Shirley Jackson

Usually I’d post this on GoodReads but I find their interface a bit messy and frustrating, so I’m running it here this week. First off, I loved ‘Larchfield’ by Polly Clark, about a mother-to-be in a remote past of Scotland, fighting with the neighbours, trying to stay sane and write poetry, and finding a surprising […]

  Some authors seem to work forever below the waterline. They can be successful in their own right without impinging on the consciousness of an attention-deficient public, whose recall-rate of viral videos featuring inadequate Russian driving skills is far above works by novelists who bring a lifetime of experience to their craft. Equally, critics will […]

Phyllis Dorothy James, the grande-dame of crime writing, has died at 94. Until pretty recently she was still attending events, which may be proof that writing keeps you young. My pal Barry Forshaw met her many times and is now writing about her in today’s Independent. Psychological suspensers make more sense to me than police procedurals, partly […]

What’s the art of suspense? I’ll tell you later. In the 1950s, suspense novels and suspense cinema, largely driven by Hitchcock, became very fashionable. Nowadays we rarely find it in films because it requires an unusually slow trajectory, with a long build-up before the slingshot of a defining event which must perforce break the spell […]

There are going to be a total of twenty books from me coming out as e-editions this year, including nearly all of my short stories, and a brand-new collection of short stories entitled: ‘Frightening’. I hope to be able to price this below the usual level to encourage new readers. I’d told myself I wasn’t […]