There’s something about them. The painted horses bobbing up and down. The wild organ music. The smiling children holding onto the pole with one hand and waving with the other as they go round and round. Carousels may sit at the centre of many a fairground, but they also occupy a special place in our … Read more
On re-reading Inspector Morse I don’t often re-read books. This may be because when I was an English teacher re-reading books pretty much came with the territory, and the pain of having to read yet again a book I would rather not have read in the first place is still fresh in my memory. So … Read more
“This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental” We’ve all read them – those disclaimers in the front of novels telling the reader that what follows … Read more
I hadn’t planned to turn to crime when I stopped teaching but, to my surprise, it’s what I ended up doing. Not committing it, you understand, but writing it – something that still, in some people’s eyes, comes to pretty much the same thing. I’m still not exactly sure how this happened, but I think … Read more
‘Private tutoring is booming and someone’s making a killing…’ All parents want the best for their kids and many are prepared to do anything they can to secure it. And that includes paying for extra help. Extra help that will bring their kids up to scratch and get them the grades. Extra help that will … Read more
DI Garibaldi is the non-driving, country-music loving, poetry-quoting detective who makes his fictional debut in The Final Round . How did I create him? Where did he come from? Strangely, the first thing that came was the name – Garibaldi. That’s Garibaldi as in the biscuit and as in the key figure in the unification … Read more