Robert Craven's blog

Wishing you all a very happy & peaceful new year. Now that the dishes & champagne flutes are washed & stowed away. Now that the fireworks finale is lying around the garden, I'd like to let you kind readers know that my 10th (yes, hard to believe TENTH) novel - MALIGN INTENT is available for pre order now... The back page blurb "Tag, bag and bury the bastard, Crowe…” An August bank holiday should be about relaxation, taking time out...

https://heyzine.com/flip-book/84d0324158.html?fbclid=IwAR3dWB7JCVQnTbz9L... One week to go! Normally, I wouldn't post anything about an author event, but this appearance, flying in from Dublin to this event is literally three years in the making. I met the festival director, Dr Jacky Collins in 2019 at the Bloody Scotland Festival in Stirling. I was part of the final group of authors selected to pitch to a panel of editors and industry...

“Tag, bag and bury the bastard, Garda Inspector Crowe…” Genre: Crime Fiction August - December, present day, one year after ‘A Kind of Drowning’ . The synopsis: Robert Craven's Malign Intent, is a contemporary crime thriller set in Ireland with a slow burning neo-noir atmosphere: Crowe has seen enough dead bodies in his time to suspect that Aonghus Hanafin wasn’t the hanging kind. August bank holidays should be about relaxation, taking time out...

It was easy to deactivate my Twitter Account. For the past four years, I found it easy (too easy at times) to get mired in in pointless arguments - especially the toxicity of the Brexit debate. I lost sight of why I was on the platform; primarily to sell my books and engage with the writing community. I would close my laptop fueled in anger and hurt. Both on a personal level - I received threats on my time line and watching educated and...

It as been a while... I planned to take 2022 off from writing completely. A full break. And here's why - sixteen years of writing, going through the mill of pitching, getting published, watching publishers go bust and retrieving my material back for indie platforms non-stop had taken its toll, I needed to hit the pause button. I needed to stop and take stock of why I write, what compels me to rise every morning and start typing words and...

What I have learned in ten years of writing by Robert Craven 2021 The great jazz musician, Miles Davis once observed, “ Sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself, ”. This is especially true of being a writer. It’s 2021 and its the tenth anniversary of the publication of my first ‘real’ novel GET LENIN . I have often thought of taking it down off Amazon and giving it a full rewrite, but then I wouldn’t be doing it justice. I love...

Books are like the stock market, sales rise and fall over your title’s shelf life. At the mercy of fickle readership, your publication in many ways is no longer art, but a commodity, a product for sale. The trick is to bring your buyers to the stall and at least look it over. For my novel, A Kind of Drowning , I planned for the year, with one eye on the summer market and the end view of Christmas sales I marked out a calendar into three blocks...

The man standing at the funeral in bubble-gum pink hair is P.J. Crowe. His career as a detective is in tatters - he's facing dismissal, and his wife's about to leave. Lying low in a small seaside town he spots a ‘Help Wanted’ ad in the kitchen of a local café. It offers him an escape and it's where Thea Farrell worked – until she was found dead at sea. And herein lies the problem: Thea was an Olympic medallist, silver for swimming and Crowe’s...

Imperium (1993) Kapuscinski is a hero of mine, Imperium isn't a novel, but a biography of growing up under Moscow Rule and a series of essays and observations. Kapuscinski traveled around the satellite countries of the USSR post collapse of the Berlin Wall. It is the last book of the the 9 books that inspired me to write . Imperium is a travelogue, reportage but more than that; Kapuscinski takes far flung countries and weaves their beauty into...

London Rules (2018) London Rules is the 5th novel in Herron's Slow Horses series, and the first book of his I had ever read. After it, I literally bought the whole Jackson Lamb series. It is the penultimate book of the 9 books that inspired me to write . 'Slow Horses' refers to members of MI5 who have for various disciplinary reasons, are moved into Slough House, a dilapidated building in the borough of Finsbury. Its a limbo, far away from the...