Yes, I'm still alive.

Blowing away the dust, brushing off the cobwebs in my little corner of blogger.com, I'm back. You may be wondering what happened to me. The school summer holidays is what happened. The weeks flew by in the blur of a themepark rollercoaster. No time for blogging, certainly. A few stolen hours for reading and a bit of writing. I will be getting back into the routine from Wednesday, when the kids are back to school.

If I'd had the presence of mind, and time, I would have given advance notice of my appearance on the Phoenix FM book club, last night. The show is hosted by Muthamma Prasad (above), who did a wonderful job of putting me at my ease. Reading between the lines, I get the impression that I may well have been the most nervous guest she's had, though I did relax into it and the hour long show flew by. I really enjoyed myself, though I had been incredibly stressed about it in anticipation. My first ever LIVE radio broadcast. Well, actually, my first ever radio broadcast of any kind, alive or dead.

Muthamma is great - how refreshing to have an interviewer who actually reads her guests' books! - as is her show. It's broadcast from 7-8 pm Firdays, out of Brentwood on 98 fm, but is available worldwide via the internet. Give it a listen, if you get the chance.

My one regret is that I didn't get a chance to do the 60-second pitch for a must-read book, which is part of the show's format. We just ran out of time. The book I was going to recommend was Sally Hinchcliffe's Out of A Clear Sky, which I hear is going to be Radio 4's Book at Bedtime next month. Some of you may remember I interviewed Sally for Vulpes Libris a while back.

So I guess I'm back in action.

I need therapy.

I seem to be addicted to setting up internet pages for myself on various social networking or writing sites. Here's the latest, over at the red room.

Please don't tell me about any other similar sites. Otherwise I will feel obliged to go there and set up a page.

Perhaps my addiction to setting up author pages will cure me of my addiction to checking my amazon ranking. It's the methadone to the heroin of amazon watching.

Around the world in 80 detectives (take two).

The article originally appeared in The Independent, it seems. Thanks to Ken aka Sibelius of WriteWords and Diane for pointing it out.

Around the world in 80 detectives.

Great fun piece on the booktribes blog, with some excellent suggestions for crime holiday reading to suit your destination. I particularly liked their St Petersburg recommendation.

38. St Petersburg

Another period piece, this time by the British author RN Morris, who cheekily borrows Dostoevsky’s detective Porfiry Petrovich from Crime and Punishment. He has written two novels so far, showing St Petersburg snowbound by winter, and stinking by summer.

Kids broke up today, which will explain my low blogging activity. I've desperately been trying to get as much novel and libretto written while I have the chance. Not much will get done for the rest of this week.

I've been crime writer by day and librettist by night.

Review radars, human and otherwise.

My automated review radar - google alerts - and my human review radar - Maggie my publicist at Penguin - have alerted me to a couple of interesting book sites, both of which seem to have featured AVL.

First there's Mostly Fiction, which actually has a double review of both A Vengeful Longing and The Gentle Axe (being an American site, they reviewed the American edition).

And then there's Book Browse, which not only features A Vengeful Longing on its home page as one of its recommended reads of the week, but pulls together a few of my best reviews so far!

And the winner is......

... not me, but Frances Fyfield for Blood from Stone. Congratulations to Frances and to all the winners at last night's CWA dagger awards. Special congratulations to my table companion Amer Anwar who won the Debut Dagger for Western Fringes. As yet unpublished, but I'm sure the offer will come soon. Well, as soon as Amer has finished it!

Right. Now on with the new one.

The Inspiration Machine, Part 2.

A DESCRIPTION, WITH PHOTOGRAPHS

The Inspiration Machine is essentially a tube which presents the user with a series of four inspirational stimuli, a combination of words, letters, images - both abstract and figurative - as well as some Egyptian hieroglyphs. These stimuli are revealed through revolving windows in independently movable paper sleeves. To use the machine, the person in need of inspiration may either think of a random number, or roll a die to generate a number. A preference for 'up' or 'down' is also either expressed or randomly generated by means of a coin toss. The first rotating sleeve is then turned the requisite number of times in the indicated direction, revealing the first of the inspirational stimuli. This process is repeated until all four windows have revealed a stimulus. It is then up to the user to interpret those stimuli in whatever way they wish.

Here's a photo, showing the inspirational windows in series:



The following sequence of four images shows more detail of the inspirational stimuli, giving an example of the kind of inspiration that may be produced by random turning. Apologies for the poor focusing, blame the camera man. I will describe what each window shows, just to clarify.


The first stimulus (above) is verbal. It presents the words RACE MIND in blue, overwritten with yellow letters that can be read either as CHIN ANT or CHINA NT, or however the user wishes.


The second stimulus (above) is visual, representing a sail boat on the sea.


The third stimulus (above) shows a pair of hieroglyphs. The first is suggestive of a pair of tongs, the second of a hook of some kind.



The fourth stimulus (above) shows butterflies and flowers, etc..

You get the idea.

Obviously, it's up to the user how loosely or literally the various stimuli are interpreted. They are intended to work in conjunction with the imagination of the user, who is expected to open his or her mind to the possibilities suggested. For example the sail boat on the sea could plant the seed of a journey of some kind, the precise nature of which is left up to the user. Or it could literally inspire a story about taking a boat to sea.

I'll post some more permutations again soon.

The Inspiration Machine.

My ten year old daughter is in an inventors' club at school. She spends most of her spare time jotting down ideas for inventions, and the rest of it trying to actually make them. She says she's quite good at coming up with inventions but what she finds hard is thinking of problems people might have that need solving (by means of a new invention). So she is always asking us to tell her the problems we face in our lives, so she can think of an invention to help us.

Yesterday I gave her a few of my own problems to work on. I was trying to think of things that might conceivably be solved by something a 10 year old could invent and successfully make. That turned out to be a big mistake, because when I stopped patronising her and told her a real live problem - one that I was convinced would be impossible to solve - her face lit up immediately and she said: "I can invent something for that!"

The problem I gave her was the difficulty of coming up with ideas for stories.

Her invention, which seemed to pop fully conceived into her mind, was an "Inspiration Machine".

She seemed to have a pretty good idea of how she was going to solve this and straightaway rushed off to get the materials she needed, without even sketching a blueprint.

The first thing required was a long cardboard tube, the kind you find inside rolls of wrapping paper. We'd taken all our cardboard to the recycling centre so we didn't have any old ones hanging around. No problem. Only the day before, her mum had bought a new roll of birthday paper, which now - with Dad's controversial consent - no longer has an inner tube.

The next thing was to cut some paper into 12cm wide strips, make some mysterious marks on the cardboard tube, and then ponder the question, "How am I going to do this?" This last part, the pondering, took the longest time.

It was at that point that my help was enlisted, but I have to say that my role was purely as a technician. The concept and design for the Inspiration Machine came totally from my daughter. We discussed how it was to work and what needed to happen. She had very precise requirements and I suggested a few ways they could be achieved.

It then came to creating a prototype. My daughter got busy with the important part - programming the machine with inspiration, while I produced the mundane mechanical elements necessary.

It didn't take long to put it together and put it to the test. To our amazement it worked!

I mean it really did work, and in ways which neither of us had imagined possible. It has certainly helped me, because today I was inspired to write 1,000 words, a target I haven't hit since I began work on this new novel.

In the next blog post I will describe how The Inspiration Machine works and I may even provide a photo.

Another American sighting.

My thanks to writer Alicia Gifford
for this snapshot taken in the Mystery section, Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, California. Not bad for a mobile phone picture.

It's the kind of shot, like the ones taken by David Isaak that lifts a lonely writer's spirits.

Something else that lifts the spirits is to see A Vengeful Longing listed by The Sunday Times as one of the 100 best holiday reads. Amazingly, I happen to know two of the other authors similarly favoured - my fellow North London Historical Crime Writers, Frank Tallis and Andrew Martin.

Photo of my forehead.

My daughter thinks my 'big' forehead is hilarious. She took this picture of it to show just how big, and hilarious, it is.

Had a nice bookseller review of A Vengeful Longing on the Waterstones website. Apparently, the book has been 'criminally' overlooked by the buying public. Hopefully, Nicholas Cunliffe-Jones, the reviewer, will help to put things right, at least in Maidstone. Thank you, Nicholas.

Check out the new Faber site. If you look hard enough, you might find me.

Rachael King on lists.

Fascinating post from New Zealand novelist Rachael King on how she uses lists in the creative process.

Her novel, The Sound of Butterflies, is absolutely wonderful, by the way (see my review on her amazon page). And now available in paperback.

Vengeful Longing in America

I've just realised I let the US publication date of A Vengeful Longing go by without remark. It was last week, the 12th. What did I do to celebrate? I went to London Zoo with my daughter's school trip. It was exhausting, but Claire said it was 'the best school trip ever', so it was worth it.

Anyhow, luckily for me, David Isaak was not so inattentive. True to his usual generous form, he was out book-spotting, despite being, as he puts it, in the middle of nowhere. More pictures, and other news of what David's been up to, on his blog.

Oh, by the way, I have no idea who those lovely people holding copies of AVL are. If they'd like to identify themselves, I'd be more than happy to send them a signed bookplate each.

Have your say.

The CWA have set up discussion forums for this year's CWA Duncan Lawrie Dagger shortlisted books. Why not pop over and join in the debate. Well, actually, start the debate more like, as no one has said anything about my book yet.

Off to the British Library tonight...

... to get a plaque for being on the CWA Duncan Lawrie shortlist. The shortlist is supposed to be announced at the event, but there was an article in the Times on Saturday by Natasha Cooper reviewing the shortlisted books. So it seems the cat is out of the bag.

Ms Cooper found AVL a little "too impressed with its own cleverness", apparently. Which is weird, because the last time I talked to it, it told me that it wished I had made it even cleverer.

Gas lit in Wood Green

Thanks to Lee Jackson for the splendid ad!

The North London Historical Crime Writers will be taking part in the inaugural Wood Green Crime Festival. The festival runs from Monday June 9 to Friday June 13 (oops!). The line up so far is:

Monday 9th at 6.30pm

Danny King and Rebecca Gray

Tuesday 10th at 6.30pm

Gaslit Vices: Lee Jackson, Andrew Martin, RN Morris and Frank Tallis talk to Barry Forshaw

Thursday 12th at 6.30pm

Alison Joseph

Friday 13th at 6.30pm

Chris Fowler and Adrian McKinty

Venue:

Big Green Bookshop

unit 1, Brampton Park Road,

Wood Green,

London,

N22 6BG

Tel 020 8881 6767

Not bad, eh? See you there!

Interview with Sally Hinchcliffe.

Something a bit different for me. I'm promoting someone else's book! Feels weird, but you know I quite like it. I quite like being a little less self-centred for a day.

The book is Out of A Clear Sky (see above) and it's brilliant. The author is Sally Hinchcliffe.

Last week I cyber-interviewed Sally over several days. You can read the result on the fabulous Vulpes Libris blog, here.

At one point, Sally told me that she felt like she was being given the South Bank treatment and she imagined me asking the questions in a Melvin Bragg voice. Or should that be Sir Melvin Bragg? Or is it Lord, or Dame...? It's something, I know.

Man against cat.

This really happened today. Several times. I stopped her climbing on my lap so she climbed on my shoulder. Unbelievable.

It's a heroic struggle, writing, sometimes.

Summer reading for Christians?

The Gentle Axe reviewed from a Christian perspective.

Chicago Tribune's paragraph of the week...

... is one of mine!

They say:

Some nerve. British author R.N. Morris gets credit for gall: In "The Gentle Axe" (2007), a thriller recently released by Penguin in paperback, he channels Fydor Dostoevsky to come up with a sequel to "Crime and Punishment"—and more than gets away with it. This novel gives a vivid portrait of Russia in the 1860s.

A detective named Porfiry—you remember him from the original—tracks a mysterious killer:

Read the selected paragraph here!

Booklist review...

The American Library Association's journal Booklist ran a review of A Vengeful Longing yesterday. Here's a quote:

The Gentle Axe was a solid debut, a reincarnation of Dostoevsky’s character from Crime and Punishment. But here Morris seems to have hit his stride. His characters come alive in all their destitution, pretension, madness, fractiousness, and humanity. His portrait of the city, abandoned by the well-to-do in summer, offers a rich, palpably fetid sense of place, and his depiction of nineteenth-century Russian society, festering with revolutionary notions and old grudges, is compelling.

— Thomas Gaughan, Booklist