15th July 2021
When I first discovered my desire to write, it was in virtual prehistoric times, when publishing houses like Methuen, Herbert Jenkins and Collins – to name just a few – adhered to simple publishing pr...
15th July 2021
I’m hugely excited that She’s Mine, my first psychological thriller, is coming out with Hera Books in August. Unlike my Kramer & Carver legal thriller series, I chose to write it in the first pers...
14th July 2021
I wasn’t feeling like writing another book just now partly because I too often seem to choose a subject needing a great deal of research but, despite not previously being attracted by the subject, I...
1st July 2021
Chris Whitaker, Eva Björg Ægisdóttir, Michael Robotham, Vaseem Khan and Peter May win 2021 CWA Daggers. The winners of the 2021 CWA Daggers, which honour the very best in the crime writing genr...
23rd June 2021
“The Da Vinci Code meets post-Independence India.” That’s how MW Craven, winner of the CWA Gold Dagger, has described my latest novel, The Dying Day. I can understand why. The book, set in Bombay in 1...
23rd June 2021
‘Police Calls’ were one of my regular duties as a 20-year-old cub reporter on the weekly Poole and Dorset Herald during the early 1980s. It involved an early morning drive to the town’s ma...
23rd June 2021
Beverley Jones talks about her new novel The Beach House and how beloved childhood stories provided sinister inspiration for adult nightmares. Once upon a time (in the 1980s), there was a little girl...
23rd June 2021
Murder at Roaringwater Murder at Roaringwater is the inside story of a young Frenchwoman, Sophie Toscan du Plantier. In this notorious and unresolved crime, the victim seemed to have a premonition of...
29th April 2021
The Invitation: join A.M. Castle for a closed circle murder mystery I have always wanted to write a closed circle murder mystery, so I suppose I’ve been lucky – the UK’s first lockdown gave me the mea...
29th April 2021
My father was a psychiatrist and he often told me that psychiatrist’s children are the most messed up people on the planet. He may have been right. Like every other writer I’ve been told “no” more tim...
26th April 2021
I lived, some years ago, on a Ladysmith Road. It joined another called Kimberley, thoroughfares of solid, red-brick terracing. Show me any British suburb, built c.1900, and I will give you streets nam...
26th April 2021
In this article I am going to express some of my personal views on the writer’s use of language in historical novels, both as an author and as a reader. By the use of language, I mean not just the wor...
26th April 2021
In 2015 I came across a Times newspaper article that detailed the crimes of the ‘Moorish Jack the Ripper’. The article was printed in 1906 and offered a gruesome description of a series of murders of...
26th April 2021
I’ve always been intrigued by man-as-monster; equally frightened and fascinated by the idea that someone who could help an elderly neighbour with their shopping, let local kids play in their garden an...
29th March 2021
Writers are wordsmiths. We spend our time playing with words, seeing how we can use them to communicate. But ideas as well as language inspire the books we write, and these ideas can pop up unbidden f...
19th March 2021
I was on a panel of ‘Roman’ writers at a festival in Harrogate some years ago when a member of the audience asked us if we’d ever contemplate writing outside that historical period. I was quite surpri...
12th March 2021
Dead Sea, number four in the Marvik mystery thriller series, was a difficult book to write, not because there was any lack of ideas for the storyline but because it needed to pick up the threads of an...
23rd February 2021
Martina Cole is the recipient of the highest honour in British crime writing, the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Diamond Dagger. The long-reigning Queen of Crime Drama is a publishing powerhouse. Ma...
23rd November 2020
Claire Tomalin observed that: ‘everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens.’ Mine is Detective Dickens, the amateur sleuth who teams up with the Superintendent from Bow Street to investigate...
23rd November 2020
Over the last decade, it cannot have escaped your attention that ebooks have changed the world of publishing significantly. This is especially true for mid-list authors such as myself. No longer alway...