“We look into a world that is not our own, distanced by time, to find a timeless drama of fear and conflict. The historical panorama fascinates but it’s the crime, the crime that drives the tale.”  From my piece on the use of historical settings in crime novels and thrillers, written for The Weekly Lizard.…

Very sad to hear of the death of Anne Jordan. We corresponded over one of my early F&SF stories and met in person at one of the big Brighton SF conventions, where she executed one of the neatest party-crashing moves I’ve ever seen to get both of us into an editor’s suite – the editor…

In the years following the Great War, a skeptical conjuror and a spiritualist medium merge their interests to tour the regional lecture halls of the United Kingdom. This eBook novella is a free download, offered to coincide with US paperback publication of The Bedlam Detective. Set in the aftermath of the Great War, it follows…

Spoilers here if you haven’t seen the episodes yet, but below are links to some of the material that provided inspiration, background detail or information for last week’s story. A producer who should have known better once accused me of ‘letting the tail wag the dog’ in my insistence on the importance of research. Story research…

I’ve had a few nice notes and tweets in the wake of last week’s broadcast including one from Chimera producer Nick Gillott, which prompted me to dig out this shot of the two of us way back when on that show’s location in Kettlewell, Yorkshire. Nick’s on the left. How often do I have to…

“That rare beast, a literary page-turner.” My advance copies of the US paperback arrived by Fedex this morning. Easy on the eye and silky to the touch. And that’s just me, you should see the book. On sale February 5th.

…being the title of my Silent Witness story, the first part of which is showing on BBC1 at 9pm tonight. And no, it’s not about wills or family squabbles. It’s got explosions and stunts and sex, high crimes and buried secrets and decent people co-opted into sinister agendas. (There was a picture here, but with…

This eBook novella will be a free download, offered to coincide with paperback publication of The Bedlam Detective. Details soon.

Of course I buy books online, everybody does. But I also can’t pass by a bookshop, and with the good ones – those where there’s more to the stock than the Top Ten airport reads and a wall of discounted remainders – it’s almost impossible not to find something. Some book that you didn’t know…

A couple of interesting TV movies came out of Australia last year, with Guy Pearce playing the title role of Jack Irish in Black Tide and Bad Debts, based on novels by Peter Temple. Not exactly the same tone as Jesse Stone, but for me they seemed to scratch the same itch. They’re making a…