2023 - Publications

 

The past twelve months have been wonderful for me, and I'm very grateful for my good fortune. In terms of published work, the highlight was the appearance of Sepulchre Street, which earned plenty of nice reviews. The US edition, retitled The House on Graveyard Lane (but it's the same book, with a few tiny changes to make sense of the title!) comes out next year.

'End Game', as I mentioned the other day, was a short story for Christmas commissioned by the Mysterious Bookshop in New York. Other short stories I published this year were 'The Intruder', in School of Hard Knox, and 'She's Leaving Home', in Happiness is a Warm Gun. After a glitch in the original publication of 'No Peace for the Wicked' (when the end of the story was omitted in EQMM!) the full version of the story was finally published, much to my relief. I'm hoping this will also appear in an EQMM anthology next year.

Each month, a new British Library Crime Classic has appeared with an introduction that I've written. And two of the books have been anthologies I've edited, Crimes of Cymru and Who Killed Father Christmas? The former was a bestseller in Wales, I've been told, and the latter had a great run during the festive season. And there was also a lengthy intro for an American Mystery Classic, Obelists at Sea.

This has been the best year of my career in terms of translations of my books into foreign languages. Different books have appeared in different territories and, overall, they are currently to be found in German, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, with a Taiwanese translation in the works and other languages under negotiation. Even though I can't read the translations (I even struggle with German nowadays, it's so long since I studied it), I do find this quite exciting.

But a book is nothing without readers. I've had many messages from readers around the world this year and their support is tremendously important. At present I'm extremely busy, working on a number of different projects, and when at the end of a long day I may feel a bit tired, there is nothing more motivating than reading some of these positive messages. So thank you, and do keep in touch.