Though my personal life–moving, dealing with the varied annoyances of first-time home ownership, trying to find minutes here and there for writing–hasn’t reflected it, over the past weeks I’ve been appearing one way or another in some newspapers–always a pleasure when your book has passed that month-and-a-half post-publication window, after which it usually disappears. Toward [...]

Tourism Touring As usual, I’m behind the curve on posting what’s going on around here. I’ve spent the last week in Serbia, where network connections are not always as they might be, and the last couple days have been spent trying to leave Europe, despite a certain Icelandic volcano’s best efforts to thwart my plans. [...]

Just a quick post for some good news–the paperback of The Tourist is selling quite nicely in the US, thank you. For the week ending January 21, it reached #30 on the IndieBound list of bestselling trade paperbacks at independent bookstores across the US. The next week, ending January 28, it moved up to #24. That’s [...]

  In about ten minutes I’m going to get a call from New York, where I’ll be talking live and nationwide on WNYC’s The Takeaway about the collision between the Dubai assassination and spy fiction… *RING!*   Later: Well, it happened–a 4-minute window that went by in about 40 nanoseconds. Celeste Headlee did a great job, but [...]

Tomorrow marks the paperback release of The Tourist (Indie, Amazon, B&N), something I’m really looking forward to. The hardback–as I giggled about here–reached #19 on the New York Times list, and Minotaur is putting its best foot forward to try and get us on the paperback list. What to do? Every writer wonders this when release date approaches, [...]

As I mentioned before, the paperback of The Tourist (Indie, Amazon, B&N) will be released soon–on Tuesday the 16th, in fact. Back when it came out in hardback, I wondered what kind of extra material I might put up to accompany the book. In this case, an obvious proposition came to me–put together a soundtrack. [...]

As I discussed before, I jumped into the whole e-book thing by purchasing a Kindle. It’s been fun owning the thing, and I’ve grown used to the interface, reading along at the same pace I would with a book. It’s particularly useful when reading manuscripts–I’ve got a potential-blurb novel on it now. I’ve bought a [...]

Back in October, as a gift-to-myself for getting the Dagger nomination, I bought a spankin’ new Amazon Kindle. Being a sucker for slick gadgets, I’d had a hankering for one for a while, but living in Europe made it useless until the international version came out. So I pulled out my credit card, choked my [...]

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 [...]

Some time ago I mistakenly let the cat out of the bag too early, but as of today it’s official: The Tourist has been nominated for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award! Since I’ve known about it for some weeks now, I’ve been both thrilled and anxious about…well, my competition. So today I finally got [...]

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. [...]

"Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Lyman, Polish tobacco farmers near Windsor Locks, Connecticut" (Jack Delano, 1940) The article came out a week or two ago, but I forgot to mention it here. Over at Publishers Weekly is an interesting article on my esteemed publisher, called “Minotaur Moves Beyond Genre,” and it features Yours Truly. But the [...]

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 [...]

With just over a month to go before the publication date of my sixth book, The Devil’s Company, I still have no idea how I am going to understand the experience of a new novel without the traditional ritual of the book tour. My publisher decided to skip the tour this time around, in part [...]