New Statesman, February 2017
In April 2004, in Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest of America, I found myself on an unexpected literary pilgrimage....
A SHOT IN THE DARK
A CONSTABLE TWITTEN MYSTERY
‘Bringing the undoubted comic talents of Lynne Truss to crime fiction should be a marriage made in heaven, and that is exactly what it turns out to be. A Shot in the Dark is sheer, witty delight’ - SIMON BRETT
Welcome to my new website, which had been designed for me by Lee Wilson of Project X in Brighton. Anyone familiar with the old website will know that I rarely updated it. This was partly because I don’t have the sort of brain that remembers to do updating, but also because updating was formerly quite difficult to do. So dammit, I will no longer have that excuse! From now on, when the same piece of information stays up as “news” for 18 months (or ten years), eveyone will know it’s entirely down to my laziness.
Right now there are two pieces of news (aside from this spiffy new site): first, my second evil-talking-cats book The Lunar Cats is soon out in paperback (and I utterly love that book); second, I have just completed my first Inspector Steine novel, to be published next year by Bloomsbury. The title will be A Shot in the Dark, and I worked on it harder than I can honestly remember working on anything before.
Life At Absolute Zero
Available from October 2021
26 short stories about the eccentric inhabitants of Meridian Cliffs, a small, wind-battered town on England’s South Coast ‘Very few writers read their own work well on the radio, but...
Continue Reading...LIFE AT ABSOLUTE ZERO (SERIES THREE)
A major Radio 4 commission to write blocks of stories concerning the people of Meridian Cliffs, a windy town on the South Coast where the Greenwich Meridian meets the sea. A third series will air in 2018. All the stories are read by the author. The producer is Kate McAll….
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For New York Times, November 2016
Imagine the progress of the English language as a moving train. It need not be a fast-moving train; in fact, it helps if you picture it chugging along majestically through a flat landscape. Our two authors are both actively interested in observing the progress of the train. One has spent…
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Hell’s Bells
I wrote this piece for The Sunday Times as Hell’s Bells opened in Edinburgh: In the middle of August, I’ll be going up to Edinburgh to see my own play, Hell’s Bells, at the Pleasance Attic, and it’s going to be quite weird. A small, dark performance space will be focused,…
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Saga, September 2016
I don’t know whether you’ve seen the Danish family TV saga The Legacy, but I can tell you that a)...
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New Statesman, July 2016
Until the 2012 Olympics, I didn’t realise that the schedule for every Games is roughly the same: all the swimming...
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Saga, June 2016
A friend at my art class asked the other day, “What do you do with your pictures afterwards?” This is...
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News & Features
Here’s a confession. When I was a child, I used to think that Dusty Springfield was singing, “You don’t have to say you love me, just because a ham.” This made no sense to me, of course. If an adult had challenged me on it – “Just because a ham?”…
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The case of the 18th-century man of letters John Hawkesworth (1715?-1773) is not as often invoked as it ought to be. This is perhaps because no one has heard of him. Search books of notable Georgians in England, and alphabetically they go straight from Hawke to Haydon. Even in Boswell’s…
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You are best known for Eats, Shoots & Leaves – looking at your all-encompassing CV is that something you are happy with? Well, it’s hard sometimes. I wrote Eats, Shoots & Leaves 14 years ago – but I think it’s fair that if you have a bestselling book, people identify…
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