Crime writer

One of my greatest thrills as a college student was when I was let into the intermediate-level creative writing workshop. You couldn't just sign up and walk in-you had to submit a short story good enough for the professor to deem you worthy. That first day, I sat around the rectangular table with my future colleagues and was handed a set of rules for the class.  Read more

"Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim. Murder destroys privacy, both of the living and the dead. It forces us to confront what we are and what we are capable of being."

Back in the mid-1990s I spent four years covering criminal courts for Florida's largest newspaper. It was like being handed free tickets to the greatest shows on Broadway-well, not the musicals, but there was plenty of both tragedy and comedy.  Read more

A J Waines, Fiona Veitch Smith and Holly Watt will feature in this year's National Crime Reading Month, which is now online due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Co-ordinated by the Crime Writer's Association (CWA) and Crime Reader's Association (CRA), the annual festival promotes authors at live events across the UK.

I have a bias toward the private investigator novel, most of it driven by the imagery of classic film noir-shiny-wet pavements, sinewy cigarette smoke curling upward, vintage cars with fat white-wall tires, hard kisses that dip-to-black. The guys wearing sharp-creased fedoras and baggy-legged pants. The women with lipstick pouts, seamed stockings, and hats cocked to the side.