Weekends don’t get much better than this. First, a terrific launch for my new novel, Bone and Cane, at Antenna on Friday night. Many thanks to everyone who came, and special thanks to the Antenna staff and everyone at Tindal Street Press, who organised it so superbly. Thanks to Mike TD for the photo above. I got to choose all the music, coming off from the Q and A to a great song about Nottingham, City Sickness by Tindersticks. On Saturday, the new album by my favourite band, REM, arrived early, and it sounds really good. Then, in the evening, we went to a packed Nottingham Contemporary, where Nottingham’s best band of the 70’s, Gaffa, reunited for the first time since 1980. It was a…
My first novel for Tindal Street Press, Bone and Cane, is published today and I hope to see loads of my Nottingham friends at the launch tonight. Those of you who own a Kindle might like to know that, for a limited time, you can get download the book at a price so ridiculously low I refuse to cite it here. Also, you can see the full size cover on the downloads page. Bone and Cane is set in Nottingham and, to a smaller extent, London. The titular characters are Sarah Bone, a New Labour MP for a fictional Nottingham constituency, and her ex, Nick Cane, who has just served a five year prison sentence for growing industrial quantities of cannabis. They meet, and the…
1978 was my first full year in Nottingham, the city where I’ve lived ever since. Most Tuesday nights, I’d head down to The Imperial, on St James St, to see Nottingham band, Gaffa. The place was always packed, even before they had a record out. Gaffa were a Nottingham band for Nottingham people. Listen to the download of ‘O.A.P. Sightings’ below to find the most authentic example of a Nottingham accent on record. In lyricist and vocalist Wayne Evans, they had a real original, perfectly complemented by guitarist John Maslen who wrote the music. Clive (“Myph”) Smith on second guitar and Mick Barratt on drums completed the picture (occasionally with Brendan Kidulis on keyboards). Their handful of records never really represented how good they were…
I’m between drafts of a new novel, so I’ve had time to work on a couple of short stories that lay, unfinished, in the ‘pending’ folder on my computer. This week I finished one called ‘The After Life’. This morning, when I saw a new song with the same name linked to on the whatevershebringswesing mailing list, I had to click through. This is the second song to be previewed from Paul Simon’s forthcoming album, So Beautiful or So What and it’s so good I just listened to it twice. Simon’s last album, Surprise, was a real return to form, as was the accompanying tour, and this sounds even more promising. Check out the song here. A former student of mine, novelist Chris Killen, published…
Next month sees the return of Five Leaves’ Crime Express series, which I edit. Those of you who have read earlier books in the series may notice that they have a new look. But most readers have never seen a Crime Express novelette, because we had great difficulty getting them into shops. The first eight books were beautiful, tiny A6 objects, with smart flaps, ideal for shoving into a pocket of almost any size. But hard to display. The authors loved them, but readers couldn’t find them. So, reluctantly, after much discussion, we’ve moved the series to normal size, where they will fit more easily onto bookstore shelves. Why should you buy then? Crime Express aims to present the best of Crime Writing today, from…