Calabash

The character of unit chief Raymond Land in the Bryant & May books has an unexpected genesis that began with ‘One Thousand And One Nights’. The archetypes from those tales gathered from Persia and Arabia (names so much more evocative!) inhabited a fanciful world of jinns and sorcerers, but their bawdiness, realism and the tales’ […]

  I once wrote a book I couldn’t sell (not once actually – about a quarter of all my novels go through this ‘nobody-in-their-right-mind-will-publish-this’ phase). ‘Calabash’ was a coming-of-age novel about a clever, lonely teenager who accidentally falls between a rundown British seaside town in the 1970s and a fantastical version of ancient Persia, where […]

They’ve been remastered and have out into the electronic atmosphere, so to celebrate this massive backlog of 20 e-books finally being made available – a project I began with designer Martin Butterworth over two years ago – I’m going to occasionally publish an excerpt from the range. Here’s a scene from the novel ‘Calabash’ in […]

I’ve had many enquiries from American friends asking if my backlist of around twenty books would become available there for Kindle, Kobo, etc. The volumes are being released in sets in the UK and Europe at the moment, with The Curse of Snakes and Calabash due in about three weeks. I’ve now signed a deal for […]

  It goes without saying that writing fantasy is very different to writing a crime novel. But I didn’t realise just how different it was until I attempted one. It not only doesn’t read like any other kind of literature; it doesn’t write like one either. My favourites in this genre would include ‘Gormenghast’, ‘The […]

            …four of which are BRAND SPANKING NEW! Your friendly neighbourhood author is about to attempt the impossible, and I don’t mean watching an entire episode of ‘Gogglebox’. I’ve been writing up a storm for your delectation, partly because I love challenges and also because I feel that right now I’m […]

By this time, having thoroughly confused my publishers about the direction in which my career was going, I decided to throw them for a loop and write a novel about a teenager who falls off a pier in the 1970s and wakes up in 13th century Persia. As you do. I think at this point […]

1. In the cinema commercial we shot for my novel ‘Roofworld’, the neon set we used came from the National Theatre’s production of ‘Guys and Dolls’ because it had just finished its run and was going cheap. 2. In my collection ‘Demonized’, the story called ‘The Green Man’ is mostly true. It was written after […]