'Do You Write Under Your Own Name?'

I find it hard - very hard - to believe, but this year marks the 30th anniversary of the publication of my first novel. Yes, Harry Devlin e...

I'm delighted to share the cover artwork of the forthcoming paperback edition of Gallows Court . It will hit the shops on 4 April, an...

I'm back from a brief but exhilarating trip to London, the highlight of which was the third Bodies from the Library event at the Briti...

Bury Him Darkly by Henry Wade (1936) is, at first glance, a Golden Age novel of a familiar type. A series of robberies take place at jewel...

The Golden Age of Murder has been nominated for an Edgar, one of the long-established awards given by the Mystery Writers of America. It...

I'm returning to the topic of reviews, and how authors respond to feedback from people who read their books, a subject that fascinate...

Sometimes we meet people fleetingly,who turn out to have a disproportionately significant influence on our lives. Hugh C. Rae, whom I first ...

The second of the two parts of Mind the Gap aired on BBC 2 this week. This thought-provoking programme was a documentary presented by Evan ...

Originality is something to be prized in any form of writing, and certainly in crime fiction. The snag is that it is very, very difficult to...

Is it  reasonable for writers to have favourites among their own books, or should one love them all equally? Well, my view is that books are...

I've been meaning for ages to visit the British Library, and I finally achieved this ambition the other day, although I only had time to...

Scott Turow's Innocent is one of those titles, like Agatha Christie's Marple , which causes me instinctively to be wary. It's e...

Hal David, the American lyricist, has died at the age of 91. It's extremely sad news as far as I'm concerned, as he wrote the lyrics...

I’m truly thrilled to say that my early Harry Devlin books, set in Liverpool, are now enjoying a new life. They are available as ebooks,...

This has been such a horrible “summer” so far in Britain that I had dark forebodings about a barbecue and crime event organised by t...

The first full-length novel I ever wrote was a thriller about football and it rejoiced in the title Dead Shot . I wrote it over two years ...

Most readers of this blog are, I think, fans of independent bookshops, and I had a great time last Thursday evening visiting Formby Books, a...

Ethel Lina White is a writer I've mentioned a few times on this blog. She's remembered today mainly as the author of the book on whi...

It’s now over 20 years since Harry Devlin made his debut, when my first book, All the Lonely People , was originally published. It was a mar...

A downmarket, dogged criminal lawyer called Harry works in a scruffy city backstreet. Harry has been damaged by the death of someone very cl...