David W. Robinson's Blog: Always Writing, page 4

The Time Draws Near

And no, I’m not talking about Christmas… well, I am, but not so’s you’d notice. I don’t do Christmas. It’s nice seeing family, but even that’s subject to some nervousness again this year, so we might see them only on … Continue reading →

Christmas is Coming

Christmas is upon us. Either that or some greetings card company is spamming me via snail mail. And right now, of course I have not one but two Christmas titles on the go. The first of Mrs Capper’s Casebooks, Mrs … Continue reading →

Introducing Mrs Capper, Private Investigator

It’s four days to Christmas, the town centre is gridlocked, her car is off the road and she’s waiting for her husband to pick her up and take her to town for a nine o’clock appointment at the library . … Continue reading →

A Scare and a Celebration Still On

It’s coming up to a year since my granddaughter became Mrs Victoria Mottram. Victoria and I are dogged by bad timing. I was determined to be in Cambridge for her graduation, but the missus and I were on a plane … Continue reading →

Christmas is Coming

With the successful launch of Confusion in Cleethorpes (above) at the beginning of this week, I’m turning my attention to the near future. Sanford 3rd Age Club Mystery #23, Murder on the Movie Set, has been with my publisher for … Continue reading →

Robert Devine

Although I’m probably best known for light hearted whodunits, such as the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries, I do write…

We’re Back

Last week I decided it was time to change web hosts, and my very good friend Iain Pattison introduced me to Hodhost. The switch would save me a considerable amount of money, and as a true son of the white rose, a diehard Yorkshireman the next best thing to free is saving.

The job involved transferring the domain name, dwrob.com to the new host, and with my usual level of technological articulacy, I hadn’t a clue how to go about it, so Gareth Hodson, the main man at Hodhost, dealt with everything for me, and it was still a bloody nightmare.

As at yesterday evening all the world could see the site but me. I tried everything to get my laptop and phone to visit the bloody site. I even went so far as downloading a free registry cleaner, which souped up the laptop by deleting no less than 16,000+ bits of rubbish cluttering up the hard drive. It made no difference I still could not get into my site.

But by this morning, everything was working. I could access the site and the back-office to make whatever changes I need.

I’ll be spending the next couple of days faffing with odd bits and pieces, but the site is up, it is running, and you’re welcome to visit, spend a bit of time scouting around, and pick up all the latest news.

On which subject, let me remind you that if you sign up to my newsletter, there’s a free download waiting for you in the shape of Nostell, a Feyer & Drake novella.

If you don’t want to sign up to the newsletter, that’s okay, but you’ll still find a free download in the shape of Liquidated in Lockdown, a Sanford Mystery special novella which sees Joe tried to solve a murder while self-isolating during the height of the coronavirus crisis. You’ll find details on the page, Free Stuff.

And of course, I can’t let this morning pass without mentioning the really, seriously BIG NEWS, the forthcoming release of Sanford 3rd Age Club Mystery #22, Confusion in Cleethorpes.

It’s due out on July 19, which would have been my late brother’s 70th birthday. He passed away from a massive heart attack fifteen years ago, and to this day I still miss our occasional telephone chats. RIP, Terry.

Published by darkstroke, Confusion in Cleethorpes is exclusive to Amazon, and it is available for pre-order at:

mybook.to/cleethorpes

As always, that’s a universal link which will take you to your local Amazon site.

Cleethorpes or Bust

The next Sanford 3rd Age Club Mystery has been a while coming, but yesterday, April 17, the script went off…

What about the Sanford Mysteries?

Joe and the crew at The Lazy Luncheonette come from a world I know well. I spent most of my…

A Snowy Sunday in Mid-April?

I’ve just come through what is one of the worst weeks of my life. Nine days since I had the second Covid jab and I haven’t been right since. I’ve felt weak, shaky, generally lacking in both motivation and the energy to look for some. My sleep pattern, such as it is, is severely disrupted and my appetite shot… although, on that last pint, I have managed to shed a few pounds.

A couple of times this week, I’ve insisted I’m back to 100%, but in no time at all, I go down again. So what is it?

I blame that second jab, but the truth is the problems simply coincided with that, and some of the areas I was suffering are posted as side-effects. Others aren’t, and there are several possibilities. Blood sugar slightly out of whack, increasing rheumatics and arthritis, and let’s not forget smoking. It gets blamed for everything else, so I might as well chuck it into the mix.

There’s one other candidate: the weather. Here, take a look at this.

That photograph was taken half an hour ago. It’s a glorious sunny morning, but colder than a penguin’s arse. And where the hell did the snow come from? It’s the middle of April. I live on the outskirts of Manchester, not Murmansk (look it up. It’s in the far North of Russia the wrong side of the Arctic Circle.)

Still and all, you can’t let trivia like illness get in the way of work. I once drove from Edinburgh to Leeds while suffering from flu. I had no choice, and it’s the same now. I have no choice.

But how do you write when your mind is full of cotton wool?  With difficulty is the short answer.

Course, writing’s not all about knocking the tale out. There are other aspects to it, such as research. So when a friend suggested sending Joe to Inverness and putting him in a kilt, I looked into the possibility. At the prices they want for a bespoke Murray clan kilt, I could buy a decent second-hand car, but it makes for a fun scene.

Another friend was saying she’s read The Squires Lodge Murders three times and that caused me to wonder what was so attractive about that title… so I spent a day re-reading it. I’m not much wiser. It’s good (he says with all the modesty of a modern novelist) and it’s slightly more varied than most of the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries.

A week or two back I came to the conclusion that I’m better sticking with the lighter whodunits than the hard-boiled stuff. That’s doesn’t mean there will not be more Feyer & Drake titles. There will, but they take time to fully develop. I had other darker works planned, and when I came to this decision, I looked at them with a view to conversion. After all, what’s the difference between The Anagramist and a Sanford 3rd Age Club Mystery? Graphic sex, violence, language and elements of realism, I would say. Aside from that the principles are the same.

With that in mind, I now have a third Sanford on the boil, involving a burglary which leads Joe and Co into a twenty-year-old cold case.

As I write, therefore, I have three Sanford Mysteries on the go. A weekend in Cleethorpes will likely be first, followed by a visit to Inverness, and by the autumn, the cold case should be heading your way.

You can’t wait, can you?

Just time to remind you that there are free books available on this site. Check out the Free Stuff link above, and don’t forget The Cutter is scheduled for release on May 25th, and you can pre-order it now at: mybook.to/cutter

Finally, if you want sign up for my Valued Readers’ Club, that link, too, is above, and the first newsletter is scheduled to go out very soon.

That’s it from the madhouse. Have fun, stay safe and read, read, read. It’s so much better than real life.