Iain Cameron's Blog

Welcome to my May Newsletter!Scotland TripOver the first May bank holiday, I was back in Scotland for a few days at a wedding. It was great seeing friends and family we don’t see often enough. The weather refused to play ball and even though this picture shows beautiful blue skies over Glasgow University, it was only a break between heavy showers.Book News Dying for Justice
The gripping 10th book in the DI Henderson series, Dying for Justice, is reduced to only 99p for the rest of this month! (Kindle version, UK only).A criminal lawyer is found stabbed to death in his office. The random act of a burglar, or man with secrets to hide?You can find it here. Eyes on You It’s almost publication time!The first book in the new Sharma and Jackson series will be published in June. In the book, Wells-next-the-Sea in Norfolk, is the home of Alison Morgan’s parents, so of course I had to research the area. It’s a hard life being an author. Note the jackets and jumpers! (Although we still managed ice creams). City of Sorrow

A reminder for new subscribers to this newsletter.

You can download a FREE copy of City of Sorrow, a fast-moving crime novella based around Henderson’s time as a young sergeant in Glasgow.

You can download it here.

Book Reading Order
A question I’m often asked: should my books be read in order?

In each of the series I write: DI Henderson, Matt Flynn, Sharma and Jackson, each novel is a standalone story.

However, if you read them in order, the characters build book-by-book and part of the fun is seeing how they change and develop.

That’s all from me. If you have any comments, or anything you would like to share, please contact me at any of the addresses below.

Best wishes,
Iain

To contact me:
Email: admin@iain-cameron.com
Website: www.iain-cameron.com
Facebook: IainCameronAuthor
Twitter: Iainsbooks

If you enjoyed The Testaments or like me, you’ve just read The Handmaid’s Tale and are now catching up with its television serialisation, you’ll like this interview with its author. The headline says it all.

Guardian, 20/09/19
Margaret Atwood: ‘For a long time we were moving away from Gilead. Then we started going back towards it’

“You are in chaos,” Margaret Atwood decrees calmly over tea. “It’s Cavaliers versus Roundheads.” We meet in London, the afternoon before she is due at Waterstones in Piccadilly to sell the first copy of The Testaments, the long awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, at midnight, accompanied by women in the now globally recognised handmaids’ costumes. Further up the river, Westminster is shutting down for five weeks. Ever since Boris Johnson raised the prospect of proroguing parliament, people have been sharing a quote from The Handmaid’s Tale, published 35 years ago, just as they did in the US following the election of Donald Trump in 2016: “That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed at home at night, watching television.”

“It is another predictable mess that people have got drawn into because a big honking pack of lies was told about it,” Atwood says of Brexit. Apart from the legal questions – “actions have consequences, but what will the consequences be?” – she is most interested in “who is going to benefit from this financially? Who is shorting the pound? I can think of all kinds of people who might turn it to their advantage.”

As has been noted, the last time a novel received such a fanfare was the midnight launches for Harry Potter books – with fans sporting specs and scarves instead of capes and bonnets. Atwood is our high sorceress, a very grownup one, with a truly unnerving knack for auspicious timing. Her best work combines psychological acuity with audacious curiosity; she is as good at recreating the politics of the playground (Cat’s Eye, 1989) as she is at inventing a chillingly plausible male theocracy. She is both deadly serious and surprisingly playful, and it is to her that readers have turned as a way of making sense of the world, helped by the hugely successful TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. With cameo appearances as an Aunt, and another in the TV version of her 1996 novel Alias Grace, which also aired in 2017, she describes the last couple of years as “horrible fun: when the occasion for the fun is not so happy. And the occasion for the fun is the rise of religious fundamentalist actions against women”.

Like Kafka and Orwell, Atwood has become part of the public discourse; the red and white robes adopted as a symbol of female defiance from Ireland to Argentina, but most often in the US, where her near-future dystopia, in which women have been reduced to female reproductive slaves, was set. Yet back in 1985, when The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood’s sixth novel, was published, “a big fuss was not particularly made. I think we had some sort of publisher’s party,” she says dryly.

The sequel has been surrounded by levels of secrecy to rival any ex-prime minister’s memoir, with tales of Booker judges’ computers being hacked (The Testaments is on this year’s shortlist). “I left my computer on a plane,” she confides. “I forgot about it because I was watching Captain Underpants.” She didn’t have a copy of The Testaments on it, but there was enough information to cause a stir if it fell into the wrong hands. Atwood doesn’t – yet – have the powers to ground a plane, but she was reunited with her computer within two hours. “It would have been a catastrophe,” she says, laughing now.

Then Amazon blew it all by sending out copies in the US a week ahead of publication. “Somebody pushed the wrong button. It was human error,” she says unruffled. “They apologised, which is apparently among the first times, if not the first time, that Amazon have ever apologised.”

Despite her formidable energy, Atwood embodies an owl-like stillness – head tilted, listening carefully, with only her hands moving when she speaks. She gives long, far-ranging answers (not always to the question asked), and can leap from Mary Queen of Scots to Mary Poppins, or from the Cromwells to the day’s news, in the blink of a gimlet eye. At nearly 80, what does she make of this remarkable late boost? “Isn’t it wild,” she says. “I can’t remember a time when I was a usual anything,” she says. “I mean going way back. I didn’t grow up in a usual way” (her childhood was spent in the Canadian wilderness). “I wasn’t a usual kind of high-school student. I was a very peculiar university student and it continued on from there.” Atwood “became” a writer at 16, when she made up a poem in her head while crossing a football field. Since then she has written more than 60 books, in almost every genre, and has been awarded more than 100 prizes, including the Booker in 2000 for The Blind Assassin. Her futuristic trilogy – Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013) – has an ardent following. She lives in Toronto, spending her summers on Pelee Island, where she has written many of her novels, including much of The Testaments (as well as a stint, more surprisingly, in Norwich).

The author has just had a long chat with Bruce Miller, the TV series’ showrunner, who is “quite thrilled” about the new novel, “because it gives him a lot more to work with”. Atwood, an executive producer on the show, had started writing The Testaments before the first season launched. And there shouldn’t be any clashes, as her sequel picks up 15 years later: “We know where we start in the 15 years, but there’s quite a lot of squeezing room for things that happen leading up to that,” the author explains. “I’ve given him a lot of blank space that will be his to fill. We agreed he can’t kill off certain people a long time ago.”

“Hands off Aunt Lydia” and “don’t touch that baby” were her principal stipulations. “I needed this child here and that child there – so that’s how it’s going to be.” The Testaments is narrated by three voices: it is the last will and testament of Aunt Lydia, and the testimonies of two girls, Agnes who has grown up in Gilead, and Daisy who escaped to Canada with her mother as a baby. Atwood’s reluctance to write as Offred, the narrator of The Handmaid’s Tale, was one of the reasons it took her so long to attempt a sequel, despite “the clamouring” from readers. “I couldn’t do it,” she says emphatically. “Not possible. To recreate that voice and do more of it. I just couldn’t.” She is wary of follow-ups in general. “They are always kind of imitations. I saw Mary Poppins Returns. A commendable sequel. I enjoyed it, but it’s not the same.”

Atwood has said in the past that The Handmaid’s Tale was written to answer the question: if there was a totalitarian regime in the US what form would it take? The Testaments sets out to show how such a regime collapses: “What makes them turn into something else? What makes them fall apart?” And for that she needed an insider: “So who in that whole cast of characters is going to know more? There’s only one answer to that.” Aunt Lydia, a female Thomas Cromwell, “swollen with power” but without absolute authority.

Many readers have wondered what they might do in Offred’s situation, how to resist and survive; by giving us Aunt Lydia’s story, Atwood asks us to think about questions of cruelty and complicity. All her novels are about survival. As Aunt Lydia reflects: “What good is it to throw yourself in front of a steamroller out of moral principles and then be crushed flat like a sock emptied of its foot? … Better to hurl rocks than to have them hurled at you.” Or as Atwood puts it: “We are ordinary as long as it is easy to be ordinary.” She quotes a Polish resistance fighter from the second world war who once told her: ‘“Pray that you will never have the occasion to be a hero.’ You don’t run into a burning building and rescue somebody unless there’s a burning building … Similarly, you don’t run away from a burning building and ignore everything, unless there’s a burning building.”

But the main reason for not returning sooner to the world she had created was because, before now, it no longer seemed relevant. “For a long time we were going away from Gilead and then we turned around and started going back towards Gilead, so it did seem pertinent.” The Handmaid’s Tale, which Atwood began writing in West Berlin in 1984, was her response to those who wanted to reverse the freedoms gained by women in the 70s, to put the butterflies back in the box. “They just didn’t have the power to make that happen.” Now they do.

The novel’s status as a feminist classic has perhaps overshadowed another of its most prescient warnings – the catalyst for Gilead was environmental catastrophe. In The Testaments Aunt Lydia catalogues the natural disasters that ravaged “her vanished country”, before continuing. “People became frightened. Then they became angry. The absence of viable remedies. The search for someone to blame. You don’t believe the sky is falling in until a chunk of it falls on you.”

If the novel deals less explicitly with the crisis than we might have expected, her point is the same: the burden will fall hardest on women and children. “It always does, because women and children are weaker – let’s take their stuff,” she says. But, as Atwood points out, she “did climate apocalypse quite thoroughly” in the MaddAddam trilogy. “Maybe not thoroughly enough,” she says, “because I think it is actually going to be worse.” But she is not without hope, and if she was younger she would “absolutely be doing Extinction Rebellion”. She was the first writer to donate a manuscript to the Future Library, in which stories remain unread for 100 years, when they will be printed on paper from a newly planted forest in Norway.

At an event last summer, a member of the audience asked Atwood for one word to sum up the times we are living in. “Vital,” she fired back. “This is a hinge moment, in many different ways,” she says now. “Let’s call it the casket moment,” an allusion to the three caskets in The Merchant of Venice. “One of those puzzles in which you need to open the right door. So, ‘All right human race, which door are you going to open?’”

One of Atwood’s central axioms is that nothing can be included in her fiction that hadn’t happened somewhere in the world. As Atwood has reminded us: she didn’t make this stuff up, the human race did. “If I was to create an imaginary garden, I wanted the toads in it to be real,” she wrote in a recent introduction to The Handmaid’s Tale. And this is “absolutely” the case for The Testaments: shadows of Weinstein and Epstein, Isis and the Trump administration can all be found in its murky waters. It is impossible to read the scenes set in a female detention camp without thinking of the US-Mexico border.

Is Atwood firing a warning or reflecting what is already happening? “Both. But warnings aren’t effective if they are just preaching. Enactments are of interest because then people think ‘What would I do?’ Whereas if someone is going ‘Don’t do that, don’t do that,’” she says, wagging her finger. “You think ‘Oh shut up!’”

This is the sixth time Atwood has been shortlisted for the Booker prize. “There are upsides and downsides” to winning, she says. If you win everyone says you shouldn’t have won the Booker. And if you don’t win, in Canada anyway, they say ‘Atwood fails to win Booker’.” And then there is the Nobel. “Oh purlease …” She is already at work on a collection of poetry, often her way of working up to a novel. And she hasn’t ruled out a further instalment: “Never say never to anything.”

“Only dead people are allowed to have statues, but I have been given one while still alive”: so Aunt Lydia opens The Testaments. Is there an Atwood statue? “There’s a head,” she laughs. “We used to call it the horrible head.” The plaster cast is in her cellar, the original, made in the 70s, at McMaster University. “I don’t look like that,” she told the sculptor, who replied. “But you will …”

“People bang on about your legacy,” she says, impatiently. “I’m not that interested because I’m not going to be here. I’m not going to be around haunting my legacy. Unless I do an Aunt Lydia and bury little manuscripts in libraries.” Well, there’s already that story buried away in the Future Library. Praise be.

From BBC 05/07/19

It’s 10 years since David Nicholls’ novel One Day became a publishing phenomenon – a word of mouth sensation that has sold more than five million copies around the world. Five years later came Us and now five years after that he’s back with a new novel. But can he repeat the success with Sweet Sorrow – a story of falling in love for the first time?Nicholls is under no illusion that whatever he does next, a book he wrote a decade ago “will always be the most popular and successful thing” he is known for.

One Day was a phenomenon that not only sold five million copies around the world but was also made into a movie starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess. But its story that followed two characters from their graduation to their early 40s by visiting them every St Swithin’s Day, cast a long shadow, says the author.”The success of One Day made it very hard to write,” he tells BBC News.

“Every time I sat at my desk I thought, well this isn’t as good, this isn’t as funny… it isn’t going to sell as many copies. Finally though, he thinks he has written a “better” book. It is called Sweet Sorrow and it is a coming of age story about finding one’s first love. It’s Nicholls’ fifth novel. The others, along with One Day, are Starter For Ten, The Understudy and Us. But despite his considerable experience, he found writing Sweet Sorrow “completely terrifying.” “It doesn’t get easier with each book. I don’t feel any more confident now than when I started. You’re revealing part of yourself. You’re drawing on something from deep inside and that’s exposing.”

Sweet Sorrow is narrated by Charlie, a man in his 30s looking back on a single, life-changing summer, when he was 16. Nicholls said he wanted to “try and remember how it felt at 16, try and capture that on the page, the kind of dizzying excitement and confusion of it all”. But Nicholls is 52 and admits he was “anxious about authentically portraying what it feels like to be 16”. “I mean it’s a long time ago and I’ve always thought the further you get away from your childhood, maybe the more distant you feel.”

Nonetheless, although he has never kept a diary, he says he has a “vivid recollection” of that time in his life. “It’s tough, it’s difficult, you feel lonely.” Not that he was a rebellious teenager. “I was quite a kind of nerdy, disciplined, conservative kid. I wanted to get really good exam results. I wanted to do well. I was very rarely badly behaved. I was pretty diligent.” The novel also explores mental illness. Charlie’s father has depression and the book examines the impact on both of them.

“The book isn’t particularly autobiographical but it’s extremely personal and heartfelt,” says Nicholls. “You draw on things that you feel very profoundly and personally and things that affect you very strongly, without recreating anything from real life. So there’s very little in the novel that actually happened. But there are lots of things in the novel that preoccupy me, that occupy my thoughts constantly.”

Sweet Sorrow is set in 1997- a time when “no one was really prepared to name and face up to and deal with” depression. Nicholls thinks that “is many people’s experience then and now. Now I think people are much more open to talking about their mental health… and there’s less of a taboo,” he adds. Nicholls knows he is “lucky”. He has enjoyed the kind of success that most authors can only dream about. His books have been published in 40 languages. His novel Us, the follow-up to One Day, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

He is also in demand as a screenwriter. He won a Bafta for Patrick Melrose, his adaptation from the novels of Edward St Aubyn, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. He has written the screenplays for most of the film adaptations of his own novels, including One Day and Starter For Ten. And he is currently adapting Us for a four-part BBC television series, which starts shooting later this year. But if there is a film of Sweet Sorrow, Nicholls is determined that he will not be writing the script. “I’m at the stage now where I’d love someone else to do it because adaptation involves a certain amount of violence… you really don’t want to take the kind of drastic action that’s required to make it work in a different medium.

“You don’t necessarily have the objectivity. Often you’re drawing on your own memories and experiences and so you can’t see clearly enough to make the kind of cuts and changes that are required. “And so my hope is that I will never adapt another of my own books.” He says it is also “time consuming” and distracts him from writing novels. “I’d love to write more fiction.” There is only one problem. “I just don’t have any ideas… I’ve said everything, there’s nothing else left to say.

“But I hope soon… there will be something else.”

 

Great news, the new Matt Flynn thriller, Deadly Intent is now available!

A dissident terrorist group are hell-bent on starting a civil war in Ireland, shattering the peace brought about by The Good Friday Agreement. When the group buy a large consignment of guns from a Syrian rebel group, Matt Flynn and Rosie Fox of HSA are deployed to stop them.The terrorists split their arms cache into smaller batches and HSA are successful at finding some, but others get through. In the confusion of one such operation, the leader of the terrorist group escapes.He surfaces again on an island off the coast of Ireland and this time, Matt is determined he will not get away – but Matt’s not finished there.He’s still got the killers of his dead partner to deal with…

It’s the second book in the Matt Flynn series, after The Pulsar Files, and now available on Amazon pre-order and published, 19/04/19 – somewhat appropriately, Good Friday.

This is a riveting story, lifted from the Guardian 20/02/19

Bestselling Brazilian romance novelist Cristiane Serruya has pulled one of her novels from sale after she was accused of plagiarising some of the biggest authors in the genre.

American author Courtney Milan, whose books are regulars on the New York Times and USA Today bestseller charts, said she was first alerted to the alleged plagiarism by a reader. A law professor turned historical romance author, Milan alleges that Serruya’s novel Royal Love “copied, word-for-word, multiple passages from my book The Duchess War”, laying out a range of instances on her blog.

“I have not listed all of the similarities because, quite frankly, it is stomach-churning to read what someone else has done to butcher a story that I wrote with my whole heart … I wrote The Duchess War in the midst of a massive depressive spell and I bled for every word that I put on the page,” wrote Milan. “But you know what? Cristiane Serruya has to be the biggest idiot out there. I’ve sold several hundred thousand copies of this book. I’ve given away several hundred thousand copies on top of that. Does she think that readers are never going to notice her blatant plagiarism?”

One line from Milan’s novel reads: “Her nostrils flared; he almost thought she might stamp her foot and paw the ground, like an angry bull.” Serruya’s Royal Love contains this line: “Her nostrils flared; he almost thought she might stamp her foot and paw the ground, like the bull that had attacked Siobhan.”

“‘If you’re any good in bed, I might fall in love with you. If that is going to be anathema …’ ‘No,’ he said swiftly. He looked away from her, and when he spoke again, there was a slight rasp to his words. ‘No. That would be perfectly … unobjectionable,’” runs an interchange between Milan’s protagonists.

A scene in Serruya’s novel reads: “She stared back, both fascinated and appalled. ‘And if I fall in love with you? Is it going to be anathema?’ ‘No,’ he said swiftly, and looked away from her. There was a slight rasp to his words, when he faced her again. ‘No. That would be perfectly … unobjectionable.’”

After Milan posted on her blog, fans and fellow authors shared further instances of Serruya’s alleged plagiarism of authors including Bella Andre, Tessa Dare, Loretta Chase and Lynne Graham in her novels Royal Love and Royal Affair, corralling their findings under the Twitter hashtag #CopyPasteCris.

Responding on her now deleted Twitter account, Serruya initially expressed surprise at the accusations, and then blamed the overlap on a ghostwriter she said she had hired from freelance services marketplace Fiverr. The Guardian has contacted Serruya for comment.

“Wow, wow, wow. I just wake up to this. How could I have been plagiarizing 5 authors? I love your books, @TessaDare and I am a lawyer. I’d never do such a thing,” she wrote. “I just woke up to distressing news that my work has plagiarism from other authors. I am taking down all the works I did with a ghostwriter on Fiverr – who btw has closed the account – until I have made certain this is solved.”

On Wednesday, Serruya’s novel Royal Love was pulled from sale online, and withdrawn from the Rita competition for romance novels run by Romance Writers of America, which released a statement announcing it had “removed the entry from the contest and [is] investigating the matter further.”

 

It’s not often I write about music. I don’t why as I wrote Hunting for Crows which, if you’ve read it, you’ll know it’s about a rock band.

A new book, The Final Days of EMI: Selling The Pig by Eamon Ford, charts, as its title suggests, the fall of one of Britain’s most famous record labels, EMI. Home to such illustrious names as the Beatles, Queen, David Bowie and Coldplay, EMI didn’t adapt well to the changing world of the record business, mainly the sharp fall-off in CD sales in favour of downloads. As a result, they suffered huge losses and were taken over by Terra Firma. TF is an equity fund and as this book shows, they had little idea about how a record label works or how to run it.

Record companies, like book publishers, are only as good as their often precocious talent. None more so, than feted pop stars who viewed the TF takeover as the march of the suits, and they left the floundering EMI in droves, often after protracted legal wrangling over contracts. In the end, the company was broken up, the recording music operations being taken over by Universal Music, and the publishing side by Sony Music Publishing.

You can read a review of the book on the Guardian website here. If you want to buy a copy, click on the book link above and it will take you to Amazon.co.uk. It’s currently on Pre-Order, but you won’t have long to wait – it’s being published in Kindle format one week from today, 21st February 2019.

 

 

Reprinted from the Guardian 03/11/18



The crime author on why he loves comics, his early interest in taboo worlds and, with a 22nd Rebus novel out, how he keeps his famous detective fresh. Ian Rankin, 58, best known for his Inspector Rebus novels, has sold 28m copies of his books worldwide. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has won numerous awards, including the Theakston’s Old Peculier crime novel of the year award and the CWA lifetime achievement award. His latest Rebus novel (the 22nd), In a House of Lies, entered the bestseller charts at No 1.

You retired Rebus from the police force in 2007 (in Exit Music), but he still wants to help solve crimes. How much of a challenge is that creatively?

I’ve got this guy in his mid-late 60s who doesn’t have a warrant card, can’t blithely walk into any police station and get past the front desk. So if he wants to be a detective, he’s got to find ways past that. I really enjoy that challenge – it keeps me on my toes.

Rebus’s unconventional, old-fashioned policing techniques solve crimes that modern, by-the-book policing can’t. Are you nostalgic for Rebus’s policing methods?

When I started writing the Rebus books I was a big fan of the American private eye story and I always envisaged Rebus as a kind of private eye within the police. He’s not going to work well as part of a team, he’s going to want to be out doing his own thing, sometimes bending the rules as far as he can. So now that’s how he operates. He’s doing this partly for his own satisfaction and partly because he just feels driven. He feels detective work has been his whole life. Also, he’s at a certain age now where he’s looking around at the world and wondering if he still makes a difference. Does he still have a role to play? And getting involved with the police, trying to solve mysteries – that’s his way of answering that question.

Rebus struggles with modern technology and social media, and a lot of the novel’s humour comes from that. How has social media changed the way you write about policing?

Rebus is bewildered at the speed of change around him. The media used to be fairly easy to control because there wasn’t much of it, but now everybody’s the media. If you have a social media presence – a blog, or a vlog, or are on Twitter – you’re reporting stuff all the time, and there are no filters. And the police are trying to use social media to get word out, but there’s no control over the dissemination of that.

You’ve acknowledged in the past that Rebus is to some extent your alter ego. Has he become more or less like you over the years?

Blessedly, I’ve never smoked. I’m 58. Like Rebus, as Leonard Cohen famously said, “I ache in the places where I used to play.” My knees are going, my hearing’s going, my eyesight’s going, and you do start thinking: “How much longer have I got? What have I got left that I want to say?” I’m not at the stage yet of reading really short books because I might not make it to the end of a long book, but it can’t be too far away.

Did you grow up in a bookish house?

Not at all. If my parents read at all, they read during their summer holiday. But we had a little local library in our village and that was the saving grace. I’d go to the library and take out the maximum number of books I could.

Did your parents first take you to the library?

Yeah, my mum. I always read a lot of comics. I still love comics because they’re affordable literacy. For a whole generation of kids, it got them into reading and it was a rung of the ladder that would eventually lead to books. I used to hang out in the library too, once I was old enough to go there on my own.

What kind of things were you reading?

At 12 I was reading The Godfather – I read the book because I wasn’t old enough to see the film. The same went for A Clockwork Orange and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Jaws and The Exorcist. I wanted to know this world that was taboo, that I wasn’t supposed to know about.

Which writers most influenced your writing?

Muriel Spark was a huge influence. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – one of my favourite books ever – led me down this rabbit hole because Miss Jean Brodie is descended from a real-life Edinburgh character, William Brodie, who was gentleman by day and thief by night. So he became one of the influences for Jekyll and Hyde. Another influence was a book called Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg, which is one of the first serial-killer novels.

Is there a book you really wish you’d written yourself?

A Dance to the Music of Time, by Anthony Powell. That book was a fascinating primer for me in how to write a sequence of books with the same cast of characters, and having the main character age along the way. This notion that life is a dance to the music of time – if you’re writing a series it’s crucial to know how to do it.

What about a book that’s highly acclaimed but you think is overrated?

There’s a lot of great literature I’ve tried reading and couldn’t. War and Peaceand Middlemarch I didn’t really get on with. The literary novel sometimes disappoints me. When I was at university I was a big fan of Thomas Pynchon, and I’ve tried some of the writers who have come after him and not really enjoyed them. I’m at an age now where if I’m not enjoying a book I tend to put it aside rather than fight my way to the bitter end. There are a hell of a lot of books out there I still want to read before I go.

Which literary figures, dead or alive, would you most like to meet?

I’d love to meet Robert Louis Stevenson, and particularly to ask him one specific question: what was in the original manuscript of Jekyll and Hyde? Because famously his wife, Fanny, handed the manuscript back to him and told him it was no good, and he burned it. I mean, did he really do that? I just find it extraordinary that a writer would do that to their own work. But also, why? Was it too close to home?

Who would you like to write the story of your life?

I don’t want anybody writing my biography. I talk through my characters and I talk through my novels – that’s me. I would rather people knew me through the books. I kept a diary from the age of 12 until I was in my mid-30s, and I’ve been through them and thought, Jesus, Ian, it’s just so boring.

What was the last great book you read?

John Niven’s Kill ’Em All, which is a follow-up to Kill Your Friends. It really is Martin Amis’s Money for the Trump age. It’s ludicrous and laugh-out-loud funny and filthy.

What do you have on your bedside table to read next?

I’m halfway through the new Michael Connelly, Dark Sacred Night. After that I’ve got Robin Robertson, The Long Take, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize. I taught on the creative writing course at UEA and one of my students, Elizabeth Macneal, has a book coming out next year that I’m really excited about called The Doll Factory.

Today is publication day for the seventh book in the DI Angus Henderson series. It’s called, Girls on Film, and features photographer, Cindy Longhurst, kidnapped from her rural studio by two men. Henderson launches an investigation concentrating on previous boyfriends, her environmental campaigning and business acquaintances. What this draws a blank, he has to face the elephant in the room: Cindy’s vast photographic collection. Henderson is convinced something in there will provide a clue – but what it is, he doesn’t know.

If you’re new to the DI Henderson series, you don’t have to read the books in order, each book is a self-contained story and only the characters and locations overlap .

 

The latest novel in the DI Angus Henderson series, number 7, is out now!

It’s currently available on Amazon pre-order and will be published 1st August.

A photographer is abducted from her rural studio. DI Angus Henderson finds several witnesses, but no motive. He’s convinced the answer lies in Cindy Longhurst’s busy lifestyle: her previous boyfriends, her environmental campaigning or in the photographs she took. Problem is, her back catalogue runs into millions.

The discovery of her body on a beach near Brighton elevates the kidnapping to a murder, but the crime scene offers few clues. Henderson reluctantly instructs the team to search through Cindy’s photographs. Looking for what? He doesn’t know.

In time, they discover a secret that could unlock this case – but it’s dirtier and more dangerous than he ever imagined.

The book available from all Amazon markets and is published in both Kindle and paperback formats.

The latest novel in the DI Angus Henderson series, number 7,  is now available!

It’s currently available on Amazon pre-order and will be published 1st August.

A photographer is abducted from her rural studio. DI Angus Henderson finds several witnesses, but no motive. He’s convinced the answer lies in Cindy Longhurst’s busy lifestyle: her previous boyfriends, her environmental campaigning or in the photographs she took. Problem is, her back catalogue runs into millions.

The discovery of her body on a beach near Brighton elevates the kidnapping to a murder, but the crime scene offers few clues. Henderson reluctantly instructs the team to search through Cindy’s photographs. Looking for what? He doesn’t know.

In time, they discover a secret that could unlock this case – but it’s dirtier and more dangerous than he ever imagined.

The book available from all Amazon markets and is published in both Kindle and paperback formats.