from Down River, circa 1988. Which is about ten years on from my first writing sale, if you want to be picky. The shot on the right is from March this year (2026), taken on Golden Lane in Prague. Behind me is number 22, a tiny cottage…

From the Penguin Books website: A collection of suspense-filled thrillers from master of the genre Stephen Gallagher A listening treat for fans of gripping drama: eight thrillers, plus a bonus story, from ‘the finest British writer of bestselling popular fiction since Le Carré’. Full of suspense and utterly immersive with full-cast production values, this collection…

This year’s stocking-filler chapbook in aid of Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) is The Adventure of the Seven Unnatural Women, a Sherlock Holmes story written at the invitation of J R Campbell and Charles Prepolec, editors of the Gaslight series of Holmes anthologies. It made its first appearance in Gaslight Ghouls. The slender 58-page…

It’s over two decades now since I pitched a new take on Dracula to the BBC, secured the commission, wrote the script, and saw the entire project canned on the very day I delivered it due to (I was told) a Drama exec’s capricious decision after lunch with an indie producer who hinted at a…

What follows is a post from my old Blogger journal, now retired but still out there haunting the internet. The original post was dated October 2009 and was written in California. The Cars of the Stars museum is no more and its collection is dispersed, alas, so don’t go looking for it. The night before…