Donald E. Westlake, 1933-2008
Donald E. Westlake, mystery writer, died on New Year’s Eve, 2008. There are obituaries, interviews and reminiscences all over the place, but luckily for us they have been collected and collated by Sarah Weinmann at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind in her usual thorough way. Westlake wrote 100 novels under several different names, and was [...]
Stories from the City
I have a piece on crime and Liverpool in Stories from the City, a collection of new writing about the city: past, present and future. My piece looks a the differences between gangsters and legitimate business and speculates about the causes of criminality in Liverpool.
Written, designed, edited and produced locally and independently, Stories from the [...]
White Whales and Wooden Ships
There is a great story over at Wired about the whaling ship Essex, which in 1820 was rammed and sunk by a Sperm Whale somewhere in the Pacific. This is the story that partly inspired Melville to write Moby Dick a book everyone should read at least once. Melville of course was a seaman on [...]
Reader Magazine 32: Milton and Hammett
I received in the post this morning a copy of issue 32 of The Reader magazine. It’s always been good, but The Reader is going through a really great period at the moment. Not only is it attracting some big names–Andrew Motion, Adam Phillips, Marilynne Robinson and Ian McMillan in this issue for instance–but has [...]
Making Space: My Olympia Traveller Deluxe S
Over at the Huffington Post Sophie Keller gives the following advice:
“Tip 1: Have less stuff! It’s true that some creatives thrive in a messy environment, but they really are in the minority. Most of us need to clear up our clutter. I have always been of the mind that if you haven’t used something in [...]
Cain’s Revisions and the Temporal Paradox
Over the last week or so I’ve been working on the revisions I had to make to Cain’s: The Story of Liverpool in a Pint. Although the amount of writing and revising wasn’t much in the scheme of things, it wasn’t easy. When you plan and write a book, you have an idea in your [...]
OneBook: They Shoot Horses
I have a brief recommendation of Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? over at Gary Smailes’s new and promising OneBook blog. The idea is that the blog takes reader recommendations and so far it’s thrown up some interesting things. One to watch I think.
Read a longer biographical piece on Horace McCoy here.
A Study in Scarlet
Just added to my writings page an article on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887). You can find it here.
Crime Fiction Conference
And so on Friday to Newcastle for the Literary Art of Murder conference. I’m going to be talking about the way ‘new noir’ stories, written in the last twenty or so years, use 1950s imagery and mythology, and how by doing so they address the paranoias of our own time. Megan Abbott’s novel Die A [...]
The Reader 29
Issue 29 of The Reader magazine is now available and for the first time in a while I have something in it in the shape of a short article on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet. Yours truly notwithstanding this looks like a great issue, including writing by [...]
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