Many many congratulations to my great friend and colleague Vanessa Gebbie for being awarded second prize in the FISH short story competition - for the second time! A marvellous achievement, there were 15,000 entries.

The full list of winners is:

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Maggie and I share a birthday, early December, two Christmas babies.

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I’ve been saying for months that I was going to do this, ever since I was thinking about the advantages and disadvantages, but at last I have got round to it … ta da!


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Two, in fact, to make up for my grumpy post.

Charles Lambert's The Scent of Cinnammon and Elizabeth Baines' Balancing on The Edge of the World arrived a little while ago, and I am enjoying them both a huge amount.

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I'm back home in Israel now after a week of traveling - from Belgium to London, London to Jerusalem. I tripped off the Eurostar for a lovely meet-up with Vanessa in St Pancras on Monday involving cupcakes and much short story discussions! More news on that to come.

The Liars' League event on Tuesday night was great fun, five stories on the theme of Art & Science. My story, The Painter and the Physicist, was beautifully read by Susan Crothers. Follow the link to read the story online or listen to it - highly recommended! A wonderful thing the Liars are doing, a wonderful boost for the short story and for live story-telling (I am still thinking about the story with the zombie mice). ...

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It seems I'm not the first crime writer to turn his hand to writing a libretto. Apparently, Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith have also had a go, as I discovered from this article in The Times.

Is there something about writing crime fiction that makes us especially qualified for the task, I wonder?

Without wanting to appear either pretentious or glib - though aware that I will probably come across as both - I wonder if it is something to do with a preoccupation with death. I sometimes feel when I'm writing my Porfiry books that the whole thing is really a way of confronting death, facing up to it. This happens literally, of course, when the detective, and the reader, is presented with a corpse. And I, as the writer, have to look that corpse in the face and try to describe what I see - or rather imagine.

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Creativity is great. At its best, it’s fertile, energetic, enthusiastic and rewarding. And sometimes the very best way of writing oneself out of a block is to doggedly apply the seat of one’s pants to the seat of a chair and get on with it.
And sometimes, it’s not.




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I’m all for a bit of stereotypical conformity in the workplace.

If, say, I ran a private detective agency I’m pretty sure I’d insist we all gather together one day each week to slap our thighs whilst collectively exclaiming “By Jove, Watson, I think you’ve got it!” in a range of plummy voices.

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[Picture of Glastonbury Tor]

Not quite Everest, is it? No, Glastonbury Tor is here as a visual metaphor that our deeds very rarely meet up to the challenges we set ourselves. BUT that doesn't demean what we achieve in any way. Glastonbury Tor is still quite magnificent in its own right, and this picture even has a cow on it. Bet Everest doesn't have any cows.

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Editing and revising your story when you haven't looked at it for six months is like drilling your own teeth out with a rusty dentist's drill. Okay, it's not that bad - the drill isn't rusty. And you have some oil-of-cloves to dab on afterwards.


You make changes, knowing that they will have a knock-on effect, creating more work and more changes. And all the time you are asking yourself,

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