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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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
CWA Dagger Awards 2020 Winners Announced – Michael Robotham, Lou Berney, Trevor Wood, Casey Cep, and Abir Mukherjee win 2020 CWA Dagger awards. The winners of the 2020 CWA Daggers, which honour the ve...
When I was working on the long-running drama series, Heartbeat, we were often told that the biggest character we wrote for was the setting. How true that was. Whenever I tell people that I used to be...
I did more research for No Return than I’ve ever had to do before for a book. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. What I didn’t know was how ignorant I was. The basic spark of an idea for the story was...
So it’s finally out and in print. Death Rattle. The debut novel of a new and nervous crime writing author. So what happens now? Well… Next come the reviews. I begin to feel like the writer of a new p...
I believe in The Muse. I am one hundred per cent convinced that there is a magic force that guides artistic endeavour. For interest mine is female, taller than me with longer, curlier, blonder hair, f...
You mean, you do research for your novels? I understand very well why some readers may pose this question. Non-fiction books, fairly obviously, need to be carefully researched. Nobody, I’m sure, woul...
A new short story anthology with a difference celebrates short stories from the archives of the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA). Vintage Crime gathers gems from the mid 1950s, when the CWA began, unt...
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