Eternally and Melusine

I’ve been contacted by David Stuart Davies, editor of a forthcoming collection of short stories called Crime Scene to be published by Wordsworth (best known for its reprints of many classic novels.) He’s planning to include a couple of stories of mine in the book. This is the sort of news that always gladdens a writer’s heart. It’s good to see a story given a second (or third or fourth) life.

‘Eternally’ was the first short story that I set overseas. It’s about a 1960s American songwriting duo. I’m an admirer of the craftsmen and women who worked in the legendary Brill Building and the story draws on what I read about them, together with an essay written about Burt Bacharach at around the time he wrote his one and only stage musical, ‘Promises, Promises’ (a performance of which features in The Devil in Disguise.)

‘Melusine’ is very different. It’s a story set at the time when foot and mouth disease was ravaging the English countryside and it’s one of the short stories of mine that I’m proudest of. Before I wrote it, I was more or less typecast as an urban writer (‘gritty’ was an adjective used by many reviewers, although to be honest I never saw either myself or the books as all that gritty.) Writing a satisfactory story with a rural setting gave me the confidence to try a different style of writing. And the end result was the Lake District Mysteries.