Do you hate watching movies and TV dramas based on novels? Or love them? Why do some adaptations work, while others crumble into dust? I’ve been talking about adaptations and why some writers fail while others…
This week I have two new resources for you if you want help adapting a book for film or TV, or are a reader/viewer who’s interested in seeing how writers set about transforming works for…
Not many writers can claim to have made a genre their own, but John Grisham and legal thrillers go together like an American judge and gavel. So, when a new Grisham comes out, there’s a…
Why should we care? It’s probably the most important question a storyteller needs to answer. It’s particularly pressing when the story relates to events that took place around three hundred and fifty years ago, to…
We’re all trying to save money, so I’m delighted that Bloodhound Books have agreed to a very rare offer on the e-book version of my psychological mystery thriller Room 15. That’s 99p in the UK,…
You’re a staggeringly brilliant spad (special adviser) working in Downing Street in the early days of a new government. The world is at your feet. Brexit is oven-ready. You have a degree from Oxford. Attractive…
Facing scarily rising fuel bills, my fellow Bloodhound thriller author Vikki Patis has come up with a tremendous way to help families who can’t afford to heat their homes – an online auction for readers…
With foreign holidays still only slowly returning, how about a remote Scottish island? One with a freezing-cold loch that contains deep secrets, a populace who seem eerily calm and controlled – and a rather strange…
Imagine you could buy a pill that could give you more brainpower, more empathy, better vocabulary and a longer life, while preventing cognitive decline, reducing stress, helping sleep and lifting depression. How much would you…
So you come across a police cordon on your way from the tube station. There are blue flashing lights and donotcross tape stretches over the road. Of course you don’t want to look too nosey,…
A quick one today, to celebrate my award-shortlisted satire The Breaking of Liam Glass reaching the #1 bestseller spot in Amazon Mass Media this week. A thank you to everyone who bought the book and…
I’m off to the Brechin & Angus Book Festival next week and to honour the occasion, I’ve persuaded my publishers to give you two early Black Friday book offers. If you’re near Brechin next weekend…
… AS A REFUSAL OFTEN OFFENDS BY PAUL BASSETT DAVIES If this review is late, blame the book. I received it two years ago and read it straight through. But every time I picked it…
Satire is having a big moment. We have satirical novels winning the Mann Booker Prize, satirical TV shows hoovering up the ratings along with satirical movies. Some politicians are deemed to be too far gone…
I’d love to hear your opinion of the new blurb for my noir thriller The Breaking of Liam Glass. Times change, things move on and I decided it was time to update the description of…
We know that the Internet thrives on free information. As the saying goes, “Information wants to be free.” But I was still surprised by what I found when I began writing my book on free…
What’s a poor author to do? You write a comic novel that satirises the orange blob in the White House and no sooner is it in print than he’s gone. Carl Hiaasen is one of…
Last time I mentioned I was talking at the Milim Leeds Literary Festival about why amnesia stories are so popular. There’s no doubt that writers have written about amnesia for thousands of years. What attracts…