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

If you picked up The Boat House during the 48-hour giveaway – and it cheers me that so many of you did – I hope you’ll enjoy the read. Did you know that, a year or two after the book came out, it was almost a movie with Jude Law and Milla Jovovich? My agent…

If you prefer, you can skip the story and go straight down to the link for the free book. Otherwise… In 1984 I travelled to Finland and took the train to Leningrad, as St Petersburg was then known. I was alone, with a backpack and not much money. I’d been living by writing for four…

Well, I gave Red Widow a try… despite a cool title and Radha Mitchell and production values to die for, I couldn’t swallow it. It’s like Miss America married into Gogol Bordello and they all set up shop in Marin Country as drug-dealing Beverly Hillbillies. Then there’s a gang war and Mrs America starts packing…

See this? You wouldn’t get away with it today, would you? And yet, be honest… there’s something about that ‘sixties adventure-fantasy Dolce Vita that calls to us still. So what, if none of us actually looked or lived like that, or knew anyone who did? So what, if those who attempted to live the life…