Hot on the heels of ‘Student’ (scroll down the page) I have a new eBook available. It’s exclusive on Kindle until the new year, but other formats will follow. Dead White Male is a stand alone novel that was written as part of The Beat, a police procedural series about young police officers in Nottingham that ran from 1994 to 2000. It’s the series in which I learnt to write mystery novels (as against the one-off whodunits that were aimed at a young audience). I chose this novel to digitise because I think it’s one of my very best mysteries and serves as an introduction to the series as a whole. If all goes well, I intend to digitise the other eleven books over the next…
Over forty years after buying my copy of School’s Out, which was as popular at Calday Grange Grammar School For Boys as it was in the rest of the English speaking world, I got to see Alice Cooper. I took my 18 year old nephew, who’s a big fan (he’d actually seen him before, at Download). This is a very slightly extended version of my review for the Nottingham Post, whose photo is above. Last year, Alice Cooper reunited his original Billion Dollar Babies band for the sequel Welcome 2 My Nightmare. For his Hallowe’en Night Of Fear tour, he has a crack band half his age, who threaten to, but never quite, drown out their leader. The sell-out show drew a multi-generational crowd, many…
Everybody’s disgusted, but nobody’s that surprised about Jimmy Savile. He was always creepy, and the girls he had his arm round as he presented Top Of The Pops rarely looked comfortable. What had he already done to them? Nevertheless, the scale of his evildoing beggars belief. The comedian Jerry Sadowitz nailed him in a routine as far back as 1988. When I wrote a story for the UNICEF comic No Secrets (edited by John Clark) and called it Jim’ll Fix It, there may have been a subconscious dig at Saville, who I didn’t like. But that’s all. I’m not claiming any presience. The four page comic story, illustrated by John McCrea, is about sexual abuse within the family, which is still where abuse is most prevalent. It…
My new novel about university life, Student, which I give the background to below, is published on Monday, September 24th, the start of Fresher’s Week at most unis. As an opening week offer, you can get the book on Kindle for 99p, or from the publisher at £4.99, post-free, for a signed copy. That’s less than anywhere else for a signed copy. Obviously, we’re doing this more for attention than sales, and reviews left anywhere will be much appreciated. I started writing seriously 28 years ago, after training to be a teacher. Almost the first thing I wrote was to become my debut, The Foggiest, in 1990. I saw it as a trial run at the time, and concentrated on adult fiction of the kind…
I’ve just returned from one of those holidays you need a holiday to recover from (long story, but it involved a huge amount of driving, breakdowns, a blow-out and never knowing where you would be the next day), so my holiday reading was less wide ranging than usual. I usually get through a balanced set of books, from crime to literary fiction and poetry, but this time the closest I got to literary fiction was a handful of stories in the New Yorker, of which I had many issues saved up. The best ones were by Jennifer Egan in the pictured issue and Tessa Hadley. I was impressed by Alison Moore’s long story The Pre-War House on my Kindle (I’d taken her Booker long-listed The Lighthouse…