11 July 2024 marks 30 years since I lost my dad. It’s also the birthday of the character in the novel I started to write immediately afterwards. I’m now, for various reasons, rewriting that novel.
Since I finally ‘came out’ as a crime writer last spring, with the publication of Her Last Chance, the first in the DI Crow crime thriller series, the questions I’ve been asked most by those who know me is, ‘Where did the urge to write crime come from?’ usually followed by ‘What on earth goes on in your head?’ After all, once I yank my leopard print shopping trolley out of the cupboard and head off to the local supermarket, the only crime-busting hero I remotely resemble is Miss Marple.
Most of the time authors carefully select their settings, but sometimes the story just revs its engine and takes you off to who-knows-where. Hence I found, completely by accident, this one little scene in The Undoing of Arlo Knott setting itself at an old workplace of mine – Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham.
We are saddened to hear y of the death earlier this week of Bristol writer Suzie Lockhart-Smith. Suzie submitted to our spoken word event Story Sunday (The Fall) in October 2019. Here is the piece she read that night, with our sincere condolences to her family and friends. Fast Fall the Eventide, by Suzie Lockhart-Smith…