28th February 2019
I think, like many crime thriller authors, my love of the genre started when I was about five years old and started reading the Famous Five series by Enid Blyton. By the time I was in my very e...
28th February 2019
Splinter in the Blood began with an image: a woman with a gun standing over a shooting victim. My earliest jottings on the story date back to April 2014. I wrote, ‘She looks down at him and feels ange...
28th December 2018
Two crime writing competitions are open now. 1) The CWA Margery Allingham Short Story Competition Not to be missed for lovers of short-story writing – and being shortlisted for this renowned competiti...
17th December 2018
On 6 December Kate Ellis welcomed another addition to her list of titles. Kate is best known for her long-running series featuring archaeology graduate turned police inspector, Wesley Peterson. Howeve...
3rd December 2018
I’ve watched the growth in the popularity of novellas with interest, something you can read on your morning commute or in a couple of lunchtimes. Novellas are also a good way to discover new authors....
3rd December 2018
Death on a Shetland Isle began with a story, a true one, of how of how two people went missing from Eynhallow, an island in Orkney. I enjoy putting Shetland folklore in my books, and for this one I wa...
31st October 2018
Many authors of series work out in advance how their protagonist is going to develop through each book. I’d like to say my own series was carefully planned in this way, but the truth is I never set ou...
31st October 2018
In the Blood was inspired by a real-life case. I was waiting in court one morning when a young woman was brought up from the cells. The charge was murder, the victim her newborn child. I’ve dealt with...
31st October 2018
AJ Waines chats to the CRA about the background to her latest psychological thriller, Perfect Bones. I can honestly say that when it comes to personal experience of the ‘criminal mind’, fact, for me,...
8th October 2018
The third Killer Women Festival is on 21 October in Brown’s Courtrooms, Covent Garden, London. Headliners include Mark Billingham, Sophie Hannah, Paula Hawkins, CWA Dagger shortlisted Mick Herro...
8th October 2018
Where do you get your ideas from? Almost every author ever published will have been asked this question at some stage. And in the case of my latest crime novel White Lies, Deadly Lies, there are two...
4th September 2018
The Shrouded Path by Derbyshire-based author Sarah Ward is out on 6 September. She talks to the CRA about her new book. Q: This is the fourth novel in your DC Connie Childs series. Is it easier to...
2nd September 2018
Every book begins with a flash of inspiration, something that triggers an idea and starts a plot flowing. The initial idea for The Mechanical Devil was a newspaper article about a sixteenth century ro...
2nd September 2018
I sometimes wonder if Robin Hardy’s cult movie The Wicker Man holds a magical allure for me because I was born at the same time as it was being filmed. This is probably vanity, as the film, the grandd...
31st July 2018
I wasn’t expecting to find I had combined an ancient law and opera for a book, but Song of the Damned, published in July 2018, turned out to have both elements at its heart. It’s not, of course, so ve...
31st July 2018
Left-wing terrorists kidnapped Aldo Moro in Rome on 16 March 1978. Fifty-five days later, on 9 May, his lifeless body was found abandoned in a Renault 4 hatchback in the heart of the city. He had been...
30th July 2018
When I was in my late twenties, I worked as a receptionist. Not any old receptionist, I worked in the staff health clinic in a military hospital in Saudi Arabia. It was confidential work. It wasn’t ju...
28th June 2018
Since bringing the 30-novel Mariner series of action adventures to a close and retiring from full-time teaching, I have been working on two parallel series of historical novels. One is a sequence of...
27th June 2018
Ask a serious crime buff to name the most prolific serial killer in history and many will no doubt say Harold Shipman, the Lancashire doctor who is thought to have killed more than 200 victims. Others...
27th June 2018
I find myself lurching into the morning routine around 6.45; rousing the boys for school (I have three, in their teens), sorting the washing (whites/colours), including remembering to put to one side...