My thanks to Mark Lynch for spotting that Blackwells currently offer the lowest UK price on Comparative Anatomy and include free delivery. It’s not cheap but at 566 pages it’s a lot of book. Spooks, strangeness, mysteries, and a bit of heartbreak. I recommend it as the perfect Christmas gift. But then I would, wouldn’t…

You have written a considerable number of short stories, some of which have been published as collections (‘Out of His Mind’, ‘Plots and Misadventures’) (and now ‘Comparative Anatomy’). What are your thoughts about the differences between writing short stories and novels? Have any of your short stories been developed further (in any media)? Short stories…

Getting back to your novels, and thinking about your early work, where did the inspiration come from for books such as ‘Chimera’, ‘Oktober’, ‘Rain’ and ‘The Boat House’? I can answer for definite with Chimera because that came from a passage in Vance Packard’s book The People Shapers, where he quoted a Rand Corporation study…

Every now and again I’ll scrub up and repost material from the old blog that I think may be of interest; this is the first in a three-parter taken from an interview by Trevor Denyer for Midnight Street. You have been in the writing business for some time now. What would you say were your…

Both The Babylon Run and the omnibus edition combining all three novels of the Dying of Paradise trilogy are now at the proofing stage. Editing these early novels for reissue was a weird experience. A collaboration with a familiar stranger, one who’s fully immersed in and committed to the kind of stuff I don’t do…

When Nick Elliot stepped down as Controller of ITV Drama in 2005, Director of Television Simon Shaps and new Drama Controller Laura Mackie announced the cancellation of a number of the channel’s successful shows in a kind of ‘image makeover’ favouring youth and ‘edginess’. Foyle’s War was one of the casualties, and Rosemary and Thyme…

The printer finally delivered copies in September after a two month delay, and orders began shipping from Subterranean straight away; Amazon took a week or two to catch up but are now showing stock and taking orders with free delivery from the US to UK customers. Weighing in at 568 pages, with cover art by…

(This is taken from a piece originally written as an introduction to Ed Gorman’s Cage of Night, for PS Publishing) There’s a type of writing which I grew up loving, which made me want to be a writer myself, and which for a while I thought was gone forever. I’m talking about spare, intelligent commercial…

There’s a relatively young website named Shepherd.com that aims to help readers navigate to new discoveries. They invite authors to give capsule reviews of books that have shaped or impressed them, and which in some way mirror their own themes. It’s not so much a platform for self-promotion—you get to mention one title of your…

Sideshows, circuses, freak shows, end-of-the-pier attractions… there’s something universally fascinating in the tawdry magic of what I think of as Sideshow Gothic. Maybe because, as children, we perceive it all as a little bit dangerous and not entirely wholesome. Like moths to a flame, we’re drawn to flirt with it then and throughout our adult…