I’m delighted to have been invited to give a solo talk at the ‘Alibis in the Archive 2026’ event to be held in collaboration with the Crime Writers’ Association at the prestigious Gladstone’s Library on 5th June – 7th June.This stunning location is home to the British Crime Writing Archive, made up of materials from the Crime Writers’ Association and The Detection Club. That champion of the genre, Martin Edwards, has worked closely with the Gladstone’s Library team to make the collections...

As well as consuming a wealth of films, social history books, and crime exposés, I drew great inspiration for my Golden Age crime series, Piccadilly Noir , from a collection of written works with a distinctly local provenance. After all, unlike the American milieu of Chandler’s and Hammett’s detectives, my protagonist George Harley, who first appears in Midnight Streets , inhabits a peculiarly British world – a world of grubby bedsits, all-night cafés, egg and chips, and Gold Flake...

Robert Aickman In the late 1980s I bought a copy of Robert Aickman’s novella The Model , purely based on its intriguing cover: a...