7 articles in this category
The pit boss is trained to look for a certain kind of man. He scans the blackjack tables for the lone wolf with the twitchy bet spread, the one who raises his s…
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There is a scene, somewhere near the middle of Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, that almost any reader of crime fiction can call up without effort. James Bond is at…
Nobody tells you what the first draft actually looks like.The finished crime novel — taut, precise, its clues embedded with surgical care, its red herrings earn…
Call it the Hilary Mantel effect or the CJ Sansom effect, but so much fiction is set in the past these days. But how do you find a balance between re-creating t…
Alison Joseph raids her kitchen drawers to demonstrate how to knock up a bestseller in 60 minutes…The heading of this blog is taken from a writing workshop I ru…
Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train, reveals how she knew it was time to switch tracksIn another life, under another name, I wrote books with (relati…
Today I hit a sweet spot, the sort of which has been rare of late. I was elbow deep in plot, the cogs of my mind whirling and spinning, throwing out ideas faste…