The Crime Readers' Association

Case Files 41

8th November 2019

Case Files issue 41 – out soon!

Case Files is an ezine that profiles new or forthcoming novels from members of the Crime Writers’ Association.
Subscribing is free – and it lets you discover which contributors in the forthcoming issue are behind these weird facts and odd confessions…

  • I was run over by my own car (and used the experience to have the same thing happen to a character in one of my novels)!
  • When I lived in a canal house in Sweden, the Crown Prince (now King Carl Gustav) moored his yacht under my window. He came to dinner with my landlady, but I never got to dance with him…
  • I own autographs of some famous Hollywood stars from the golden age of Hollywood, and also from Vera Lynn and Petula Clark.
  • English is my fourth language chronologically, but having now worked in it for over 25 years, it’s the best of the five I speak.
  • I learned self-defence after receiving death-threats in the course of my work as a photojournalist. (I am pretty handy at MacGyver-ing weapons out of everyday household objects.)
  • Walking about town in my lunch hour, I saw that a secretarial agency was advertising for girls to work in America – and so ended up living and working in Manhattan at the age of nineteen.
  • The sword I use to defend/decorate my house has a steel blade 3ft long and 1 ½ inches wide, forged in Obdurman, Sudan and sheathed in leather sewn with white pearls.
  • I got married in an old asylum and then lived with my husband in a haunted house, but I’m still too scared to watch Paranormal Activity!
  • As a very young girl I sailed out to Egypt on the Empire Windrush.
  • I won Writing Magazine’s Crime Short Competition with my first ever short story. There was a cash prize but I spent it all on getting to the prize-giving ceremony in Harrogate!
  • Twice, I have acted with Hollywood A-lister Paul Bettany: once as Hermia to his Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and once as Cecily to his Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest. I am barely 5ft tall. Paul…isn’t.
  • I was once dragged kicking and screaming from my seat in the audience of The Winslow Boy to go on stage and replace an actress who had just been taken ill.
  • I keep a letter from Steven Spielberg in my purse reminding me “never to lose the intensity and passion for your art.” It’s carried me through many dark nights of the soul!

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Chris Simms, Editor, Case Files.

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