Air and Sea Stories

Fiona Erskine interview – The Chemical Detective

THE CHEMICAL DETECTIVE by Fiona Erskine is published by Point Blank, an imprint of Oneworld, in hardback on 4 April (see review on Goodreads) I’m privileged to be able to interview Fiona Erskine, author of the brilliant new thriller The Chemical Detective. Back in September 2017, OneWorld announced that it had signed up for two…

Writing the landscape

I’ve always been fascinated by landscape, and that fascination has shaped my identity as a writer. Ironically – or perhaps inevitably – I grew up somewhere with a particular kind of landscape that some people think of as no landscape at all. The flat expanses of North Essex do not share the character of the…

Frank Barnard – on ghosts and remembrances

I have been a fan of Frank Barnard’s work for years, first becoming aware of his writing back in 2006 with the novel Blue Man Falling, based around a Hawker Hurricane squadron in the Battle of France. Frank has a fascinating background, including a career as a journalist, national service in the RAF and even…

My Publishing Nightmare – the story of a book deal gone bad (Part 3)

Parts one and two of this blog series covered what happened when I signed a contract with a publisher for my novel and it turned out badly, with a product I was unhappy with, poor sales and a deteriorating relationship with the publisher, and then my initial, unsuccessful attempts to retrieve my rights to the…

My Publishing Nightmare – the story of a book deal gone bad (Part 2)

To start off with, I should say that I gave this blog its title before I heard about the shameful business involving Amélie Wen Zhao. Now that really is a publishing nightmare. Suffice to say that what happened to me was bad enough, and the kind of thing that befalls a lot of aspiring authors,…

My Publishing Nightmare – the story of a book deal gone bad (Part 1)

This is the story of how bad things happened to an author. Me, as it happens. I was naive, disorganised, and arguably lazy with how I sought to get my novel published, but ultimately I don’t think that excuses the bad things. The short version is that I got stuck with a publisher who wasted…

Historical fiction – where to draw the line

The issue of factual inaccuracy in historical fiction is a perpetual source of debate, and occasional outbreaks of controversy. Reports in the media today pick up on this issue with aspects of the new film Mary Queen of Scots labelled ‘problematic’ by a historian in a BBC report with the Telegraph going as far as…

Interview with Amanda Berriman, author of ‘Home’

I am very pleased to welcome to Air and Sea Stories, Amanda Berriman, whose fantastic debut novel Home will be published next month (February 2018) by the Transworld imprint of Penguin. Home is a beautiful novel with a unique voice – that of four-(and a half!)-year-old Jesika, who, with her mother is forced to negotiate…

The last roundhead returns – This Deceitful Light review

The Last Roundhead, by Jemahl Evans, was one of the best historical novels I’ve read in a long time. The voice of the main character and narrator, Blandford Candy, was as authentic as it is possible to get in a work written in the 21st century. Better, he existed in a world of such effortlessly…

Nemesister – review and interview with Sophie Jonas-Hill

I am pleased to welcome to Air and Sea Stories, Sophie Jonas-Hill, whose pacy psychological thriller Nemesister was recently published by Urbane Publications. First off, a review of the book, followed by an interview with Sophie: Review – Nemesister Sophie Jonas-Hill’s novel is an incredibly atmospheric thriller that swings from eerie to brooding to intense…

Duelling and dualling – co-writing ‘Oath and Crown’

When I suggested – a little casually, truth be told – to the Random Writers group in the Autumn of 2015 that I was considering writing a novel about the William the Conqueror and was hoping to find a co-writer, I should have known two things. First, that the almost immediate volunteer would be Jules…

Detectives of the occult – hanged, drawn and quarterly

I wasn’t really aware of just how enduringly popular the Occult Detective is in literature and other art forms until recently. It was through fellow writer and aficionado of weird fiction and long dogs, John Linwood Grant, that I had my initiation into the genre. John, with Sam Gafford, edits a new publication that promises…

Interview with ‘Last Roundhead’ author Jemahl Evans

Air and Sea Stories is pleased to welcome Jemahl Evans, author of the critically acclaimed The Last Roundhead (Caerus Press, 2015) and the forthcoming sequel This Deceitful Light, which is due for publication in September. Jemahl graduated with an MA in History, focussing on poetry and propaganda during the Wars of the Roses, and started…