I’m currently revisiting this modest second-hand find from a few years ago, and confirming that it’s the best book on British TV drama production I’ve read. It was published in 1970, and is about a ’60s BBC show that I never watched. But it’s still the best book on British TV drama production that I’ve…

Publication day for the UK paperback edition It’s 1912 and Sebastian Becker, the Special Investigator to the Lord Chancellor’s Visitor in Lunacy, arrives in the West Country to interview Sir Owain Lancaster on his run-down country estate. Descending from his train in the small coastal resort town of Arnmouth, Becker finds the entire community mobilised…

Got a Kindle? Got any space left on it after stuffing the memory with every free download that’s been wafted past you by publishers and self-publishers convinced that if they can saturate the world with product, riches will follow? Well, here you go again. Don’t get too excited. It’s just a couple of short stories…

Okay, perhaps the post title’s overselling it a little, but on May 23rd The Bedlam Detective sees UK publication and in anticipation of the event, we’re making the Kindle edition of Down River free for the holiday weekend. You’ll have 72 hours in which to grab it, from 12.00am (Pacific Standard Time) on May 4th…

The Devil in the White City is one of my all-time favourite nonfiction reads. Historian Erik Larson counterpoints the planning and staging of the 1893 World’s Fair with the murderous activities of one “Dr H H Holmes”. The fake doctor – real name Herman Webster Mudgett – was a plausible charmer who preyed upon young…

Despite being a single studio drama first broadcast on Christmas Day 1972 and reshown only once a few months later, Nigel Kneale’s seminal TV ghost story still seems to have managed to mark, scar or otherwise influence just about everyone who saw it back then. Amongst my generation of horror writers, most either acknowledge a…

I just heard that the US edition of The Bedlam Detective is going into its second printing. Glad news for any author, and thanks to all who’ve picked it up. Even greater thanks to those who didn’t put it down again, and went on to pay for it. The UK trade paperback edition will be…

This month, mega-niche distributor Network releases the complete first (and only) season of Virgin of the Secret Service, a 1968 Empire-spoofing obscurity remembered with fondness by at least one viewer. I was thirteen at the time, and in my autograph-collecting phase; I wrote to leading man Clinton Greyn and in return got a typed slip…