I’m delighted to have a story – ‘The Drop’ – in the newly published anthology of crime fiction from Run Amok Books – Jacked. There are some fantastic stories in here, from the funny to the deranged, the hard boiled to the strange. Vern Smith, a very fine writer indeed, has done a fantastic job […] Read More →

American football. I love the game. This seems to trouble some people, as if I’m indulging something with almost deviant undertones, like dressage, say. The complexity and the finesse, the occult vocabulary of Cover 3, zone coverage, read option…, a multidimensional game of chess the cliché goes. That said, the game looked ridiculous when ‘The […] Read More →

Well the dust has settled on the Oxford launch for The Accidental Recluse, held at Blackwell’s fab new store in the Westgate. We left a trail of devastation; spilled wine, overturned chairs, the echoes of hollow laughter that followed my cheap gags, empty bookshelves, heckles from my three month-old son, utter confusion and no small […] Read More →

Fun in the sun last night. Or not quite in the sun. More outside the sun, in a hot library. Andrew Bayliss, erstwhile head of Carterton Library (close to my home village) and promoter of all things local and literary booked me in for an event. And what a good turn out, given the beautiful […] Read More →

Dug in for winter   The brownest of eyes But a dog, So eager to please it could crap, And does, Like it’s crapping at me, Like it knows I never liked dogs. I’m only here To buy bread, I tell it, And it cocks the head Like, ‘and the rest?’ Ok, and the wine. […] Read More →