As an early-career writer you work about 90% from the heart and about 10% from the head. Stuff pours out of you. You can lose track of time while you’re working. Everything’s inspiration and there’s little in the way of calculation. I’ve heard writers claiming that they go into a trance-like state when they work…

The Stephen Laws archive, that is, or more correctly it’s lifted from his Facebook page. No, it’s not horror fiction’s very own Boy Band. That’s the late and much-loved Charles L Grant, me with Paul McCartney’s hair, Laws, and Bigdog himself Joe R Lansdale at the BFS Awards. Laws is a notorious pickpocket, which is…

If you’re in London, from now until Saturday night you can catch the second run of the science fiction comedy Dead Static at the Hen and Chickens theatre in Islington. Tickets are nine quid. I believe there are still comps available for bona fide reviewers (ie, if you can prove you are one, and not…

Writing about Greg Hoblit’s supernatural chase thriller The Fallen for her Cats on Film blog, Anne Billson got in touch to clarify a point. Apparently some of the Amazon reviewers of my 1987 novel Valley of Lights contend that it owes something to Jack Sholder’s movie The Hidden. In Valley of Lights, a Phoenix police…

The British paperback edition of The Kingdom of Bones, the novel that introduces The Bedlam Detective‘s Sebastian Becker, is published today by Ebury Press. Marilyn Stasio in The New York Times wrote: THE KINGDOM OF BONES… shows the occult mystery in its best light. Vividly set in England and America during the booming industrial era…

Woo-hoo. Kirkus has named The Bedlam Detective as one of the best fiction titles of the year. I believe a small glass of something may be called for. The ‘Read full review‘ link in the image won’t work, but this one will. While waiting for the softcover edition to be published in February, why not…

Like many people who’d embraced Sherlock I was prepared to dislike CBS’s Elementary just on principle, but I don’t. The Brooligan household watched the pilot and we decided, after some discussion, that it maybe wasn’t for us; based on that first viewing it felt less than fresh, and the mystery element was weak. Subsequent episodes…

Guy Adams, the Torchwood/Sherlock/Hammer novelist and Angry Robot-published author, has tagged me for this. I didn’t even realise I’d annoyed him. It’s called a Blog Hop. Here’s how it works, he said to me. You answer ten questions on the next big thing that you’re working on, then tag five other writers to do the…

“I like working with the actors and with the producer, it’s normal for me, but outside Danish Broadcasting, maybe it’s old school – the director is king, the writer’s more the guy you get some scripts from and then you see him again at the premiere. If they’re just looking for a writer, then maybe…

Just after the Berlin wall came down, I threw a bag into the back of the Volvo and drove down to the Hamburg ferry. Not quite as spontaneously as that, of course. I had a plan. I’d lined up meetings with Hamburg’s Sex Crimes division and detectives in the Criminal Investigation department of the Dussseldorf…