I edit a series of short novellas (we used to call them long short stories, but things have moved on) for Five Leaves. The sixth and seventh in the Crime Express series are published today. They’re corkers, the best yet. First we have ‘Gun’ by Ray Banks, a tight, gripping noir by a young writer new to me. I defy you not to read in a sitting. Then there’s the only book in the series that I commissioned myself, ‘Speaking Of Lust’ by Lawrence Block, a grand master of crime writing, who I’ve been reading for donkey’s years, and who I was lucky enough to meet up with in New York earlier this year. This is a very spicy quartet of shaggy something stories, told…

‘The Pretender’ is about a young man with an accidental gift for literary forgery. He gets involved in the world of a small but very distinguished literary magazine. Soon he finds that the magazine is in financial trouble and the only way he can help it survive is by ‘finding’ new manuscripts by authors who have written for the magazine in the past. And he happens to have access to the typewriter that Graham Greene wrote one of his best known short stories on. ‘The Pretender’ is as much a coming-of-age novel as it is a thriller. It’s a story about writing and creativity and is my most autobiographical novel, although not a word in it is true. I started to write a version of…

One of the differences I’m discovering between publishing a YA novel and publishing an ‘adult literary(ish)’ novel is that people ask you to write articles and the like to promote it. An advance chapter of ‘The Pretender’ appears in the new issue of Staple, out any day now. This little feature (with the photo above) appears in today’s Sheffield Telegraph, and is reprinted here for my readers outside Yorkshire (that’s Handsworth, Sheffield by the way). David Belbin was born in Handsworth in 1958 and now lives in Nottingham. He has published more than thirty novels for teenagers, including ‘Denial’, set in Sheffield. His new novel, ‘The Pretender’, out next week, is more for adults. It’s a novel about a bookish young man with an accidental…

The box above was one of many that arrived today at the publishers and distributors. Technically, it’s not on sale for a fortnight and I’ll be writing more about this, my first novel for an adult audience, in the coming weeks. But you can download an extract and, indeed, buy an advance copy of The Pretender here. It looks fantastic, for which all praise to the publishers, Five Leaves.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjwfNAYdBVQ] Aimee Mann was in superb form at Sheffield’s Leadmill on Thursday night. A mesmerising set. For the encore, she played the first four songs that the audience called out for. My shouted request was for the title track of her second solo album, a song that she wrote out of her friendship with the Labour MP Tony Banks. It’s about, broadly speaking, what it was like to be a member of the shadow cabinet in the mid-90’s – not exactly your usual fare for a pop song. Banks was a Mann fan. At a gig fifteen years ago, she told the Sheffield audience (I think it was the Leadmill again) that she’d been invited to tea at the House of Commons. Should she go?…