When Mikael Blomkvist is holed up in cottage in the Vanger estate and can’t think he reads detective novels. I do that too. Hence The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (and the first 100 pages of The Girl Who Kicks the Hornets’ Nest ). Blomkvist namechecks Val McDermid The Mermaids Singing and some other—to me—obscure Scandinavian detective novels. In short, Blomkvist was behaving like a real person. He was behaving like me, which might have been you...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000q5z3/the-mercy Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds star in the story of serial British bungler Boris Johnson’s attempt to circumnavigate EEC regulation, buoyed by jingoistic support at home, while sending out false reports of his typical British derring-do, circling the globe far quicker than his competitors from his sinking ship anchored near the Portuguese coast. Based on a true story.

I was surprised a panegyric to the Monsters of Templetown by Stephen King was on the back cover and not the front. I’d describe that as bad marketing, but perhaps this was not to confuse the reader, because despite the title there are no real monsters. Lorrie Moore describes the Monsters of Templeton on the front cover as, ‘A bold hybrid of a book’. What she means by that is the stories are factional, and it’s a love story of place as much as...

Will you take the Covid-19 vaccine(s)? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/06/the-vaccine-miracle-how-scientists-waged-the-battle-against-covid-19 Around 20% of us are unlikely to take the Covid-19 vaccine (there are more than one type of vaccine, but it is highly unlikely you’ll get a choice—unless you’re rich—which propriety brand you will get inoculated with). These are a vocal minority, let’s call them I’d-rather- smear-my-face-with-...

FREE TODAY (Tuesday, 8th December) my e-book collection of Christmas stories, including a number originally published on this site such as The Undertakers at Christmas and my alternative version of the Nativity. Get it here: A Christmas Cracker

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000q1km/flint I fiound it strange that a crew from BBC Scotland led by Anthony Baxter should spend five years from 2014 filming a documentary about water pollution in Flint Michigan, the former home of General Motors, and the narrator is Alec Baldwin. We’re far from home. Remember around 25 years ago when John Gummer, the then Tory agricultural minister, fed his four-year-old daughter a burgher to prove the...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000q5vv/dirty-god I expected this to begin with the acid attack. Instead Jade (Vicky Knight) is returning home, but still wearing a see-through face mask until her face settles. Her hopes are pinned on a miracle, that reconstructive facial surgery can return her to the fresh-faced girl she was before the attack. And not this ‘dog’s dinner,’ as she calls it. Hospital staff are supportive but warn her that...

After reading War and Peace I felt that someone should gallop up and hang a medal around my neck. I’m easily confused and Russian names are Russian to me. Childhood is a much easier beast. Short pen-portraits of, for example, ‘The Tutor, Karl Ivanitch,’ ‘Mama,’ ‘Papa,’ ‘Lessons,’ ‘The Idiot’. His is a very structured life. Papa is a little god, all bow before him. He runs the estate with an iron grip. No rouble unaccounted for. Yet, he can lose...

It's so great, as we celebrate our twentieth birthday, to see that the quality of work on ABC is as brilliant and varied as ever. Story of the Week goes to Peter Bennett's 'A Hauf an a Hauf'. It takes skill and courage to use dialect as your narrative voice, and Peter manages it brilliantly with characters that leap off the page with warmth, humour and pathos: A Hauf an a Hauf | ABCtales No doubt at all in my mind about the Poem of the Week -...

Thank you so much to all the ABC Talers (and friends!) who participated in our Zoom Reading Event last Saturday. It was an absolutely brilliant evening. Special thanks to Mark Burrow for all the organisation and the compering. It will be on our YouTube channel in the New Year, so keep an eye out for it there! Also lots and lots of thanks to those who have sent donations to ABC. If your donation had a name on it you should have had a reply by now...