Actually, it was yesterday that the Otto Penzler anthology, Agents of Treachery, was released in the US, and I’d advise everyone interested in espionage fiction to give it a good hard look. The prepub reviews have been uniformly terrific (all starred reviews), and The Boston Globe has just chimed in very favorably. And how could [...]

The New York Times does me good Over the last week or so, The Nearest Exit has gotten some great attention from the NYT. Back on Sunday the 23rd, Joshua Hammer’s “Milo’s People” looked at the book saying that it “reprises the themes of The Tourist, with even more success”–nice words, and it only gets [...]

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. [...]

A little while ago, Kate Horsley over at the relaunched Crimeculture asked me and Kevin to do a two-way interview for the site. Because of our schedules, it took a while, but proved to be a fun and interesting experience, delving into the writing process, themes, receiving fan letters from hit men, not receiving them [...]

  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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

I’ve been out of touch for a hella long time now, up in Leipzig too full of teaching (much more time-consuming than some may have you believe–particularly if you’re raising a 2-year-old at the same time) to write anything here, much less write a word of my next novel. Now, though, in Budapest for the [...]

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 [...]

In about a week and a half, the family and I will be relocating north and west, to Leipzig, where I’ll begin something I’ve never done before: teaching. Two classes, The Collaborative Novel and The Spy Novel. Given that the idea for The Collaborative Novel–a class in which everyone works together to write a single [...]

Back when I could write my age with a single digit (i.e. back in the seventies) the kids in my neighborhood came in two types. One was devoted to Sesame Street, while the other was an Electric Company aficionado. I was solidly in the latter camp, but as with my devotion to Beta videotapes, it [...]