“We have a man. We want to know if we can trust him and I think you can get us the answer.” Sebastian Becker was never meant to live, but sometimes you just don’t plan these things. He made his first appearance in The Kingdom of Bones, pursuing the fugitive Tom Sayers from London’s Music…

I’ve begun watching a WGA preview screener of Amazon’s Homecoming with Sam (Mr Robot) Esmail directing Julia Roberts in a podcast-inspired drama. It’s too early for me to offer judgment, but so far it’s intriguing and engaging and matches no obvious broadcast model – half-hour serial fiction with varying episode lengths and other “No one…

Dark Mirages is a new book presenting unproduced screenplays by writers with genre credentials, each with a story behind it. In my case Dracula was commissioned by the BBC and cancelled, unread, on the very day that I delivered the script. The producers were Deep Indigo working with BBC Wales.  My angle was that nobody…

Publication November 2nd 2018. Paperback and ebook.   In the lobby of a Blackpool hotel, one year after the end of the Great War, Britain’s spymaster recruits a young sideshow fortune-teller for a mission of historic importance. A standalone novella from the author of the Sebastian Becker novels The Kingdom of Bones, The Bedlam Detective,…

The Brooligan Press website is now up and running, with details of all the titles in our list and global links for ordering paperbacks and ebooks. You can find it right here

Last weekend found me back in Pooley Bridge. It’s a village at the northern tip of Ullswater in the Lake District with a post office, a couple of pubs, a handful of tourist shops, a posh bistro, and a steamer pier. Ullswater is, for my money, the fairest of the Lakes, and the village was…

Available now… two new trade paperback titles from The Brooligan Press. Frankenstein’s Prescription Banished to an isolated rural for killing a fellow student in a duel, Hans Schneider meets the mysterious Dr Lavenza and learns about Frankenstein’s prescription—the secret of eternal life. Together, Schneider and Lavenza set out to collect the missing pieces of the…

A retrospective ‘umbrella title’ that’s become attached to four consecutive novels written during my publishing run with Hodder & Stoughton, just before the balance of my career tipped more toward screenwriting. Four linked stories in a shared Northern landscape, playing variations on a theme of flawed good versus complex evil. Though it was never my…