We booked our ‘Othello’ tickets the hour they went on sale: two for ourselves and one each as birthday presents for my sister and oldest friend. My youngest brother and his partner, who also live in Sheffield, decided to join us. We’re all huge fans of ‘The Wire’ and go to a lot of theatre at The Crucible, one of the UK’s best theatres, where productions cost half what they do in the West End. It’s the first week of term, so we decided to go for the matinee, rather than evening show, so as to leave more weekend free for preparation. On a good day, it’s a fifty minute drive but we allowed an hour and a half for traffic. We’d been on the…

If you were to ask my readers which their favourite of my novels is, most crime fans would say Bone & Cane, Young Adult readers might well say Love Lessons (or, if they’re big music fans, Festival), but the majority, I know, are fondest of The Pretender. It’s my favourite, too, having taken me over twenty years to get it right, then get it published. The novel is about a young man, Mark Trace, with a precocious ability for literary forgery. During the story he successfully fakes Graham Greene, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Roald Dahl and more. As a coming of age story, it straddles adult and young adult fiction. The YA aspect is one reason why I put Dahl in, that and a rather…

This is a slightly extended version of the review that appears in today’s Nottingham Post.   Willy Vlautin likes his songs to speak for themselves. Richmond Fontaine’s new album is a song suite that the band play in full during this two hour show. ‘The High Country’ has some narration, provided by guest vocalist Amy Boone, from The Damnations (replacing Deborah Kelley on the album), but most of the sad story of love, loss, derangement and escape comes through the songs. Willy doesn’t give us any recaps. He does tell us how he started writing the album when he was woken at 4.30am by a logging lorry. Less convincingly, he insists that Bing Crosby is one of his patron saints (‘I know he beat his…