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THE WOMAN IN BLACK VIDEO / DVD

Please do note, if you are trying to track down Video or DVD copies of the old (1988) Television adaptation of this novel. The film and TV rights are now wholly owned by someone else and this TV version will not be shown again or re-issued. Meanwhile, pirate copies are sometimes for sale on ebay and amazon. THESE ARE ILLEGAL and should not be purchased.

February 2006

NEWS

I get frequent requests to speak in schools, talk to writers groups and make library visits and the answer, I am afraid, is from now always no. It would be unfair to go to some and not others, but if I went everywhere I would never get any writing or other work done. I think my job is to write books not to talk about them. But for students I will be putting up more on the website, and hope to say something about each of the most-studied books here.

THE GUARDIAN

I have written occasionally in the Guardian Saturday Review section and now signed a contract with them so that I will be writing more often. I will do the Commentary column once a month, longer book feature pieces several times a year, and more book reviews. I am not a regular Guardian reader, where we live in the country there are no newspaper deliveries and I like to read a wide variety of columnists and particularly book reviews. Where are the best book pages? The Guardian and the Times.

NEW BOOKS

I have just finished marking the proofs of the next Simon Serrailler crime novel, The Risk of Darkness, which comes out in June, and started the next. The title of this has just changed to The Going Down of the Sun.

OTHER BOOKS

"Why don't you write books like Strange Meeting any more?"

I am sometimes asked if I am ever going to write novels which are not crime fiction or whether I have completely given myself over to crime.  The answer is, I wish I knew. But books do not come when they are bidden. If you had told me five years ago that I would be writing crime fiction I would have laughed at you. People change, writers change. Goodness, those who do not risk becoming dull and stale. I count myself blessed to have been given a period in my twenties and early thirties when I wrote half a dozen literary novels which won praise and prizes and are still in print  and read widely. But those don't come to order. I love writing short stories but I can't write those often either they usually come into my head fully-formed and my head has been empty of them lately. I've just had to learn to trust and meanwhile, carry on with whatever is to hand.  And it is exciting doing new things and winning new readers, who like very different books.
I have had about a third of a literary novel ( goodness I hate that phrase but I can't think of another) written and waiting for the rest, for about seven years. I wish I could finish it but it seems to be stuck. And the only way to deal with that is to leave it alone and start something else. So I have.

DOGS and FAMILY

Alas, our little Border Terrier Maudie has never returned home. I am sure she was stolen and I can't bear to think of it. The reward of £1,000 is still on offer. But our other Border, Beano, was so sad and depressed without her that something had to be done , I seriously thought he might pine away and die. So before Christmas we went to a farm in Oxfordshire to see a litter of eight week old Border Terriers, planning to bring home another girl. There was one left out of a litter of 9 but we also found a boy who had not been sold because he was the runt of the litter and at his first check, the vet had detected a heart murmur. My daughter picked him up and he sat very quietly on her lap. And you know what happens when a puppy does that,….
So we came home with two. They are now 3 months old. The boy is called Smike, Smike is a character in Nicholas Nickleby, and the girl is called Dandy ( because we already had Beano.)  They are wonderful and completely mad and the way Smike races round this house makes me wonder if the Vet made a mistake about the heart murmur. 

READING

Victorian pastiche seems to be the rage there are so many new long novels with a mass of convincing period detail. Did you read The Dante Club ? This year sees KEPT by D.J. Taylor, has just been published and if you like this sort of thing, it`s a terrific read. I don`t read recent crime fiction while I am writing it too easy to catch someone else`s style or inadvertently pinch one f their ideas but before I started writing my new one I gobbled up THE LINCOLN LAWYER by Michael Connolly. It is absolutely fantastic by the time I reached the end I was having to take deep breaths. Margery Allingham was one of the most successful writers of Golden Age detective fiction her novels feature Albert Campion one of those upper-class detectives who were so popular until the 1960s. Several have just been re-issued in Vintage paperback and I wasn`t sure how well they would stand up. In part, they don`t dialogue and background are very old-fashioned. But her finest book, TIGER IN THE SMOKE is as gripping and terrifying a read as it ever was. The villain, the setting foggy London and a strange street band of assorted freaks, are extremely sinister and you cannot get them or the atmosphere out of your head. When I have finished THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN, I am going to read the next.