My Blog
The Story Behind The Silence Before Dawn
I had long been thinking of writing a spy series set in the Cold War, partly because my father, who died when I was three, was a spy during that time. That began to change during the pandemic when I saw ordinary people doing so many extraordinary things above and...
The Wedding In Auschwitz
These newly-weds have dressed up for their wedding photo but they're not smiling... And for good reason: their union was sealed at Auschwitz – the only wedding known to have taken place in the death camp. Rudolf Friemel, an Austrian communist who resisted the Nazis,...
Mala & Edek – A Tragic Auschwitz Love Story
Mala Zimetbaum, the first woman and the first Jewish woman to escape from Auschwitz-Birkenau, was born on January 26, 1918, in Brzesko, Poland In 1928, when she was ten years old, her family emigrated from Poland to Belgium, where they settled in Antwerp. Mala,...
If a writer falls in love with you…
If a writer falls in love with you, you can never die… Or so the saying goes. And it’s true. It’s also true if a writer gives birth to you, befriends you or if you are foolish enough to cross one… Because that last means all bets are off. There’s another saying: Good...
I Still Believe In Magic
I still believe in magic… In spite of this past year, and because of it, I believe we all need that sprinkling of something beyond the ordinary more than ever. Our lives have become so extraordinary and our reality so extreme that magical possibilities don’t seem...
The Story Behind My Dictionary of Crime
The crime bug bit me the day my father died although I didn’t realise it until much later. I was only three at the time, so my memories are blurred but the hints my mother dropped over the years sharpened a different kind of focus. She would refer to the secretive...