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.
‘Buried Letters’ appeared on BBC Radio Bristol between 7-10pm Fri 18 Aug 2023. It is is a short piece of award-winning creative writing based on Chloris Drabble
After lots of work and a long journey, and tons of support from the brilliant team at Inkubator Books, Detective Inspector Al Crow is finally ready to take on his first shift in the outside world.
A little about my third book, which takes me in a new direction, and into some potentially treacherous waters… In this novel, a bunch of private Caribbean islands band together to create a brand new nation, the ‘People’s Republic of Love’, governed by the citizen with the most followers on social media.
New dates for Hidden Gems! From landmine-sniffing rats to the mysterious ‘red gene’. Since just before lockdown we’ve been sharing the most amazing facts we’ve uncovered while researching our books. From the exploits of famous Italian artists to the birth of photography, the Spanish civil war and some astonishing quantum physics, our audiences always learn…
Writers travelling in search of better health and producing novels and journals in the process, loom quite large in English literature. There was D H Lawrence moving restlessly around the Med and roosting in the New Mexican desert, Katherine Mansfield enduring misery in the south of France, and poor Keats dragging himself to Rome – all seeking the magic cure for TB.
A biopic is a film which aims to tell a life story, usually of a historical figure and/or or celebrity in one sphere or another. The most popular examples include Ghandi, Lawrence of Arabia, Malcolm X and Schindler’s List, with The Theory of Everything, Raging Bull and Amadeus also featuring. You could claim they are filmed biographies, or set out to be.
Like many community groups, we powered down a bit during the pandemic. Meetings happened on zoom, then sometimes outdoors when it was permitted, then back to zoom, and now we are in a hybrid world of mostly meeting in person but with the option of joining via laptop. It is interesting how writers have been…