Robert Craven's blog

So went a conversation I had with Kenneth (not their real name) during the course of pitching my novel through 2020. In the unforgiving world of commercial publishing, this question is often asked - who is saying what to whom, and is their internal world caught up in the jump cuts of talking heads ? A roving POV can lead to confusion which begs the question most authors face - are you making a movie, or telling a story? I suspect that any author...

"Publishing is a business, not a charity." went Kenneth (not his real name) on a phone call recently. Through lockdown 2020, I completed my latest novel. And I decided after six years of independent publishing to try my hand at pitching it via the conventional route. Carefully selecting the agents who handle this genre (crime), I began to follow the submissions process and track each submission on a spreadsheet. The first thing that became...

Good morning from a lockdown Dublin. I'd like to wish everyone here a safe and happy 2021. I was going through some old notebooks and files last year during the idle months of April Level 5. As a writer, I tend to hoard; I have spaces jammed with half-filled notebooks, random idea pages, and newspaper and magazine clippings, so with all the unexpected free time, I decided to purge a lot of old or unused material and get it out of the house. I...

When I was young, living in Manchester, my parents had an old valve radio. It was big, brown, and beige. It sat pride of place on the dresser in the living room of our house, shiny and smelling of furniture polish. The valves would hum and glow when you turned it on. Twisting the dial, the thin red line would slide along the station bandwidths, bringing the world in through the speakers. Everyday our home was filled with music, local news and...

I was once told by a Liverpool author that the difference between the UK and the USA when it came to power is that while in the US power came from wealth in the UK, power came from privilege. This side of the Irish Sea, the current narrative rings true with the unelected advisor to the current government: Dominic Cummings. Julien Temple’s flawed but at times brilliant ‘The Great Rock ‘n Roll Swindle’ springs to mind. The Sex Pistols under the...

Anyone walking along the riverside of the Limmat might have picked her out; a pretty girl of about twenty, whose maroon-looking lipstick accentuated her wan complexion. Her arm, bent at the elbow and carried at an awkward angle, might have given pause for thought; her fist, balled up into a permanent clench, was concealed between the buttons of her expensively cut overcoat. An attentive eye might even have noticed the small spattering of blood...

I read with sadness this morning that Neil Peart, drummer and lyricist of RUSH has died. He was 67. He and his bandmates, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson were a soundtrack and voice to my teenage years. Peart was a hugely accomplished drummer and undertook writing the band's lyrics when no-one else wanted to and drove the band's direction. For anyone who grew up in Ireland or the UK in the 1980's, the time was bleak, the weather seemed bleak, the...

“For there’s no-one with endurance like the man who sells insurance.” (Crumit / Curtis 1935) Or the modern author too. Eighty-five years after this song was composed and the start of a new decade, it’s all about endurance, persistence, self-belief and hard graft. I have just published my seventh novel: Eagles Hunt Wolves . It is the fifth and final part of a wartime series I started in 2006, beginning with Get Lenin which was published in 2011...

EAGLES HUNT WOLVES (and Improbable Adventures) – Robert Craven In 2006, I started writing an adventure story in the vein I grew up reading. In June 2011 it was published – Get Lenin . Five years of rewrites, excruciating edits, rejection letters and emails led to it being spotted on the now-defunct peer review site Authonomy. What sealed the modest publishing deal was the principal character Eva Molenaar. I wanted Eva to be a strong female...

EAGLES HUNT WOLVES LAUNCH DATE 30/01/20 For fans of John le Carre, Mick Herron, Ian Fleming, Phillip K Dick and Alastair Maclean – meet Eva Molenaar. 1946: The guns have fallen silent over Europe. For now. Searching for her lover Nicklaus Brandt after a mission three years earlier with the French Resistance in Lyon, Eva finds herself in lawless war-torn Berlin. Reunited with her old MI6 handler, Henry Chainbridge, she finds Brandt in a secret...