Arts
Three Men on a Bike, Part One
I suppose it must have been during the 1965 Easter break from the Sixth Form that Bogs, Cough, Pat and myself decided that during the summer months between the AS level exams and the start [more…]
Roger Ackroyd
Arts
A Life in Three Honks, Honk the First
Being born in Birmingham in 1947 I was lucky enough to have ridden on the trams along Oulton Boulevard before they were scrapped in the early 50’s and regularly traveled into central Birmingham on the [more…]
20th Century
Book Review: Silent Village, Robert Pike
There have been a number of books on the disaster that overran Oradour-sur-Glane on Saturday June 10th 1944 but this is the first one that I have read that finely details the lives of the [more…]
Biography
Take Your Daughter to Work Day
Prologue by Roger Ackroyd Recently located in the piles of papers here at Ackroyd Towers was a copy of a report made by Lily Ackroyd on her “Take your daughter to work day” assignment for [more…]
Fiction
The Butcher Began To Kill The Ox, Ch 3
CHAPTER 3 The light rain that had begun when he got off the train at Bradford on Avon had now turned into a steady drizzle and to judge by the lowering clouds coming in from [more…]
Fiction
The Butcher Began To Kill The Ox, Ch 2
CHAPTER 2 Now, here he was, sitting in an anonymous government office, waiting to be grilled by what he had always described as “faceless farts” of civil servants who wouldn’t do his job for all [more…]
Fiction
The Butcher Began To Kill The Ox, Ch 1
For those new readers who have not yet availed themselves of my first novel, A Coin for the Hangman (available at Amazon as a print or ebook version), I am prefacing this first chapter of [more…]
Literature
Tales from the Book Crypt
As a regular visitor to and buyer at auctions across the South of England I have become used to viewing lots and waiting for hours for the items I am interested in to come under [more…]
Book Review
Tales from the Crypt
The recent screening of Mark Gatiss’ Dracula – an enterprise that started well enough but fell away into nonsense like many of the BBC adaptations – reminded me of an enterprise that I initiated some [more…]