If you’re in Dublin tomorrow, you can come and see me yak at this free Science Gallery event. It’s part of the 2013 European Science TV and New Media Festival, with a keynote speech followed by a panel discussion. 14.00 – KEYNOTE TALK AND PANEL-LED DISCUSSION SESSIONScience, Medicine and MediaKeynote Talk: Dr David Kirby, Senior…

There’s a long-established and old-fashioned bookshop in Southport, Lancashire, called Broadhurst’s – new books downstairs, old books above, and they wrap your purchase in brown paper and string before you leave. The really high-value stuff is in a room that resembles Sherlock Holmes’ study, with a velvet rope across the doorway, while on the same…

I recently guested on a late-night radio music-and-chat show where the topic of conversation was “My Mis-Spent Youth”. To be honest, I don’t think my youth was particularly mis-spent. Comics, B-movies, telefantasy and cheap paperbacks pretty much gave me a career. But you have to get into the spirit of the thing. So I talked…

I’m currently revisiting this modest second-hand find from a few years ago, and confirming that it’s the best book on British TV drama production I’ve read. It was published in 1970, and is about a ’60s BBC show that I never watched. But it’s still the best book on British TV drama production that I’ve…

Publication day for the UK paperback edition It’s 1912 and Sebastian Becker, the Special Investigator to the Lord Chancellor’s Visitor in Lunacy, arrives in the West Country to interview Sir Owain Lancaster on his run-down country estate. Descending from his train in the small coastal resort town of Arnmouth, Becker finds the entire community mobilised…

Got a Kindle? Got any space left on it after stuffing the memory with every free download that’s been wafted past you by publishers and self-publishers convinced that if they can saturate the world with product, riches will follow? Well, here you go again. Don’t get too excited. It’s just a couple of short stories…

Okay, perhaps the post title’s overselling it a little, but on May 23rd The Bedlam Detective sees UK publication and in anticipation of the event, we’re making the Kindle edition of Down River free for the holiday weekend. You’ll have 72 hours in which to grab it, from 12.00am (Pacific Standard Time) on May 4th…

The Devil in the White City is one of my all-time favourite nonfiction reads. Historian Erik Larson counterpoints the planning and staging of the 1893 World’s Fair with the murderous activities of one “Dr H H Holmes”. The fake doctor – real name Herman Webster Mudgett – was a plausible charmer who preyed upon young…