POWDER SMOKE
Powder Smoke is the tenth novel in the Jim Stringer series. It is set in 1925 in York, Leeds, the Yorkshire Dales and Moors (and London). The story is a sort of Western with trains, in that some of the characters are aficionados of the Old, or Wild, West, and there were many of those in the Yorkshire of the 1920s. The paperback edition is out later this month (January 2022).
THE WINKER
The hot summer of 1976. Lee Jones is a good-looking, narcissistic failed pop star. He has tried to make it in various incarnations, but when the album he made with his group, Picture Show, failed to trouble the top 50 in 1974, he knew the game was probably up. The year 1976 finds Lee holed up in his flat in Marylebone and giving self-revelatory interviews to the imaginary pop journalist, Abigail. Meanwhile, he has formulated a plan to avenge himself on a public that has rejected him. He will go into public places and wink at people, both men and women. (Lee is bisexual and irresistiable to either gender, he believes). Then, having ingratiated himself with the the recipent of the wink, he will kill them. This plan is based on a half-baked understanding of existential philosophy, and a desire to draw attention to his own early days as a perfomer, when he was known to wink at young women in the audience. Lee's aim (requiring a third party to notice the wink) is to gain fame as the elusive, murderous 'winker' and to make everyone scared of looking at everyone else. Meanwhile, a middle aged gay man called Charles, who is English, but lives with his mother in Paris (having once played a game of 'wink murder' that went badly wrong) has become interested in newspaper reports of 'the winking killer'.
THE MARTIAN GIRL
A modern-day woman, Jean, is writing a play about a female mind-reader on the Edwardian music hall stage: Kate French (aka The Martian Girl). Their act is based on a verbal code. Jean detects, from theatrical archives, that Kate French might have been murdered by her on-stage mind-reading partner, a man called Draper. It seems Draper had thought Kate could really read his mind, and this bothered him, since he had a dark secret to conceal. Meanwhile, Jean's boyfriend, a married man (and a barrister) called Coates is becoming increasingly paranoid that Jean has learnt his own dark secret (which is that he is a murderer), and when Jean tells him the plot of her play, he takes her to be insinuating that she knows about his dark past. The river Thames features (under bad weather) heavily in this book.
SOOT
York, 1799. A painter of silhouettes, Matthew Harvey, has been murdered in his studio by one of the last six people whose silhouette he painted. His dissolute son, Captain Harvey, commissions Fletcher Rigge, a young, clever but impoverished son of a country squire, to find the killer. Rigge is in the York Debtor's Prison. Captain Harvey bails him out for one month, in which Rigge - armed with copies of the last six silhouettes – must find the killer or be returned to prison, possible for the rest of his life. The story is set in a monochrome world: snowbound, Georgian York, in which Rigge must search for a shadow.
THE JIM STRINGER NOVELS
A series of historical detective novels set in the early Twentieth century, and featuring a railwayman turned railway policeman called Jim Stringer. The books have been shortlisted for a number of Crime Writers' Association Awards, and The Somme Stations won the Ellis Peters Award for Historical Crime. The novels progress chronologically, but can be read in any order. They are:
4. Murder at Deviation Junction
6. The Last Train to Scarborough
(The tenth Stringer novel, Powder Smoke, is forthcoming next year.)
BILTON
A lifestyle journalist with an attitude problem, Martyn Bilton is unspeakably rude, frequently drunk, and his career is going nowhere - until an impulsive gesture makes him a media star. Just how long can his integrity survive? 'A very funny book . . . It is as though the two shambolic characters from the film 'Withnail and I' have somehow stumbled into Evelyn Waugh's newspaper satire Scoop.' Daily Telegraph. LINK
THE BOBBY DAZZLERS
Some young burglars based in York are commissioned by Brian Butteridge, a professional Yorkshireman who owes a small fortune to the inland revenue, to steal four vaulable chairs unkowingly harboured by a a tourist attraction in the North York Moors. All does not go smoothly.
This book was published by Faber and Faber to considerable acclaim (but not very good sales) in 2002. LINK
THE YELLOW DIAMOND
Detective Superintendent George Quinn - Mayfair resident and dandy with a razor-sharp brain - has set up a new police unit, dedicated to investigating the super-rich. When he is shot in mysterious circumstances, DI Blake Reynolds is charged with taking over. But Reynolds hadn't bargained for Quinn's personal assistant - the flinty Victoria Clifford - who knows more than she's prepared to reveal...
The trail left by Quinn leads to a jewellery theft, a murderous conspiracy among some of the most glamorous (and richest) Russians in London - and the beautiful Anna, who challenges Reynolds' professional integrity. Reynolds and Clifford must learn to work together fast - or risk Quinn's fate.