Literarily speaking, there’s very little that’s worse than an otherwise gripping, clever, well-made piece of art dropping in something clunkingly stupid to try and trip you up. I love a good twist. They are, after all, a big part of the attraction of crime fiction. The unexpected reveal of who the villain was all along,... Continue Reading →

Once it’s out there, it’s out there   There’s a running joke among writers, that goes something along the lines of an over-zealous English teacher explaining to their class that the curtains being blue shows the depression and sadness of a character in a scene. Meanwhile the confused writer sits there going ‘Huh? No, I... Continue Reading →

Ok, so, as shown in the movie, it wasn’t an incredibly easy case to solve (unlike, say, the Sandbrook murders of Broadchurch). Amy knew how to play to the prejudices and expectations of investigators and spin what would at first glance seem a plausible narrative. The operative phrase there being at first glance. Because, with... Continue Reading →

Very few wars throughout history have followed the traditional literary three-act structure as well as the First World War did. It’s possible to divide it quite neatly into this most common of narrative structures, even if they are somewhat uneven – a short first Act between August 1914 and the First Battle of Ypres, a... Continue Reading →

Oh my God, she’s just found her brother and saved him from a squalid and messy death and this is one of the emotional high points of the movie… but Goddamn it, Etaples is supposed to be a seaside town and it’s taking me right out of the moment! Testament of Youth is the movie... Continue Reading →

So one of the Golden Rules of writing is that you never write about anyone you know. There are a whole host of good reasons not to. You can offend people, for starters, if you have them do something that they don’t think they’d ever do, or if they feel you’ve misrepresented something that they... Continue Reading →

‘They never caught Jack the Ripper, and now time and history have spirited his identity away.’ So says Ed Buchan, the Ripperologist from Whitechapel, ITV’s somewhat hit and miss gothic detective drama from a few years back (although when it hit, as it did in seasons 1 and 3, it was well worth a watch).... Continue Reading →

No one writes in a vacuum, and I am eternally thankful for my beta readers who get to suffer through the insurmountable piles of garbage that I call first drafts, correcting grammar, typos, enormous plotholes, and gaping in disbelief as I completely misrepresent their mountaineering experiences in a handful of throwaway lines. These guys rock,... Continue Reading →