Introducing Death Wore White
How would you classify your writing, and do you consciously try to write to a certain style or genre?
Looking back at the five Philip Dryden novels – and now the first Peter Shaw – I hope the books combine a sense of the Golden Age of crime writing, with something of the impossible crime about them, with a more modern, gritty, feel . . . Read more
The genesis of 'The Skeleton Man'
Jim Kelly's latest novel, The Skeleton Man, is set in the lost village of Jude's Ferry. Here he considers the genesis of that idea.
I saw my first lost village from the top of a Sheffield Corporation bus one dawn morning in the drought summer of 1976 . . . Read more
Hanratty, the A6 murder, and me.
I remember that the house was very quiet the day I found the picture. The funeral had been the day before but the rooms already felt as if they'd been empty for a lifetime. I'd gone home to sort through the documents that had accumulated in the thirty years my mother had lived there, first with the family, then with my father, and then alone . . . Read more
The book that changed my life.
As I write this at my desk I can reach across and touch the spine of a book on the shelf below the window: the cover is in that washed-out orange so popular in the 1930s, but now it’s protected with a cellophane wrap. I often pick it up, let the pages fall open at the frontispiece, and feel again the thrill I felt that day in 1967 when I first opened a copy . . . Read more
My top five crime writers
R.D. Wingfield.
Few crime classics have been so poorly served in their TV incarnation as R.D.Wingfield's wonderful DI Jack Frost. Suffice to say the author has never been able to watch David Jason's portrayal. (He had the young Ronnie Barker in mind for the role . . . Read more