Midland Hotel & the Jazz Cafe

Evening gang! Everyone okay? Excellent.

First off, how on earth does an 11 year old child get from Wythenshawe to Rome via plane on his own without a bloody passport? For God's sake the Olympics starts on Friday. Should we not be on top of security at major airports? Just in case you've missed this story here's the LINK TO THE BBC.

In other news, this picture is of the iconic Midand Hotel.

Awesome photo isn't it? Thanks to Crosby Camera Club for the image.You should see the inside of the hotel. In fact, come to Morecambe and stay there. This hotel features in my book The 24 Hour Jazz Cafe. In fact, it's on the front cover.

Not bad is it? Accordng to the reviews it's a pretty good crime thriller too. Sadly in the book the Midland is not open but being redeveloped as it was a few years ago. Then the hotel is burned down at the end. Don't worry, they build something awesome on the site for the follow up!

Anyway, that's the point of this post. I use real places in my books to ground them in reality. Makes the story more believeable. In Edinburgh you can go on an Ian Rankin Rebus tour to see the places featured in the books. I hope one day that folk will come to Morecambe and district for my books in the future and, hopefully, that will help the regeneration of the town.



Interest From a Publisher!

Evening all,

Exciting start to the day today, as the title of this post suggests.

A few weeks ago Ian Rankin (the tip-top crime writer famous for Rebus and now Malcolm Fox) retweeted a message regarding an up and coming publisher called Bang. They were asking for submissions of crime novels, ideally to form a series. They asked for five pages and a brief synopsis via email.

This morning I received a reply which said:

"...I think your novel shows real promise and would like to consider it. Please could you send me a completed manuscript...Please could you also give me more detail about how you see a series will develop from this title and how many books the series might be."

Now I'm not daft, or new to interest from a publisher. I suspect this might well be a standard email sent out to the majority of the submissions received as I know Bang are looking for clients. But it's still positive, obviously, and I'm just nicely excited by it. The plan now is to finish editing The 24 Hour Jazz cafe and email it to them as well as to continue to promote my existing ebooks. If something comes of it, great. If not, I'm no worse off.

As ever, I shall keep you informed on here.

(By the way, I was lucky enough to meet Ian Rankin late last year at a gig he did in Lancaster. He signed my copy of The Complaints. I was pathetically star struck so the wife had to mention my writing and he wished me luck and advised to keep going while I stood there grinning like an idiot. Good times.)