Writing about Greg Hoblit’s supernatural chase thriller The Fallen for her Cats on Film blog, Anne Billson got in touch to clarify a point. Apparently some of the Amazon reviewers of my 1987 novel Valley of Lights contend that it owes something to Jack Sholder’s movie The Hidden. In Valley of Lights, a Phoenix police…

The British paperback edition of The Kingdom of Bones, the novel that introduces The Bedlam Detective‘s Sebastian Becker, is published today by Ebury Press. Marilyn Stasio in The New York Times wrote: THE KINGDOM OF BONES… shows the occult mystery in its best light. Vividly set in England and America during the booming industrial era…

Woo-hoo. Kirkus has named The Bedlam Detective as one of the best fiction titles of the year. I believe a small glass of something may be called for. The ‘Read full review‘ link in the image won’t work, but this one will. While waiting for the softcover edition to be published in February, why not…

Like many people who’d embraced Sherlock I was prepared to dislike CBS’s Elementary just on principle, but I don’t. The Brooligan household watched the pilot and we decided, after some discussion, that it maybe wasn’t for us; based on that first viewing it felt less than fresh, and the mystery element was weak. Subsequent episodes…

Guy Adams, the Torchwood/Sherlock/Hammer novelist and Angry Robot-published author, has tagged me for this. I didn’t even realise I’d annoyed him. It’s called a Blog Hop. Here’s how it works, he said to me. You answer ten questions on the next big thing that you’re working on, then tag five other writers to do the…

“I like working with the actors and with the producer, it’s normal for me, but outside Danish Broadcasting, maybe it’s old school – the director is king, the writer’s more the guy you get some scripts from and then you see him again at the premiere. If they’re just looking for a writer, then maybe…

Just after the Berlin wall came down, I threw a bag into the back of the Volvo and drove down to the Hamburg ferry. Not quite as spontaneously as that, of course. I had a plan. I’d lined up meetings with Hamburg’s Sex Crimes division and detectives in the Criminal Investigation department of the Dussseldorf…

The first professional work I ever did was in radio drama, and I did quite a lot of it.  Long form stuff, six-part serials and 90-minute plays.  It’s a medium that provides a grounding that’s equally valid for both novel and screenplay writing.  You learn to structure, and to structure over distance.  You learn to…

My psychology lecturer friend is looking for a horror short of  around 15-20 minutes to screen to a bunch of subjects as part of an experiment to test their recall. She needs to be able to show formal permission for its use, so she can’t just nick a scene from a DVD. If you’ve made…

At the end of my previous post on people in writing careers without any ideas to drive them, I mentioned an entry in Little Miss Brooligan’s blog said the Actress to the Vicar on the subject of writers and writers’ rooms. It’s part of her coverage of Running the Show, an intensive day of sessions…