"Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad but it's the only way you can do anything really good."

This quote by the celebrated American writer, William Faulkner - a Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner - seemed an apt metaphor for me as I stared at a blank laptop screen and the chasm of uncertainty that accompanied it. Sure, I'd read a couple of best-selling "How To Write A Thriller" books, hoping to arm myself with sufficient tools for the task ahead and to distil some of the more nuanced guidelines of the genre. But, at some …

THE BUTTERFLY HUNTER

Twenty years after the end of the Second World War, Klara Brandt discovers that the man responsible for the brutal massacre of her family when she was a child in Germany is still alive. Her thirst for vengeance compels her to leave her comfortable new life in New York and risk everything to find him. But is the man she eventually encounters in the remote backwaters of Brazil really the sadistic killer she’d set out to find, or someone else?

Dreams are a somewhat unfashionable trope in fiction. Perhaps it seems like a lazy shortcut into the subconscious of a character, so a lot of writers avoid them. Or maybe they are simply passé. It’s a truism, after all, that listening to other people’s dreams is boring – and not just in fiction.

But there is a certain irony here, because without dreams – waking dreams at least, reverie, and imagination – how would a novel ever be written?

Perhaps the most famous literary dream occurred near Lake Geneva in 1816, when after …

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My launch party for "Theatre of War" at the Club of Acts and Actors - a fitting venue in the heart of London's West End theatreland.  

Picture of the author with actor,writer Michael Simpkins and TV and theatre legend, Brian Murphy.