Dear Amy by Helen CallaghanDear Amy is the outstanding debut novel from East Anglian author Helen Callaghan. Margot Lewis is a teacher at a school and a young girl in her class, Katie Brown, has gone missing. Margot also runs a...
Retirement is just a word…. Taking off the mask of the detective, which had been part of everyday life for many years, proved more difficult than we thought after leaving the police force. Five...
Poison Panic is perhaps best described as Victorian true crime… Discovery It was a note scribbled in the margin of a burial register that first alerted me to the Essex poison cases of the 1840s. A m...
Clare Chase: How I Wrote A Stranger’s HouseHow I wrote A Stranger’s House by Clare Chase The Initial idea I got the idea for the novel from snooping round other people’s homes! I became fascinated by the clues you can pick up about a person’s...
The People’s Book Prize closes on Sunday 10th July – check out the TV interview via the link and read the blog below and maybe go and vote for BK Duncan and her book Foul Trade! Interview...
Seth Lynch and The Paris RipperThe piece is about my book The Paris Ripper, which is due out on Feb 18th. Seth Lynch lives in Wiltshire with his partner and their two daughters. He works as a database administrator and his spare ti...
Sara Sheridan writes the popular Mirabelle Bevan Murder Mysteries set in 1950s London and Brighton as well as historical novels set in 1820-1845. Fascinated particularly by female history she is a cul...
Shetland author Marsali Taylor talks about writing, saliling and living in the northern islesA blog by MARSALI TAYLOR, the Shetland author of the Cass Lynch Mysteries. What book would you save in a house fire? This is a hard one, because I have so many books which are now out of print, like m...
My debut novel In Bitter Chill deals with the kidnapping of two young girls in the 1970s. It’s a distressing subject but I never considered the topic to be off-limits partly because it’s based on a ne...
Why I’ll Never Use an e-reader by Matthew PritchardOver the last 18 months I have purchased three e-readers: one for each of my parents, and a third for a friend. Having seen the machines in action, I have been impressed by them but know for a...
Golden Age – Part 4 by Noreen WainwrightI have spoken a lot about the Golden Age as a genre. When you are immersed in a subject you see it everywhere and in Waterstone’s in Liverpool last Sunday, sure enough, there were just so many re-issu...
Golden Age – Part 3 by Noreen WainwrightWhy do some contemporary crime writers decide to re-visit the golden age or indeed any other period of history? This is a popular trend but it is by no means a new one. In the 1970s, Ellis Pete...
After a conversation with James Ellroy, Tim Baker began work on a noir thriller. Twenty years and one vivid dream later, the completed work FEVER CITY is being published by Faber & Faber on 21 Jan...
Golden Age – Part 2 by Noreen WainwrightIn my last posting, I mentioned the unreliable narrator crime novel and how popular this sub-genre has become. But, if we look at the decades since the golden age we can see many strands in the...
A Day in the Life of Jean BriggsA Day in the Life of …Or, should it be A Life in the Day of …? I go to bed with Charles Dickens. I wake up with Charles Dickens. He’s always interrupting me with his speeches, his fourteen...
Golden Age – Part 1 by Noreen WainwrightYou might have noticed a relatively new trend in crime fiction publishing. In the midst of some of the prevailing big hits, you will see the re-issue of some of the golden age classics. One example of...
Diary of a Debut Author by Fiona Veitch Smith“His name is Arthur and he’s dead.” That’s how I was introduced to my costume for a 90-second film promo for my debut crime novel, The Jazz Files. Arthur – God rest his soul – had apparently once been...
A Day in the Life: Behind the Scenes by AJ WainesOne of the absolute joys of being a writer is that every day is different, largely because writers can play a much bigger part in the publishing process than they used to. Most authors now have a ‘pla...
The Importance Of Being Edited By Fergus McNeillSomebody once said “The only thing worse than being edited, is not being edited.” I forget who it was, and those may not have been their exact words, but they made an extre...
Diary of a Debut Author by Vaseem KhanSo . . . I am standing in a first-floor lounge at BBC studios in Manchester. It is 13th August 2015, 8.40am and in fifteen minutes I am due to walk onto the set of BBC Breakfast to talk about my debut...
Joining the CRA is FREE. There are no lengthy forms to fill out and we need nothing but your email. You will receive a regular newsletter but no spam.
