Happy New Year!

Let me start the year's blogging by wishing everyone who reads "Do You Write Under Your Own Name?" all the very best for 2017. Here's hoping it's happy and healthy for you, with lots of good books to read.

For me, this is going to be a very busy twelve months, and I'll be explaining why in a few days' time. At this stage, though, I'd like to focus on what is in store for readers of this blog and my writing generally.

The paperback edition of The Golden Age of Murder comes out in February; this edition contains various revisions to the original version, and I'm eagerly looking forward to its appearance

The key brand new publication will be The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, which will appear under the imprint of the British Library (in the US it will be distributed by Poisoned Pen Press). I've worked on this for quite a long time, and it's benefited from the input of several experts, most notably Nigel Moss and Barry Pike. I must say I'm excited that it's now nearly ready to hit the presses. It's very different from The Golden Age of Murder, but I really enjoyed writing it, and I hope it will give crime fans plenty of entertainment. I don't yet have a precise publication date, but I'll keep you posted.

I'm also working on three more anthologies for the BL, while there will be plenty of intros to books in the Classic Crime series. I've also just written an intro for a book to be published by Harper Collins, and an extraordinary long lost classic for Locked Room International, as well as for a collection of locked room novels to be brought out by the Folio Society.

This year will also - I very much hope! - see the publication of Taking Detective Stories Seriously, a collection of the reviews of Dorothy L. Sayers with a lengthy commentary by myself. The Sayers Society are producing this book, and I'm looking forward to its appearance. The reviews are truly fascinating.

In terms of new fiction, I'm working on a couple of anthology, and stories of mine should be appearing also in a Malice Domestic antho, one published by Level Best in the US, and in EQMM (As well as -yes! - making some progress with the next novel....)

On the blog, the mixture will be much as before. I'll invite guest bloggers to talk about topics of interest from time to time, and review films and TV series, as well as talking about the craft of writing, and covering Forgotten Books most Fridays. As usual, posts will tend to appear on Monday, Wednesday and Friday of each week. But sometimes the pattern changes - usually because I press the wrong button and publish something prematurely. Times keep changing, but my techno-incompetence will - and this is the one forecast for 2017 on which you  can confidently rely -, endure...