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This was the second collection of short stories published posthumously after PD James’s death. Not known for her short story, this collection gives a very different view of James’s writing. She’s known for her very well written novels, where the handsome and cultured Commander Dalgliesh steps in and meticulously takes apart a vicious crime. Instead, these stories present murder where the guilty aren’t punished, and some are even rewarded. In several of these short stories the central character is the murderer, men plotting their revenge. The other stories are told from the point-of-view of an innocent caught up in a murder. The Girl Who Loved Graveyards is the stand out story of this collection. It begins with an almost modern fairy tale feel and ends with a nasty shock. The weakest story is by far Mr. Millcroft’s Birthday. It felt like James was trying for a lighter, more satirical tone, unfortunately she missed her mark. James excelled with a dark tone in her writing, where she leans into this with these stories then the story is far better for it. These stories rely on nostalgia, most of them are set long before they were written, and they benefit from it. This is not the nostalgia of cosy crime, instead she uses her setting to aid her stories. These are stories where people can be easily isolated, where the police are far away, where forensics are not there to save the day. Instead, these are stories full of dark human behaviour. But these stories also pack a punch with a twist in the tale, an unforeseen ending. These stories are very different to James’s Dalgliesh novels, and show she had a talent for dark, gothic stories. Maybe she might have had an alternative career writing novels in this style, or maybe she just enjoyed writing the occasional dark, gothic short story. This is still a fascinating and dark collection of short stories, showing why James was such an accomplished writer, which I finished reading all too quickly. Find it here on Amazon

In the lead up to what is already being called, in our household, The Big Move, I am focusing on editing and preparing manuscripts, rather than writing. This is because it is hard to write when you feel guilty for not packing your life into boxes, and secondly because whilst Cowboy Summer waits for covers and one last read-through, I have no finished the 17 tracks of the American Songbook. Yes people, I said 17 tracks. There are two tracks "Sandbar" and "Marshallville" which will only be available on the deluxe album version (both digital and print). Current word counts look to be around 150,000 which is going to make this a pretty hefty tome probably some 450-500 pages long. Should keep you busy! we are hoping for a release date this side of the end of May, if all goes to plan, and I'll let you know how things progress. The contents of the 'album' stands thus: 1 - All Over The Road All Over The Road - Easton Corbin 2 - Great-Grandaddy's Gun Grandaddy's Gun - Blake Shelton 3 - Home Grown American Beautiful - The Henningsens 4 - Nothin' Town This Nothin' Town - Jason Aldean 5 - Country Girl Fresh Off The Farm The Farm Inc. 6 - The Boy Who Was Summer Sunny and 75 - Joe Nichols 19 You+Me - Dan + Shay 7 - Tailgate Hangout Ready, Set, Roll - Chase Rice That's My Kind of Night - Luke Bryan 8 - Payback's a Blast Get Even - Brad Paisley 9 - Bright Thunder Blown Away - Carrie Underwood 10 - Drunk Last Night Drunk Last Night - Eli Young Band 11 - Our Song Play it Again - Luke Bryan 12 - Worth the Drive See You Tonight - Scotty McCreery 13 - Instantly State of Grace - Taylor Swift Crickets - Joe Nichols 14 - Ladies' Man God Made Girls - RaeLynn 15 - Lonely at the Top Hope You Get Lonely Tonight - Cole Swindell 16 - Sandbar (Deluxe Album Version) Wish I Had A Boat - Tyler Farr 17 - Marshallville (Deluxe Album Version) Water Tower - Jason Aldean

This anthology is a collection from a writers workshop in East London. As such is has been designed to showcase the writing coming out of this workshop, and so is a very mixed anthology. This isn’t just a collection of short stories only, or just poetry or only essays. This collection contains many different styles of writing. There are short stories here, but also poetry, essays and even drabbles (100 word stories). The strength here is this collection’s variety. If you don’t want to read poetry or an essay, then the next piece is something different. And there is a lot of variety here, there’s twenty-eight different pieces of writing in this collection. There are certainly highlights here. Belgin Durmush’s short story is a surreal satire on dysfunctional committees, while George Tsappis’s story finds the humanity in less than a glorious time for the British occupiers of 1940’s Cyprus. The poems here span many different styles. Frank Crocker’s poems are pithy and humorous, revolving around one subject or another. George Fuller’s poems paint lyrical pictures of different events and places. Dharma Paul’s poems engage the mind and emotions. But the standout poems here are Deborah Collins’s, both lyrically and memorably, captures the strange and disjointed world of East London during lockdown. And there are Paul Butler’s drabbles. He uses 100 words to tell his concise and sharply funny stories. This anthology is full of different and new writing, it is a chance to find some new authors from East London, and is read that can be dipped in and out of, or read in one or two sittings. Find something original here. Find it here on Amazon

Ruth Rendell was known for her dark psychological thrillers, but she also wrote many short stories, throughout her career. This was her first collection of them, many of which had been previously published in different magazines. At her best, she always had a feel and understanding for character, especially people caught up in events greater than themselves. Here are several short stories that showcase that ability. She captures characters both on the edge of society and those who are bastions of it. These are also the best stories here, were Rendell writes about a character caught up in a situation, with tragic ends. Rendell uses the twist-in-the-tale format for some of these stories, unfortunately it only sometimes works, other times the twist is so obvious that it is a wonder she completed the story. This collection was originally published in 1976, with the stories all written before then, and many of the attitudes in these stories haven’t aged well. Attitudes to mental illness, child abduction and sexism depicted here do creek with age. The pleasure of this collection, though, is in Rendall’s understanding of character, and at its best it is fascinating. Find it here on Amazon

My short story, Even a Monkey Can Fall from a Tree, can be read in this, new anthology, Showtime 2023, but there’s more to it than just that. Every year, Newham Writers Workshop publishes an anthology of its members work, and I’m member of them and this is the fourth anthology I’ve had work published in. But I’m also now part of the editorial team that published it. I had the easy job. My fellow writers, Belgin and Paula, had the hardest task. They proofread and edited all the submissions and they did a wonderful job of it. They captured those annoying repetitions, corrected those silly spelling mistakes we all make and helped the writer to clarify what they were writing. Editing is not my strong point and I’m so grateful for those who can do it well. My role was the formatting of the manuscript, uploading it to Amazon and promoting it online (Which this blog is the first stage of). I had to format it into eBook and paper back book formats. This wasn’t too difficult, except the writer who had their work in a strange format and screwed half the book’s formatting (!!). Martin, my partner, helped me with the cover. The cover picture is Alphabetti Spaghetti by Alex Chinneck. This is a series of sculptures, of post boxes tied into a knot, placed across the country. There is one just down the road from us, its also a piece of public art in the London borough of Newham, which is a theme we kind of fell into for our cover illustrations. The anthology is a showcase of our members work, hence the name, and it contains so much good writing, a chance I got to experience formatting it, and that writing is so varied. There is poetry, short stories, memoirs and a memorial essay. A lot of current poetry I find dense and difficult to understand, but I’m happy that I can’t say that for my fellow writers here. Many of the poems here are lyrical, painting wonderful images with their words, others use words to take an aim at their subjects. Beautiful-Words by Deborah Collins, Noise by Paul Butler, The Tankard’s Mahogany Bar by George Fuller and Resignation by Catherine Daniels are all fine examples of the poetry here. There is a richness of prose here too, and on such a diverse range of subjects, challenging subjects, not simply cosy and safe. Ros Allison gives us another short story about female friendship. Sarah Winslow, Nicola Catton, Dharma Paul and Belgin Durmush all have written short stories that use fantasy themes, ranging from light and whimsical, to dark and memorable. These stories include meeting your hero, strange events in a coffee shop, through meeting yourself and a very dark story about a house that suddenly appears on a hill. My own story, Even a Monkey Can Fall from a Tree, is about a young man who catches Monkey pox (Mpox). Through this infection he finds himself on the receiving end of a world of judgment and homophobia. The inspiration came from reading about different men’s experiences during the outbreak of Monkey Pox in the summer of 2022. As I read their experiences, I felt such an echo of the homophobia circling around HIV in the 1980s & 1990s. It was disturbing to hear all that homophobia resurfacing again. It shouted out to me to write about it, to explore the cost of it. There is also non-fiction in this anthology, personal essays that draw on universal experiences. Dave Chambers’s essay, Uncle Bob, is about how he moved away from and then left the Catholic Church through his relationship with his uncle. Frank Crocker’s essay is about loss, first experienced as a child and then much later as an adult. The last piece in the anthology is also one of the most poignant pieces here. It is a memorial essay about our former treasurer, Margaret Griffith. Margaret died suddenly and unexpectantly in August 2022. Her death had surprised and shocked us all, she had been our longest serving member. This essay, drawn from the eulogies at her funeral, is a way of us remembering such a prominent member of our workshop. This anthology is a showcase of the work coming out of our writers workshop, the original and different voices producing work in East London. You can get a copy of it here. Happy reading Drew

Anthologies can be interesting reads and, in the past, have introduced me to writers I might not have found in other ways. If it’s by one author then it can be an interesting introduction to an author’s work or else it is a way to see how an author handles writing short stories, which are different form from novel writing. If it’s an anthology of different writers then there is a chance to discover new authors. Unfortunately, this anthology did not provide any of this. I found this anthology so frustrating because none of the stories developed any of their themes. None of the stories had any character development or even led anywhere. After finishing each story, I was left with the feeling, “Was that it?” None reached any sort of resolution. Now, short stories are not novels, I don’t expect complete character story arcs or resolution of big themes, but they are stories and stories do need to take the reader somewhere. All the stories here left me feeling frustrated because they didn’t go anywhere. Some of the stories had an interesting premise but did not follow through on that premise, ending too soon or just not exploring that premise. One story, which illustrates my frustration with this anthology, was about two work colleagues sharing a car to a team-building event. They bought coffees; they argued over what music to play in the car; the car got a flat tyre; they waited for the breakdown van to arrive; they restarted their journey and it started to rain, but they didn’t reach their team-building event. The characters didn’t share anything, they didn’t get to know each other, they didn’t contact in any way; they were just the same at the beginning as they were at the end of the story, nothing had changed or been challenged. What was the point of this story? It was just a catalogue of their morning. For an anthology to have one story as frustrating and pointless as this is one thing, but to have a whole collection of stories like that is another thing. It had to be a conscious decision by the editor, but why would someone collect together a group of stories that all left the reader feeling so disappointed? I don’t know. My advice is not to waste your time with this anthology, I wish I hadn’t. Find it here on Amazon

Miss Marple is probably the most famous female detective in English literature, she was certainly an original character when she first appeared in print, using psychology and character observation rather than searching for physical clues to solve crimes. This collection of stories was published posthumously after Christie’s death and brings together the remaining Miss Marple short stories that hadn’t been published in book form before, plus two supernatural stories that didn’t feature Miss Marple. This is certainly a mixed bag of stories. Sanctuary and Greenshaw's Folly are fully formed stories, with plots and characters that work and carry the reader to the end at a readable pace. Strange Jest is much more a puzzle story than a mystery and suffers from not being a Christie mystery. The other Marple stories here feel rushed and not fully formed, like first-draft stories that were squeezed into a tight word limit. These stories far too often tell the reader what is happening rather than letting the characters and events show the reader what is happening. So often they felt rushed. They weren’t to the standard of other Christie stories, especially the original stories in the very first Marple collection, The Thirteen Problems. In Miss Marple Tells a Story Christie shows her ear for dialogue, the story is written completely in Miss Marple’s voice, solely her voice speaking. It shows how well Christie knew her character; unfortunately the story itself is too short and slight to build any plot. The two non Miss Marple stories here are examples of Christie’s supernatural stories that she wrote periodically throughout her career. The Dressmaker’s Doll is overly long, dragging out the situation and distracting from the ending. In a Glass Darkly is a much darker story in tone, but the neat ending, where order is restored, is a let-down. Christie’s short stories were best when she gave herself time and space to develop plots and characters, thus making her longer short stories often the better ones. This is very much the case here. This is a collection for committed Miss Marple fans who want to read all the stories she appears in. If you’re new to Miss Marple fiction there are much better places to start. Find it here on Amazon