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Yes, I’m back from a very pleasant visit to two libraries in the West Midlands where I met some very interesting people and had a good chat with them about how I write my marine mystery detective crime novels and thrillers, but I have to tell you that I committed a great sin while there. No, I didn’t rum amok naked and wailing through the centre of Burton-Upon-Trent or Perry Common in Birmingham – though that might have been interesting or sad, depending on your point of view, and it might well have got me in the newspaper headlines, although I did make it into the Staffordshire and local press – but I failed to visit the Marmite factory! Yes, I know, how , as a life-long lover of Marmite could I have possibly missed out on such a wonderful opportunity? (I need to have my fix every day on toast otherwise I suffer withdrawal symptoms). So, while I was in the actual town where the wonder product is produced you’d have thought I would have spared some time to worship its hallowed gro...

Travelling back to Portsmouth from the Isle of Wight today was an interesting experience to say the least and provided great material for character development, settings and ideas for my crime novels. Friends dropped us off at Sandown Station in time to catch the small train to Ryde (it's a former red and grey London underground train made up of two carriages). On the station platform were two men, both drinking cans of Fosters Lager and clearly not their first of the day (this was at 1.30pm) one was broad Scottish wearing dark glasses in the rain, the other with an array of tatoos and a vocabularly that only seemed to consist of the F word, uttered very loudly.  With them was a woman of indeterminate age dressed sloppily but cleanly with long scraggy blonde hair with a baby in a pushchair. The baby was a well fed pretty blonde girl and it transpired that the two men were taking the baby to London for the weeked to say with her grandfather. It was cl...

Over the weekend I did the final read through of the sixth in the Inspector Andy Horton series of marine mystery crime novels. I say final read through but it’s not because there will be copy edits and proofs to read yet before it is published, and, heaven forbid, I might even need to do revisions. But for now the manuscript is done and has been whizzed off to the publisher. At this stage of writing I have been through it so many times I could practically recite it by heart, so a fresh pair of eyes is very welcome. This is always a jittery moment because you’re never sure if you could change one thing here, amend something there, tinker with this and that. Then the next jittery moment is when reading the proofs and thinking, I could have written that differently. But it’s too late then to change anything. For now I wait a response from my publisher. And as to the title? Well here it is and the blurb. Let me know what you think. Footsteps on the Shore An Inspector Andy Horton Ma...

Yesterday, as the rain and wind bashed against the window of my office I escaped into the world of DI Horton in the new crime novel I’m writing, as yet untitled. It will be the sixth in the marine mystery crime series featuring Inspector Horton and my eighth crime novel. Blood on the Sand , the fifth Horton novel, is due to be published on 28 February 2010, and Dead Man’s Wharf (number four) will be out in paperback also in February 2010. I managed to unravel the plot lines of this new Horton novel, which once again is set in Portsmouth on the south coast of England, and get on with some fluent creative writing. Now I'm eager to return to it, which is what I shall do after catching up on my Twitter and Facebook updates and writing my blog entries. The wind continues to roar across the garden from the reaches of Langstone Harbour close to where I live, and every now and again the rain comes down like stair rods. Not a day to be out and about and certainly not a day to be at sea. ...