17th July 2015
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...
10th July 2015
What’s so attractive about a cold landscape? There are numerous great writers who set their crime novels in the Mediterranean heat (Andrea Camilleri, Petros Markaris) or the humidity of the American d...
3rd July 2015
Crime fiction readers demand more sophisticated novels than the ones I read as a teenager. While the golden age mysteries that I devoured had complex plots full of twists and turns, the action was usu...
26th June 2015
February 1947 was the coldest on record. Snow fell somewhere in the UK every day from January 22nd until mid March.There were fifteen foot snow drifts. Supplies had to be airlifted to villages and hou...
19th June 2015
‘How’s the novel going?’ asked my husband. ‘Hard going,’ I said. ‘Why?’ ‘You know how when you’re writing something scholarly you have to decide what to...
16th June 2015
Every other Tuesday we feature a publication from leading independent publisher Endeavour Press. The Apothecary’s House by Adrian Mathews (Download for FREE today 16.06.2015) Tell me more! When...
15th June 2015
The Crime Writers’ Association are delighted to reveal the long listed authors for the CWA Goldsboro Gold Dagger, the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger and the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. Th...
12th June 2015
‘I draw from life – but I always pulp my acquaintance before serving them up. You would never recognise a pig in a sausage.’ I love this quotation from Fanny Trollope, mother of the...
10th June 2015
It’s probably true to say that every fiction book intended for publication needs to be slotted into a specific genre. Some of these are very broad such as ‘crime fiction’ or ‘c...
5th June 2015
I believe it was Agatha Christie who remarked that murder was a good occupation for a woman at home. What she might have added was that nevertheless it was important for that woman to get out of the h...
1st June 2015
Crime Reading Month has started with a great post from Sarah Hilary. Over the next 30 days we have posts from some amazing crime writers – all members of the Crime Writers Association – in...
27th May 2015
Inspiration for writing about crime takes many forms and, for me, it was my own family history that first drew me into the nineteenth century underworld. All families have skeletons in their genealogi...
25th May 2015
National Crime Writing Month is a UK wide annual reading festival promoting the crime genre. It is a major initiative, coordinated by the CWA, a non-profit group dedicated to the promotion of the genr...
20th May 2015
What is a Writers’ Platform? If you search online, you’ll find several definitions, some more complicated than others. But in basic terms, it is a group of things that you do to get your name noticed...
18th May 2015
Looking back to my years in publishing, I sometimes wonder that I survived without feeling the blade of an axe in my head I knew my authors hated being edited nearly as much as I hated being caught be...
14th May 2015
You know what it’s like… you spend years working on bits of novels, maybe some short stories, maybe you even finish a novel but it’s so bad you let it disappear into a file on your computer that you k...
13th May 2015
A single event on a summer’s day, way back in 1975, changed my life for ever. I was fifteen and living in Melbourne, Australia, where my parents and I had emigrated the year before. I was kickin...
11th May 2015
Eleven authors have been longlisted for the CWA 2015 Dagger in the Library award, thanks to your votes. The longlist was compiled by YOU right and we’re thrilled that so many of you stopped by to vote...
11th May 2015
The CWA is excited to announce that the 2015 Diamond Dagger recipient Catherine Aird will be doing a series of appearances at this year’s Crime Fest. The acclaimed author, who follows in the footsteps...
8th May 2015
I’d always toyed with the idea of writing a book set in my hometown. Haddington, East Lothian is reasonably small. The population ripples around 9,000, but it always felt like much, much less. It’s an...