Earlier this week I wrote about my upcoming appearance on Stratford Words – a weekly show ran and hosted by Nick Le Mesurier on Welcombe Radio: a community internet station based in, well, duh, Stratford-Upon-Avon. That’s right – Stratford; home of Shakespeare and all that good stuff. And check me out – I did a radio show, which is something he never managed so that means…something, right?
The programme is a weekly hour-long broadcast which offers local writers of all genres, styles and platforms to chat with Nick about their works, their influences and anything else that might come up. I was lucky enough to get a whole hour to myself. And for those who wondered whether I’d be able to talk about myself for that long – pah, you clearly don’t know me.
Seriously though, it was the first radio show I’d done as a ‘writer’, and certainly the first one I’ve ever done live so I wasn’t sure what to expect; whether I’d dry up, drop the F-bomb, suffer a mild case of spontaneous combustion: you know, I was preparing for the worst. But, thanks to Nick’s guiding hand and calm manner I think I got through it alive (other than some stomach rumbling the mic may or may not have picked up: time sort of got past me on Sunday morning and I managed to miss lunch.)
So, we talked about my other life – 25 years with OUP, about influences and thoughts on the role of the crime story in society today. I read a slightly abridged (for time and aforementioned F bomb reasons) version of ‘First Class‘ a story from the new collection You Could Make a Killing, and discussed some of my upcoming projects.
All in all, I had a blast, and would do it again in a heart beat – actually, by the time this post goes out, I probably will have done it again in a recorded chat with Peter Oxley and Simon Finnie my bosses on the new anthology Burning – more details of that to come soon…
In the meantime, if you’d like to listen to the show – here it is, and if you like ‘First Class’ despite my reading of it, then why not check out You Could Make a Killing – free if you’ve got Kindle Unlimited, £2.99 in Kindle if not, or £8.99 in paperback.