2024
Apologies for the lengthy gap between these posts. Part of the reason for my tardiness is that my partner and I have recently moved, downsizing, as seems to be the fashion, from a fairly large house to a garden flat in the same locality, and being forced to say goodbye to many things along the way – not least 35 boxes of books collected by Amnesty International UK for resale in their bookshops and on line.
That aside, there is a smidgeon of writing/publishing news. A new short story, Criss-Cross, featuring Alex Hadley, senior officer in one of the Major Investigation teams within the Met’s Homicide and Serious Crime Command – and a leading character in the final book in the Frank Elder series, Body & Soul (2018) – together with one Charles Resnick (Det. Insp. retired), is due to be published in a collection of new stories by members of the Detection Club, edited by Martin Edwards, due out in the Spring of 2025.
Later in 2025, Fedora, which won the CWA Short Story Dagger in 2014, will be included in another collection edited by Martin Edwards, this one bringing together the best of short fiction written over the years by CWA members. And if you didn’t catch Fedora first time around and don’t want to wait several months, it’s available as an e-book here or as one of seven stories in Going Down Slow, published by Five Leaves Publications (2017) and readily available from Five Leaves Bookshop.
Short fiction aside, since the publication of On Balance (Shoestring Press, 2023), I’ve been working towards having enough poems for a new collection, tentatively titled Blue in Green, after a Miles Davis track from 1959.
If you’re in the area and want to check them out, I shall be reading some of the new poems plus a few from On Balance, at the Torriano Meeting House in Kentish Town, north London on Sunday, October 27th, when I shall be sharing the stage with Tamar Yoseloff, who will be reading from her new collection, Belief Systems (Nine Arches Press, 2024). More details here.
I’m pleased to say that after some mobility problems have prevented me from doing so in recent years, I shall be back at CrimeFest in Bristol in 2025, 16th-18th May. The last time I was there was near the occasion of my 80th birthday when I had the pleasure of being interviewed by fellow-writer Alison Joseph.
Finally, it’s worth noting that now that I am getting around a tad more easily, I’d be very open to invitations to read from and talk about my work from any libraries, readers’ groups, independent bookstores et cetera that might be interested. Please contact me here.