Books for Christmas reading
Merry Christmas. What are you planning to read over Christmas? Here’s a Yuletide taster menu for you, from the top of my To Be Read pile. Something to fill in deadly gaps between TV Xmas…
The murder to end all literary murders? Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz reviewed
The English love the countryside and never more than when there’s a corpse spreadeagled over the lawn. The country crime sub-genre appeared almost as soon as the detective genre itself. Three years after the first English…
How to avoid the crime fiction trap
Crime is the post popular genre in fiction and on screen today, but many writers fall into the crime fiction trap. Understanding the crime fiction trap The big trap in crime movies and novels is that the…
What writers can learn from Andy Murray
I wouldn’t have thought there was anything that writers could learn from Andy Murray, but today I read Barney Ronay in the Guardian on what he calls Murray’s “on-court savvy” – a “supremely un-British skill”.…