LATEST POSTS #AMWRITING

Writing this new book…if I hadn’t spent nearly three years hosting the podcast and talking to people about exactly these ideas, I wouldn’t have had a clue where to start. Even so, the journey has taken me to places, and ways of being, I’d never encountered before.

My new project for 2020 is a website, podcast and membership program. Here’s the full story…

‘A Treachery of Spies’ is one of a great selection of FT Crime reads for 2018, including the latest from Ian Rankin, Jane Harper and C J Sansom.

There was a point in 1942 when the expected lifespan of a radio operative with the SOE was six weeks. They had to have the presence of mind to get complex message encryption right while being cold, hungry and terrified of capture at any moment…

Thanks to John Dugdale for selecting ‘A Treachery of Spies’ as a Sunday Times Thriller of the Month August 2018!

Introducing the character who I now love as much as any character I’ve ever created: perhaps more than any of them…

It’s staringly obvious to anyone who takes more than about three minutes to read the facts of her life that the woman whom we know best as the Maid of Orléans was neither a peasant girl nor a visionary…

The myth is of a mystic peasant girl, visited by angels and saints, who acted as a standard bearer and morale-booster for the French army to such good effect that they began to win. Here are 5 reasons why this isn’t reasonable, fair or borne out by the truth.

Sometimes a character jumps out of nowhere: he or she wasn’t in the outline and didn’t have a key part in the plot – but they arrive and are so alive, so compelling that they take over every scene and muscle their way up to the top of the character tree…

It’s that time of year, what my friend John Barratt calls, ‘Mithrastide’: the time of consumerism and consumptionism where affluenza strikes the entire western world promulgated in the name of a child who was never born, in a place that didn’t exist, who grew to be a non-man who preached poverty and compassion and whose followers have spent the past two thousand years feeding instead the god behind the facade with a steady diet of blood, sweat and tears…

BBC History Magazine has published a short story in which I’ve combined the survivors of the Boudica series with Pantera as he would have been if the Boudica’s armies had won…

Here’s the thing about writing a book. It’s a deeply personal experience. You sit in your office (or café, or car, or wherever you can best shut out the outside world) and commune with a cast of people who live entirely in your head.  They are all, in fact, a part of you, small split parts of shadow or light, or mixtures of both, capable of greatness and horror, love and grief, murder, mayhem and acts of astonishing compassion.