I’ve seen several newspaper comment pieces this week, bemoaning the people who cite the current cold snap as proof that the whole global warming debate is a load of nonsense. They point out that we can no more use one cold spell as proof against global warming than one warm spell can be used as [...]

As my little corner of England grinds almost to a standstill under 8 inches of snow, I’m conscious that much of the Northern Hemisphere is also experiencing an unusually cold winter. Many of you might have noticed the story of the snowbound train in China, on which passengers were trapped for 30 hours. Of course, [...]

Best New Book Brodeck’s Report by Philippe ClaudelThe fact that this book hardly featured in the annual “best of” lists is proof that even the literati fall for their own brand of hype. Because Brodeck’s Report is an astonishing book about the horrors mankind perpetrates and the survival of the human spirit. It’s set beyond [...]

Every few months I have lunch in London with a small group of fellow authors – Mark Billingham, Simon Kernick, James Twining – and my UK agent, known to followers of Stuart MacBride’s blog as “Agent Phil”. We’re all good friends so we have a lot of laughs and spend time discussing the one thing [...]

First off, a test. Two girls, aged 10 and 12, become trapped in a storm drain in Adelaide, Australia. Fortunately, they have their phones with them. Do they… (A) Call the emergency services? (B) Call their parents? (C) Use their phones to update their status pages on Facebook? Astonishingly, the two girls in question did [...]

As we had the Summer Bank Holiday in the UK yesterday, and Labor Day in the US today, summer is now officially at an end so I thought I’d look back on some of the books I’ve read over the last two months (I find it very hard to write during the summer so it’s [...]

I’ve just returned from the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate (the biggest festival of its kind in the UK, with over 8,000 tickets sold this year), and thought it was a pretty good indicator of how publishing is weathering the current financial storm. The first thing to note is those 8,000 tickets. [...]

I’ve just returned from my first promotional tour of Finland. I actually finished out there on Saturday evening but came back by land and sea and spent a few days in Stockholm. Now, I have to be honest, I had very limited expectations for this short tour. Kuka on Conrad Hirst? is my first novel [...]

Why does a writer stop writing? We’re often heard to say that we write because we have to, because it’s something within us. Unpublished writers frequently claim that they’d keep writing even if they never had hope of being published. So why do writers sometimes stop? I’ve been thinking about this because I recently read [...]

I haven’t posted in a while because I wanted to leave the floor to Olen around the launch of The Tourist. But as the dust settles and he sidles off to Serbia, I thought it was about time for me to step back into the fray. Just a quick post to begin with to talk [...]

I’m generally leaving the blog to Olen over the next few weeks, leading up to the publication of The Tourist but I wanted to share some good and bad news. This morning, I received five copies of the Japanese edition of Who is Conrad Hirst?. This is good news because the book was released on [...]

Lee Goldberg had an interesting post on his blog in which he listed the 25 writers who’d most influenced him. I have to admit, most of them were unfamiliar to me and when I started thinking about a similar list, I was struck by a number of things. Firstly, I struggled to name 25 writers [...]

It’s often said that Hollywood stars experience death long before its physical onset. How often do we hear that some great star of the golden age has died, only to be surprised that they had been alive all this time. It can apply to other fields, of course, and it’s particularly striking when the person [...]

As the days are drifting away into Christmas and on to the end of the year, I thought this was an appropriate moment to look back over the last twelve months. And what a year it’s been, to the extent that the election of a black President in the US might prove to be only [...]

As we’re halfway through Advent, I have something of a Yuletide puzzle for you. Christmas has an enormous cultural impact on society, one that’s far from limited to those who’ve been brought up in the Christian tradition, and I was thinking recently about the ways in which that cultural impact manifests itself. Music has always [...]