I’ve recently been playing with Twitter, the microblogging service that’s become incredibly popular in the last year. Twitter lets people post very short messages (140 characters, the same length as an SMS) to their Twitter page, letting friends know what they are up to. (If you use Facebook, it’s a little bit like the Facebook…
One of the scary aspects of ageing, I have discovered, is that we shrink as we get older! Really! I got a shock a few weeks back when I went for a check up. Now, I’ve been five foot eleven inches for as long as I can remember, and reasonably happy with that, although there…
Your hero, suffering for his art… No I’m not referring to my last birthday, but to this past weekend! What is it that stops us human beings from learning our lessons? What is it in our brain that makes us think that having another large brandy at 3am, when we are already very drunk, will…
I always ask my publishers or hosts wherever I travel in the world if they can arrange for me to meet police officers – I find it immensely helpful for my research for my Roy Grace novels to have as broad a picture of the world’s police forces and their different problems in different countries…
I have always liked poetry, and although I’ve not written any since I left school, I like to read poetry when I am working on a novel. I often find great inspiration in the words and images of both classical and modern poets. The reason I don’t like to read fiction, certainly during the writing…
Thanks all of you who took part in my What’s Cooking quiz! Some of your answers were quite brilliant and really made me smile. Well, no one actually got all three answers right, although Steve Hargrave, Helen Bayley and Julie Hargrave came close! The correct answers are that it was indeed Dennis Nilsen who was…
There’s an in depth interview with me at Shots Magazine, the result of a very pleasant (and very long!) lunch at Christmas with the Shots Editors [Mike Stotter and Ali Karim], together with Barry Forshaw [Editor of Crime Time and The Encyclopaedia of British Crime Fiction] and Carla McKay [crime-fiction critic of the Daily Mail].…
PJ in hot pursuit on the slopes! So, moving on from grimy ovens to fresh white snow…. (the competition stays open for another week!) I thought you might be amused by this cartoon of me that appears in the current issue of the Ski Club of Great Britain publication, Ski & Board. As the son…
Some of you found my Xmas quiz this year a little hard, so to ease the pain of now being in damp, recession-clobbered January, here is an easier competition which any of you could win! Take a look at the photo above. A bottle of champagne to the first post which correctly identifies: A. The…
Well I guess my first post of 2009 should contain elements of my last posts of the year – food and the Brighton and Hove City Mortuary… As Christmas recedes, like our bloated tums, into distant memory, I’m reflecting on what were the highlights of the holiday period, and up there among them must rank…