Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2025! I hope it's a happy and healthy year for readers of this blog. And if you've made any new year resolutions, fingers crossed that they work out well!

I've got lots of writing activities and events planned for the next twelve months - including the publication of Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife, the final proofs of which I'm checking right now! - and I hope to meet a good number of you during the course of the year. For those interested in Alibis in the Archive, for instance, we have a great programme to be unveiled shortly and I encourage you to sign up as soon as places are released if you'd like to spend the weekend of 6-8 June with us.

As for my own resolutions, there's just one to mention specifically. I've finally decided to go ahead with a newsletter for my readers. It won't replace this blog in any way, but it will supplement it and include additional material and information. My current thinking is to send out a monthly newsletter. Maybe, if I get the hang of it, a bit more often. So if you are interested, please do subscribe   - bearing in mind you can cancel at any time. (And if the link doesn't work for you - because Substack is new to me and I'm still getting used to it! - please let me know.)

Before we get into the swing of the new year, I also wanted to mention some sad news. I only recently became aware that David Bordwell died in the early part of last years, shortly after it was announced that his brilliant book Perplexing Plots had been shortlisted for an Edgar. I never met David, but I enjoyed corresponding with him and I found his writings about film to be truly impressive. He was a charming and generous correspondent and although he'd mentioned that he'd been unwell for a long while, I'm truly sorry that he's died. We also lost a writer I never met, Alan Rustage, who usually wrote under the name Sally Spencer. He was some years older than me, and not much involved in the crime writing community, but he came from Northwich, where I grew up.

I also heard a while back that a writer I liked and admired, Julia Wallis Martin, died some time ago. I'd lost touch with her, and the news came as a shock. I'd like to write a full-length post about her in due course, because she's definitely a writer who deserves to be remembered.