I have received so many questions, comments and emails about fingerprint evidence and crime scene investigations, so I decided to keep with the theme from one of my previous posts about fingerprints.  There is so much more the fingerprint evidence from discovery to…

There are a lot of people who view all sub-plots with the gravest suspicion, regarding them at best as a pointless distraction from the main business at hand, and, at worst, as a dangerously amateurish self-indulgence.  Kill your darlings, they screech like dogma-drilled harpies, kill, kill, kill them all!  Needless to say, I disagree.

In a general sense, I’m all in favour of sub-plots.  In fact, I delight in them.  They offer so many exciting possibilities to writers of…

One of the many smaller pleasures of writing fiction is the fun to be derived from choosing the names of your characters.  There’s a lot of joy in nailing down the perfect name for your maverick cop/cerebral private detective/vampire overlord/super-soldier from Planet Zap, and just as much amusement in bestowing the names of people you dislike upon the seedy/degenerate/evil characters currently paddling around in the shallow end of your WIP’s gene pool.  But the truth is that the more you…

Creating a likeable, interesting and complex main character, one the reader can have empathy with, one they want to trust, feel his/her pain and disappointments, root for throughout the story is the key to creating a successful and riveting crime novel.

Pauline Rowson author of the popular DI Andy Horton crime series explains how…

Of course, I've always known this.  It's a rare day when I write something that works perfectly first time.  More often than not, everyday stresses and concerns intrude on my writing time, meaning that my mind is never as focused as I would wish it to be.  The end result is that I not only write sentences back to front, I also write paragraphs inside out, and write them in the wrong order, too.  It's like my mind has all the information it needs to write the story, but because there's so…

At Monks Brook U3A on 8 January I was delighted to talk to the audience about my DI Andy Horton crime novels, how I draw my inspiration from the area in which the novels are set (the Solent area on the South Coast of England) and my method for developing plot lines and creating…

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A visit to the newly refurbished Sandhurst Library in Bracknell Forest on 4 December was the perfect way to finish a busy year of talks and public appearances in 2013. Not only were the audience lovely and packed with some die hard DI Andy Horton fans but after my talk about murder, crime and bodies there was a gorgeous English tea complete with cucumber sandwiches, scones with jam and cream,…

According to recent statistics, men have all but stopped reading fiction. Do they watch great television? Yes. Do they read non-fiction? Some. But the novel – that great interior journey – seems to have been lost to them.

It wasn’t always this way.

The path from boyhood to manhood used to go something like this: Boys got dirty, played with plastic guns, disturbed…

To the extent I even have readers, my apologies for neglecting this blog for so long. 

The most important news is that I have finally launched my official Web site, www.seitzbooks.com. Here you can find my books, current news, contact information and more. Check it out!

I have also launched a cable talk show, "Book Talk." The show is dedicated to the world of books, writing and reading, and we're trying to be as broad as…

In celebration of the 5 YEAR ANNIVERSARY since the first published Emily Stone Thriller, I’ve just released the EMILY STONE THRILLERS Boxed Set.  I’m very excited to offer this to readers.  It includes the…

The second day of my mini book tour of South Wales on 3 October 2013 on the publication in the UK of the tenth in the DI Andy Horton crime series, Death Surge, started with a coffee and a lovely walk along the delightful seafront in Porthcawl (town by the sea) where I picked up some amusing and interesting ideas for characters and…

One of the most interesting aspects of studying criminal behavior and criminology is finding out why and how criminals commit a specific crime.  It’s really the complicated and daunting task of finding out what makes an individual tick and hopefully learning more about their criminal pattern of behavior in the process. …

I'm often asked if I have a writing routine. There are writers who write the same time every day come what may; others who will write a certain number of words every day and when they've done their quota, they'll knock off.  Me? I have no real set routine but I do like to write every day, speaking engagements permitting.



Some days when the words flow or I am at a…

August is  traditionally a quieter month in terms of speaking engagements for me so it is a chance to get down to some hard graft on the writing front.  I'm running a little behind with the next DI Andy Horton, which will be number eleven in the series, but I am confident that I will make up time in August.



I also have two speaking engagements in August and am delighted to be giving a talk…

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Over a hundred people turned out on a hot July afternoon to listen to me talking about murder, mystery and mayhem. I was honoured and delighted to entertain Hamble Valley U3A with a talk about crime writing and my crime novels.

The audience were very friendly and it was good to meet some DI Andy Horton fans and introduce my crime novels to some new readers.

U3As are self-help, self-managed lifelong learning co-operatives for older people no longer in full time…

Sociopath or psychopath, so which is it?  We often see these two descriptions interchangeable among mainstream news media and entertainment arenas.  When I first began my study in criminology, I was initially confused by the terms and found that many individuals in the teaching area and general information found in college textbooks used each of these terms interchangeably.

Both…