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…

Despite being a single studio drama first broadcast on Christmas Day 1972 and reshown only once a few months later, Nigel Kneale’s seminal TV ghost story still seems to have managed to mark, scar or otherwise influence just about everyone who saw it back then. Amongst my generation of horror writers, most either acknowledge a…

I just heard that the US edition of The Bedlam Detective is going into its second printing. Glad news for any author, and thanks to all who’ve picked it up. Even greater thanks to those who didn’t put it down again, and went on to pay for it. The UK trade paperback edition will be…

This month, mega-niche distributor Network releases the complete first (and only) season of Virgin of the Secret Service, a 1968 Empire-spoofing obscurity remembered with fondness by at least one viewer. I was thirteen at the time, and in my autograph-collecting phase; I wrote to leading man Clinton Greyn and in return got a typed slip…

I was reprimanded at the age of 10 for taking Thunderball into school as my book for the ‘own choice’ reading period… I can date it exactly because I still have the headmaster’s remarks on my school report. Oh, well. Years later I was amused to see several of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, Thunderball…

Over on the Scouting New York blog, this post about the impossible geography of Kubrick’s settings in The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut triggered a memory from 1997. I was in production at Pinewood Studios when Eyes Wide Shut was filming. My office was in the long main building but on the other side of…

Released March 25th. Buy my episode and get all the others thrown in absolutely free! Amazing bargain. Find it here