Friday 20 May 2016

Friday Comic Tease


Coloured Panel
Night Witch Issue #4


Wednesday 18 May 2016

Night Witch Issue 3


Out Today
Night Witch Issue #3


Friday 13 May 2016

Friday Comic Tease


Lettered Final Panel
Night Witch Issue #3



Monday 9 May 2016

Written in Dead Wax by Andrew Cartmel


WARNING: SHAMELESS PLUG

Andrew Cartmel is one of my closest friends and gave me first writing job and has a book out tomorrow.

Now I actually read each chapter as it was written and by the end I had to taken to calling Andrew and begging him to get a move on. 

So despite the fact that this is a friend and a colleague I want to say - this is a really good book and you might want to give it a whirl.

I particularly like Tinkler's coma, the cats, the Aryan assassins and the high quality red herrings that will have you second guessing the resolution until the last chapter.


 


BLURB FROM THE PUBLISHER

He is a record collector — a connoisseur of vinyl, hunting out rare and elusive LPs. His business card describes him as the “Vinyl Detective” and some people take this more literally than others.

Like the beautiful, mysterious woman who wants to pay him a large sum of money to find a priceless lost recording — on behalf of an extremely wealthy (and rather sinister) shadowy client. 

Given that he’s just about to run out of cat biscuits, this gets our hero’s full attention. So begins a painful and dangerous odyssey in search of the rarest jazz record of them all…

 AVAILABLE IN ALL GOOD BOOSTORES AND ONLINE VIA THE USUAL SUSPECTS






Friday 6 May 2016

Friday Comic Tease


Panel Progression From
Night Witch Issue #3






Wednesday 4 May 2016

Much Less Schadenfreude Than I Was Led To Expect


The Almost Perfect People
Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia
By Michael Booth

I've been to Sweden and it's hard to square such a pleasant country with the cascade of gloomy chunky jumper wearing detectives that invade our television and bookshops.

And given that every new scandinoir conjures up a seedy world of moral compromise, secret historical shame and the certainty that society is in a state of terminal decline just why, in survey after survey, do the people of the region vote themselves the happiest in the world.

Michael Booth who is both married to a Dane and living in Denmark sets out to examine the roots of this contradiction. He tackles each Nordic country in turn, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Finland in turn -  providing a useful insight into their history, culture and idiosyncrasies. 

The blurb, misleadingly, stresses the 'hidden dark side' of the Nordic utopia but the book is in fact much more balanced and nuanced than that. Less schadenfreude and more wry humour.

Recommended.

Monday 2 May 2016

City Read Panel on Saturday


CITY READ 2016 

In the run up to this years City Read events I will be on stage with the following literary luminaries...

Sebastian Faulks, Gillian Slovo, Claire Tomalin, Louisa Young 

To discuss the joys of setting your work in the greatest city in the world.


WHERE?
 THE BRITISH LIBRARY

WHEN?
SATURDAY 7TH MAY
3:30 PM

Chaired by Kamila Shamsie

Cityread London unites the capital every April by inviting the whole city to pick up the same book set in London and read it together. Cityread events erupt across Greater London in libraries and bookshops, cinemas and stations. This special event, chaired by the novelist Kamila Shamsie, celebrates Cityread’s first five years. It brings together all four living writers whose books have been Cityread’s choices to date. They discuss the joys and challenges of evoking our capital city – Sebastian Faulks with A Week in December, Louisa Young with My Dear, I wanted to tell you, Ben Aaronovitch with Rivers of London, and Gillian Slovo with this year’s Cityread, Ten Days. The first Cityread book, in 2012, was Oliver Twist, and for this the biographer Claire Tomalin speaks about Dickens’s London.