G B Rubin on Murder at Christmas: You Solve the Crime

The Sleuth. The ‘Tec. The Gumshoe. He, she or it comes in every shape, form, nationality or spiritual outlook on life. But they are always someone else. We, the readers, sit there, mentally flipping through alibis, suspecting everyone in sight, and muttering: ‘Come on, it’s obvious!’ at the hapless sergeant who misses the crucial clue. Reading a good whodunit has always been a participatory sport.

So, what happens when we make that impulse literal? When the reader really does get to decide which lead to follow, which suspect to interrogate, and which risk to take - even if it means ending up as the next corpse?

That question sat at the heart of my new book, Murder at Christmas – You Solve the Crime. It’s a nod to the Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks that once lined the floor of every kid’s bedroom. I wanted to bring that same sense of playful peril - the thrill of ‘Turn to page 63 if you open the door… page 91 if you run for your life’ - to the world of country house murders and snowbound mysteries. And so, in my book, the reader gets to be the sleuth and direct the storyline – with all the stakes and peril that entails.

Because if you grew up loving those books – and I did - you’ll know the pleasure wasn’t just in surviving the story; it was in deciding the story. You weren’t a passive reader - you were the protagonist, the author’s conspirator, deciding what comes next. And that, I think, is what every crime fiction reader secretly craves: the power to make the call, to follow the clue, to solve the puzzle.

It’s easy to write off nostalgia as a yearning for childhood, but our fondness for those branching paperbacks runs deeper. Life, especially adult life, rarely gives us the luxury of neat outcomes. A good mystery, by contrast, promises that logic and observation can restore order. Add interactivity, and that promise becomes irresistible: if the world’s gone mad, at least the story still obeys rules.

In Murder at Christmas, you’re not just reading about the detective - you are the detective. You can stalk suspects down candlelit corridors, question the maid with something to hide, or take the wrong turn entirely and end up in a very compromising position. Success or failure is entirely up to you (or whoever you give the book to).

That sense of agency scratches a very particular itch for mystery readers. It turns the act of reading into investigation. Suddenly, the clues aren’t just words on a page; they’re potential lifelines. Every decision has weight.

Funnily enough, the more I wrote, the more I realised how naturally crime fiction fits the ‘choose your path’ structure. A whodunit is already a maze: red herrings, blind alleys, locked doors. All I had to do was let the reader walk those corridors themselves.

Of course, there’s a fine balance between fair play and fatal traps. The old Choose Your Own Adventure books were gleefully unfair - you could die on page four because you took a wrong turn in a cave. I wanted Murder at Christmas to keep that spirit of danger but reward reasoning. The sharp reader - the one who notes the offhand comment, the misplaced glove, the suspicious alibi - will find the right path. The inattentive one may find themselves tried for the very crime they were meant to solve.

At the start of the book, there’s a big choice: investigate the poison pen letters at Hurley Court as your pal Algy is begging you; or join your new client Melissa Thresh on a scenic Christmas train, where a magic act turns deadly. Either way you’re throwing yourself into a cast of sly, hapless or eccentric characters and a devilish mystery. Of course, they’re love letters to Christmas country house mysteries and to Murder on the Orient Express.

Setting the book at Christmas felt inevitable too. Yuletide is a time of tradition and ritual - and what’s more ritualistic than the murder mystery? The snow, the candles, the gathering of family (and grudges). The juxtaposition of goodwill and malice is delicious. Christie knew it, and so did every writer who’s ever stranded a cast of characters in a big house with too much brandy and too many secrets.

At Christmas, we crave both comfort and catharsis. A murder story delivers both. The darkness makes the light more precious. And when the reader gets to choose their path through that darkness - to follow their curiosity, their courage, or their folly - the experience becomes personal.

Murder at Christmas: You Solve the Crime by G B Rubin (Simon and Schuster) Out Now

It is 1932. You are Dr Kim Tenor, a Scotland Yard pathologist with a side line in private detection when the boys in blue are stumped. You’re celebrated in the newspapers, but you tend to get the official police’s backs up. You attend the opening night of your friend Johnny MacAlister’s ritzy new nightclub, the Golden Star. While you’re there, Johnny introduces you to his cousin, Melissa Thresh, who is being followed by a mysterious figure, and she asks if you can find out what's happening. But you have also promised Algy Hurley to go down to the family seat, Hurley Court, where some strange events have been occurring. If you help Melissa, you’re caught up in a mystery on a train that involves a seemingly impossible murder. If it’s Hurley Court, it’s a Christmas-set country house murder involving an old family ritual and a silver dagger. What would you choose?

 G. B. Rubin is the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Turnglass and Holmes and Moriarty.

More information about G B Rubin can be found on his website. He can also be found on X @GarethRubin and on Facebook.

Forthcoming books from Profile Books (Including Viper)

 January 2026

Vivian Dies Again is by C E Hulse. Time heals all wounds. Except blunt force trauma. Vivian Slade is a cautionary tale. The wrong side of thirty, she's no longer the life and soul of the party - she's a party of one. But she's determined to turn over a new leaf, even if that means going to a family gathering where everyone hates her. Turns out, someone really hates her - enough to push her off a balcony to a very messy end. But then Vivian wakes up! Only to be murdered again. And again. Stuck in a baffling time loop, Vivian's only ally is a sleep-deprived waiter who just wants to finish his shift. Will Vivian be able to solve her own murder? Only time will tell...

February 2026

The Nowhere Children are expecting you... High in the mountains sits Nowhere, a verdant valley surrounded by walls of rock. People have lived at Nowhere for centuries, though never for long, and rarely happily. Its last owner was its most famous: movie star Leaf Winham, who built Nowhere House as a refuge to hide from his fame... and to hide his crimes. Only when Nowhere House went up in flames were the graves discovered, the last resting places of lost young men who would never go home. Years later, Nowhere valley has become a sanctuary for runaway children, a place where adults cannot enter. Drawn by this promise, fourteen-year-old Riley pulls her brother Oliver from his bed in the middle of the night, hoping to find a new family. But the Nowhere Children are fierce in defending their valley and their secrets. For something dark lives in the ruins of Nowhere House, something that asks a terrible price for sanctuary.. Nowhere Burning is by Catriona Ward.

Mischance Creek is by Garry Disher. A deadly drought. A broken town. It's the worst drought in a generation, and the people of Senior Constable Paul Hirschhausen's vast outback beat are suffering. Foreclosures. Failing businesses. Petty quarrels that are spiralling out of control. So when a naive tourist runs into a ditch beyond the ruins of Mischance Creek, Hirsch is relieved to step away from Tiverton. But Annika Nordrum asks for more than just roadside assistance. Her father's body was found at the bottom of a mineshaft seven years ago - his death ruled an accident - and her mother hasn't been seen since. Can Hirsch close this cold case before the town reaches breaking point?

Inspector Jian and his daughter Weiwei just want to go back to their home in China: but Jian is facing a corruption charge in his absence and risks arrest. Instead he tries to scrape a living on London's meanest streets as an illegal immigrant, reduced to hustling Mah Jiang for cash. A bleak future looks to be growing bleaker still when a triad gang blackmail him into tracking down an unlikely young robber. In No Exit Jian and Weiwei scramble between London's grimiest bedsits and its swankiest penthouses as they penetrate the glittering world of 'princelings' - the rich children of the Chinese elite, who treat the city as their playground. Locked in a desperate struggle, with no way out in sight, It will take all their wiles, as well as some lucky gambles, to come out of this latest venture alive. No Exit is by Simon Lewis.

March 2026

Intelligence is by Robert Newman. Was he about to recruit her into the secret service? She held her breath. Frogwoman, codebreaker, assassin, saboteur - whatever it was, she'd do it!  Oxford, 1938. Ida and Medora are two brilliant young philosophers at the heart of a group who gather in storied rooms to dance, drink and debate theories of right and wrong. But as the world spins towards war, theoretical questions of life and death become all too real. While her friends are called up to do intelligence work, Ida, the irrepressible Texan outsider, seeks academic distraction. Then she stumbles across secret Nazi information that could radically change the direction of the war. Can she and Medora capture the attention of the spymasters and mandarins in London on time to save lives.

'You are quite the chameleon, aren't you? You could wear anything, do anything, and yet you choose plain, plain, plain. Is it all a front for a secret life?' Anna Harris knows how to blend in, to be whoever she has to be to get by. But somehow she has ended up in a quaint, sleepy village, swallowed into the lives of her boyfriend and in-laws. She's not unhappy, but this isn't the life she remembers choosing. When vivacious Sofia Carstairs moves to the village, Anna is reminded of the freedom she once had. She used to be carefree and rebellious. But is she willing to throw away her future for some fun? Perhaps leading two lives is more enticing than one. After all, Anna's not a bad person. She just wants to try it out...The Artful Anna Harris is by Tracy Maton.

May 2026

The Hollow Boys is by Tariq Ashkanani. Two children lost. The wrong one found. It's a warm evening in September when nine-year-old Danny Yates comes back from the dead. He walks into town half-starved and silent, ten months after he and his best friend Will Keefe were presumed drowned. And when Danny does finally speak, he swears that he's not Danny. He's Will. Danny's mother is convinced that her boy has come back wrong. More than that, she thinks the town itself is now at risk from whatever dark force returned her son. Chief of Police John Deacon is more interested in how the sinister disappearance of two boys could have been written off as a tragic accident, and who was responsible. What happened to Danny to make him take on his friend's name, his personality? And does Danny's return mean there's a chance that Will is still alive?

June 2026

North Dakota, 1970s. Renee 'Cash' Blackbear, a nineteen-year old Ojibwe woman spends her days playing pool, drinking beer and driving trucks for the local wheat farmers. When the body of the Ojibwe man is found in a field just outside of time, Sheriff Wheaton – Cash's guardian and only friend – and asks for her help. For Cash has an intuitive nature , and she knows that the answers will be found on the Red Lake Reservation. But navigating local racial tensions brings its own dangers, and soon Cash isn't only searching for justice: she is fighting for her life. Murder on the Red River is by cMarcie R. Rendon.

Forthcoming books from Atlantic Books

January 2026

Diary of A Murderer is by Kim Young-Ha. It's been twenty-five years since I last murdered someone, or has it been twenty-six? In his prime, Kim Byeongsu was one of the best murderers around. But he gave it all up to become a dedicated father. Despite suffering from dementia, he decides to come out of retirement for one final target: his daughter's boyfriend, who he suspects is a killer too. In other dark, glittering tales, an affair between childhood friends questions the limits of loyalty and love; a family disintegrates after their baby is kidnapped and recovered years later; and the pursuit of creative fulfilment may come at the expense of all reason...

You think you're safe. But somebody's watching... Irish estate agent Rosie Kinsella loves her job selling high-end properties in London. But when she's targeted by a mysterious stalker her amazing life is turned upside down. Who is 'Michael', and why does he seem to think he and Rosie are in relationship? How does he know where she lives and where she works? And how has he managed to take photos inside her house? Rosie's colleagues and friends rally round to protect her. But who can she really trust? Your Every Move is by Sam Blake.

The Grapples of Wrath is by Alice Bell. This mystery will leave you in a chokehold. Medium turned private investigator Claire Hendricks is excited to embark on her first official case. Pro-wrestling manager Ken King is convinced that his late father, Eddie, is haunting the gym and show venue in Brighton. Ken hires Claire to help, unaware that her ghost best friend, Sophie, comes as part of the package. But Eddie is adamant he did not die of natural causes, and tasks Claire and Sophie with bringing his killer to justice. In the world of pro-wrestling, can they work out what's real, who's faking and unmask the killer once and for all?

February 2026

The Final Problem is by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. To catch a killer, one must act the part. When ageing actor Ormond Basil arrives on the Greek island of Utakos he hopes only for a holiday and perhaps finally to shed the mantle of his most famous role: world-renowned sleuth Sherlock Holmes. But when a body turns up in his hotel, the other guests, accustomed to seeing Ormond as the greatest detective of all time, pressure him to solve the mystery. With Paco, a jaded writer of pulp detective fiction, he has his very own Watson at his side. But even with their combined encyclopaedic knowledge of plots and killers, this case turns out to be anything but elementary...

Everybody knows the story, nobody knows the truth. Lucy Golden is a true crime icon, infamous for killing someone as a teenager while escaping a California cult led by her father. Twenty years later, still coasting on the original success of the memoir she wrote after her acquittal, Lucy knows that her story is always just one news cycle away from obscurity, even as online trolls ask questions that threaten to tear her life apart. So when a hot-shot documentary filmmaker decides to make her case his next subject, Lucy sees a chance to silence her doubters once and for all. But just how far will Lucy go to protect the story she's been telling - and selling all along. Paper Cut is by Rachel Tuff

March 2026

The Savage Death of Babs Dionne is by Ron Currie. Babs Dionne, doting grandmother and vicious crime matriarch, rules her small town with an iron fist. She controls the flow of drugs into its borders with the help of her loyal lieutenants, girlfriends since they were teenagers, and her eldest daughter, Lori, a former soldier struggling with addiction. When a drug cartel discovers that its numbers are down in the area, they send a malevolent force, known only as The Man, to investigate. At the same time, Babs's youngest daughter, Sis, has gone missing, which doesn't seem at all like a coincidence. In twenty-four hours, Sis will be found dead, and the whole town will seek shelter from Babs's wrath...

Harriet Smith investigates... The tyrannical Mrs Churchill is convinced someone is trying to kill her. As if she didn't have enough to vex her, she's concerned that Jane Fairfax has won the heart of her nephew, Frank.  She has hired the talented and devious Harriet Smith to break up this nascent relationship as well as uncover who might want her dead. With the help of her long-suffering, sensible best friend, Robert Martin, Harriet's list of suspects soon grows - Frank Churchill, Jane Fairfax, Mrs Elton and Wakefield the butler all have means, motive and opportunity. Will Harriet prevent the worst from happening? And will she avoid falling for the charming Frank Churchill herself? A Very Vexing Murder is by Lucy Andrew.

April 2026

Sorry For Your Loss is by Georgia McVeigh. The moment I catch eyes with Jack at grief group, I just know. This is my second chance at love. He's charming, good-looking and newly available. In fact, his wife died the very same day I lost my partner. Coincidence? Maybe. Fate sounds more romantic.Unfortunately, I do possess qualities that aren't always desirable. Usually, I can mask them, but sometimes the darkness slips through. And when it does, I wonder if I see that same darkness in Jack. Could he also be hiding parts of himself? Perhaps we really are perfect for each other. Perfect lovers. Perfect enemies. It's all the same in the end, right? 

June 2026

Girls learn from what the world teaches Them. A smart girl uses those lessons to her advantage... Evie is alone in New York. But not for long. Because Evie can be whoever you want her to be. And therein lies the temptation. Evie isn't just a pretty face. She's a test that rich and seemingly untouchable men take and fail. Such a failure has a price that evil extracts with skill and increasing success. Until the day she comes face to face with a man who crossed her childhood and family. The man whose actions set up on chosen path... But which of them will try and, and survived to tell the truth? The Temptation Test is by Rachel North.

How Writers Reap the Harvest of their Loves by Les Hinton

I’ve spent my career as a fresh-faced reporter, a travelling correspondent, an editor, and as an executive responsible for huge media companies. I enjoyed it, and learned a lot; but what I didn’t realise until recently was something else it was training me to be.

I had already written a memoir called The Bootle Boy and the research had been easy. I wrote about my life and experiences in chronological order, looking back now and then at old diaries, calendars, and newspaper clippings to check my memory.

After that, I wanted to try fiction, which is a whole other thing, and, I discovered, much more difficult. 

Thinking up the story; inventing characters; developing the rise, fall, and climax of the story. All this turned out to be far more difficult than I had dreamed.

But what I hadn’t realised was how built-up lessons of my life would help rescue me.

Writers of fiction, as many readers here will be aware, depend heavily on their lived experience. That’s what feeds their imagination. To give their work authenticity, they infuse what they write with the true dreads and joys of the life they’ve lived. Not literally, of course, but to summon the glowing moments of happiness they have known; or the sadness of a loved one’s death; the romance gone wrong; the betrayal of someone you trusted, and to use their imagination to apply these experiences to create wonderful and terrifying moments in their fiction. 

The richness of a life, linked with a fertile imagination, is the foundation of all fiction. I can imagine the above words will be like teaching some of you to suck eggs. But I’m new at this and want to go on to explain what it means to me; how a life face to face with the extreme tragedy and beauty of human existence can be a treasure for a writer.

Let me tell about someone who has seen the highest and lowest of life:

He has been with lottery winners celebrating their millions; with the destitute and homeless and drug addicted; sat in court as a black-capped judge delivered the sentence of death. 

He has stood by the piled-up, rotting corpses of massacred women and children in a war zone; walked through the horrifying remains of what was the world’s worst air disaster; survived an IRA bomb.

He has been drunk in a Manhattan punk bar with Johnny Rotten; received a playful punch in the stomach from Paul McCartney; made the late Queen Elizabeth laugh at his jokes.

He has met presidents and prime ministers; stared from two feet away into the cold eyes of Benjamin Netanyahu, sat alone with an anguished Tony Blair as he prepared to send his country to war; been the object one-to-one of the overwhelming persuasive power of Margaret Thatcher; and a victim of the easy, body-pressing charm of Bill Clinton.

He has worked in the fantasy world of Hollywood among the movie stars and egocentric moguls. Sat at a breakfast cafe next to Stephen Spielberg; watched Meryl Streep stroll by with a baby on her hip; lived next door to O J Simpson at the time he may, or may not, have murdered his wife and her lover.

This someone I’m writing about, you will have guessed, is me and that list represents a fraction of the life I’ve lived. It’s part of the inventory of my life and a treasure that means I should never run out of the ideas a fiction writer needs.

I’m not the first journalist in this position: Ernest Hemingway, Evelyn Waugh, Geraldine Brooks, Michael Frayn, Frederick Forsyth . . . I could go on, there are many more, and I’m definitely not comparing myself with all that brilliance.

My point is that, if you’re a journalist long enough, all human life will pass your way. Some of it is tough, unbearable sometimes and the stuff of terrible dreams, but, boy oh boy, it’s great raw material if you want to write fiction.

My book Dying Days is about the dying days of newspapers and a mysterious group intent on the murder of Press barons and their editors.

It is entirely fictitious, more or less. There’s a prime minister who “no matter how serious things were, a perpetual expression of amused indifference seemed to play on his face.” But it’s not Boris Johnson. This PM bites his fingernails; but it’s not Gordon Brown.

There’s a nonagenarian Press baron and “all the stresses and strains and dirty tricks of his long life were carved deep into his war-torn face” … but it’s definitely not my old boss Rupert Murdoch, far from it.

There’s another Press baron who’s “a caricature of his bawdy newspapers . . . an alien life form unreached by everyone else’s ideas of civility and social convention.” Well, I admit having Robert Maxwell in mind when writing that.

There are many the other characters, foul and fine people, and I know there’ll be others who’ll say of them “ah, that’s so and so.” But they’ll never be right, not completely

It’s almost all made up. None of it is absolutely true. But it does draw from the rich harvest of the life I’ve had.

Dying Days by Les Hinton is published by Whitefox on 6 November, £9.99 paperback

Journalist Dan Brasher wasn’t supposed to be at the Chatstone family’s exclusive summer gathering – a who’s who of media moguls, politicians and power brokers. But when a bomb rips through the historic mansion, Dan and fellow journalist Jess Hunter find themselves thrust into the most dangerous story of their lives.What begins as a shocking act of violence soon reveals something far more sinister, trapping Dan and Jess in a lethal web of power, treachery and cold-blooded revenge that stretches to thehighest levels of global power.

Two Daughters, One Mission and the return of Celtic Noir

How The  Inn  Closes  for  Christmas  and  Other  Dark  Tales 

Returned to the Light

The  Inn  Closes  for  Christmas has inhabited our family bookcases for decades, appearing in various editions and translations from the 1940s to the mid-1970s. Now, a lost classic rediscovered, it is back in a beautiful hardback edition ready for Christmas 2025! 

For the two of us, Cledwyn Hughes’s daughters, there have been tears, laughter and more than a few surprises along the way.

Starting Out on the Journey

The “Hughes Girls” began a deep dive into the Cledwyn Hughes archive at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth a few years ago. Invariably, every visit to the Reading Room revealed unexpected treasures, guiding us to a deeper awareness of our father and his writing practice. Looking back, each step along the way feels serendipitous and what we uncovered filled in many gaps left by a man who kept his dark imagination deliberately separate from family life.

John Cledwyn Hughes—to use his full name—was born in 1920 into a line of farming families in mid-wales and our paternal ancestors can be traced back to the late 1600s living, marrying and dying within a thirty-mile radius of the farm where he grew up. It must have been surprising, therefore, when, at about fourteen, our father announced his intention to become a writer. His mother had hoped he would take over the local chemist shop in nearby Oswestry, but, devoted to her only child “Jim”, bought him his first typewriter that very year. He went on to study pharmacy at Liverpool University, but the typewriter remained his true companion, and writing his vocation.

From his early teens until the end of his life, Cledwyn, as he became known, wrote every day. Rejection letters arrived, as they do for any fledgling author, but his self belief and relentless graft saw his short stories appear increasingly in magazines throughout the 1940s. 

A Bold Leap Across the Atlantic

One of the most moving discoveries in the archives was tracing the audacity of a young man from a farming background with few literary connections or mentors who wrote to a New York literary agent, Marion  Saunders, asking her to represent him. After a brief exchange, a little like a blind date that goes surprisingly well, Saunders agreed. Within a year (late 1946) she was sending the telegrams we can see in the archives to his family farm that The Inn—originally titled “Obsession”—had been accepted for publication by A. A. Wynn in New York under the new title He Dared Not Look Behind. The publisher later altered the title for the UK market to The  Inn  Closes  for  Christmas.

The original authorial title survived only under a yellowed, gummed strip that we later discovered on the galley proofs of the American edition. Peeling back that strip felt like having sight of a private conversation between our father and his first editor.

Our research also uncovered four previously unpublished short stories, now among the “Dark Tales” in the new volume. These pieces demonstrate four more cracking experiments with the unsettling atmospheres that defined Cledwyn Hughes’s earlier work.

Gratitude to Those Who Made the Return Possible

Many individuals and institutions helped us on this rediscovery project of a fine Welsh writer, and we are so grateful to them for recognising his qualities and his relevance to modern readers. It is not within the scope of this piece to list them all, but we would like particularly to thank:

The National Library of Wales for safeguarding the Cledwyn Hughes papers, noting especially the four unpublished stories that have a home in the new 2025 edition.

Curtis Brown Heritage, and especially Norah Perkins for her brilliant insight and support in developing a publishing strategy.

The Baskerville team for treating the manuscript with reverence, restoring the original title in the acknowledgements and producing a beautifully designed volume that honours both the story and the author’s literary legacy.

Closing Reflections

Holding the new edition feels like standing on a bridge between two worlds: the private, imaginative realm our father inhabited and the public sphere where his stories now live again. The journey of republishing has run parallel to a personal pilgrimage. A profound and satisfying process. Learning about a father who inhabited a creative world apart from his everyday self; discovering new stories; and meeting the people who are helping to bring his work back into the light.

The Inn Closes for Christmas is by Cledwyn Hughes (John Murray Press) Out Now

Discover the lost masterpiece from the father of Celtic noir. The Inn Closes for Christmas is a deliciously dark and haunting tale of one man's nightmarish obsession and how far he'll go to escape it. For fans of Shirley Jackson, MR James, and Andrew Michael Hurley, rediscover this forgotten classic.  The Bank manager, as he had done for so many Christmases now, opened the file. And as always, as he opened it he wondered why he must do this each year. For the man had asked him that he should do this every Christmas for as long as he should live. In the file, the bank manager sifts through some papers - local newspaper cuttings, a pathologist report, a statement from the town's dentist William Sterrill, and a death notice for his wife, Mrs Doreen Sterrill. But it is the last paper that stops him in his tracks. It is the confession of William Sterrill. In William's confession we learn about the terrible accident that caused his wife to have her leg amputated, the prosthetic leg she then had to wear, how this leg slowly drives William to murder, and then the descent into madness as we walk through William's nightmares, visions, and thoughts.  The Inn Closes for Christmas is also accompanied by a selection of short stories, full of the uncanny and creepy where Hughes points us towards the darkest places in the human psyche with the lightest of touches.

Cledwyn Hughes was an Anglo-Welsh author of short stories, novels, and narrative non-fiction. He wrote for more than 30 years across a wide range of genres including crime, 'Celtic Noir', children's and topographical writing.

Born in Llansantffraid, Montgomeryshire, he worked as a hospital pharmacist in the north of England before settling down in Wales to write full-time. His work has been featured in magazines such as Suspense, as well as in collections like Woodrow Wyatt’s English Stories. He was also a regular contributor to the BBC.

He is best known for the novel The Civil Strangers (1950) and the macabre novella The Inn Closes for Christmas (1947), which remained in print until shortly before his untimely death.

More information about Cledwyn Hughes and his work can be found on the Cledwyn Hughes website. You can also email them directly-  estate@cledwynhughes.com. They can also be found on Instagram  @literaryestate_cledwynhughes

All photographs and copyright courtesy of Rebecca and Janet (daughters of Cledwyn Hughes).

“Following Fleming: the first Q mystery, Quantum of Menace - by Vaseem Khan

 

It’s not often you have a book endorsed by Mick Herron, Ann Cleeves, Lee Child, Mark Billingham, Janice Hallett and Charlie Higson (among others) before it has even been published, but that is the (very fortunate) situation with my latest novel, Quantum of Menace, out on Oct 23rd.

 The book is the first in a mystery series featuring Q from the Bond franchise. In Quantum of Menace, Q – aka Major Boothroyd – finds himself unceremoniously booted out of MI6. A man at sea, he decides to return to his small hometown – the fictional Wickstone-on-Water – to reinvestigate the mysterious death of his childhood friend, a quantum computer scientist.

Quantum of Menace is not a spy novel, though Q’s past is a lurking presence that he cannot completely divorce himself from. This is a book about a man who has lost his bearings, a man contemplating a lonely future where he has become superfluous to requirements. It’s also a book about what modern Britain stands for and what fighting the good fight now means. Q has fought that fight for more years than he cares to remember. Now he must call upon his intellect to solve a more local crime.

During the course of his return home, we see Q coming to terms with his own broken past. We also, at long last, get to discover the man behind the Q myth.

In the build up to the book’s release, I recently spoke at the Henley Literary Festival, where I was interviewed by James Scudamore, a member of the Ian Fleming family, and one of the individuals behind the decision to ask me, in the summer of 2023 (via Ian Fleming Publishing Limited (IFPL), the publishing arm of the Ian Fleming estate), whether I might be interested in writing a mystery series featuring Q? Fair to say that I was stunned. It’s not every day you find yourself invited to take on one of the most iconic characters in fiction.

The requirement was not for another Bond-style spy thriller, but a traditional mystery. I was asked to put on my thinking cap.

But how does one approach the business of bringing to life someone else’s characters? I’ve been relatively fortunate in that from the beginning it was clear that I wasn’t imitating Fleming. The book was to be entirely my own creation, albeit using characters and a background that millions will be familiar with.

I presented several plots, and my own sense of how I wished the series to play out. In particular, given that Q appears only briefly in the novels, I was given carte blanche to bring Q to life as a ‘whole’ character – I chose not to paint him as a caricature but as a serious scientist, a man who has given his all to his country for three decades only to find himself cast aside. Is he bitter? Of course he is!

His return to his hometown is fraught with tension. Wickstone-on-Water is the sort of once sleepy place that often appears in cosy crime, but with a distinctly edgy vibe: a few thousand people whose halcyon view of the world is being tested by recent migration and the activities of county lines drugs traffickers.

In the book, Q investigates the mysterious death of his childhood friend, Peter Napier, a quantum computer scientist who had been on the verge of a major - and possibly very dangerous - breakthrough. With this particular plot, I hoped to tap into some of the fears about unchecked technological advancement that are impacting both individuals and state actors.

Yet, the plot is intensely local, and it is the personal relationships that Q is forced to resume that add the real tension to his return. We get to meet Q’s estranged father – Mortimer Boothroyd – a surly, retired ancient Roman historian, and his even more estranged childhood fiancé, now the detective in charge of the original investigation into Napier’s death.

I confess I’ve always had a soft spot for Q. He never appeared much in the books – essentially, almost everything we know about him comes from the films. But I always believed him to be a serious man, a weapons scientist who takes himself – and his mission – helping safeguard the civilised world – as a sacred trust. That’s the Q I have brought to life.

Quantum of Menace is undoubtedly a child of its time, another entry in the ‘clever cosy crime’ subgenre that has taken the publishing world by storm in recent years. For me the dilemma was simple: how do I combine what we love about the Bond canon – for instance, the prickly relationship between Bond and Q – whilst bringing in everything a sophisticated cosy audience has come to expect? i.e. dry wit, quirky personas and an emphasis on the puzzle rather than, say, rocket launchers fired from the tops of speeding trains?

The answer, I hope, is now enshrined within the pages of this book and its sequel, The Man with the Golden Compass, the opening chapters of which are included at the back of Quantum of Menace.

The tone of the novel lies somewhere between Mick Herron’s Slow Horses and Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club. There's dry humour, cryptic clues, an insight into Q's life at - and post - MI6, and, yes, Commander Bond puts in an appearance. How could he not!

Quantum of Menace by Vaseem Khan. (Bonnier Books Ltd) Out 23rd October 2025

Q is out of MI6 and into a new world of deceit and death. After Q (aka Major Boothroyd) is unexpectedly ousted from his role with British Intelligence developing technologies for MI6's OO agents, he finds himself back in his sleepy hometown of Wickstone-on-Water. His childhood friend, renowned quantum computer scientist Peter Napier, has died in mysterious circumstances, leaving behind a cryptic note. The police seem uninterested, but Q feels compelled to investigate and soon discovers that Napier's ground-breaking work may have attracted sinister forces . . . Can Q decode the truth behind Napier's death, even as danger closes in?

The book is out on October 23rd. You can find buy options here.

Publishing in hardback (including special editions by Waterstones, Goldsboro Books and independent bookshops), audio and e-book.

More information about Vaseem Khan can be found on his website. You can also find him on X @VaseemKhanUK and on Facebook @VaseemKhanOfficial

Merle Nygate on Why Spy Fiction

The first realistic espionage stories I ever read was Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden short stories. The narrator, a writer, trails around the Italian lakes during inclement weather and visits agents who are supposed to be gathering information or intel as we like to call it now. The agents are feckless; they lie and they cheat and the work itself is tiring and often dull. To me, it felt real. It was real, Maugham was recruited to run agents during World War I.

Later, much later, I read Graham Greene’s The Human Factor and in the author’s notes Greene described how he wanted to write about spies with pensions. Again, that felt real. 

But although I have written multiple genres and mediums, everything from fantasy to factual comedy to drama. I felt unable to peruse ideas o ideas about espionage and betrayal with any semblance of confidence for a long little. I recognise that as a writer you ned to know where you're ready to realise a particular idea, believe that you have the experience and the skills to make what you have in your mind the best it can be. I was determined that if I was going to attempt to write a spy novel it would have to feel and as realistic as the espionage that I admired.

For many years that particular goal seemed a long way off until the ambition was reignited when I read. Tom Rob Smith's Child 44. Child 44 is set in Stalinist Russia and is written from the point of view of a NKVD agent who is morally compromised.

It's a brilliant book. The setting is the miserable post-war deprivation of 1950s Soviet Union. The characters are terrified of who will betray them and they are all desperately trying to survive. When I reached the end of the book, I read the author's biography and was astonished that the author had achieved this level of authenticity solely on the basis of research.

Child 44 was inspirational. 

I now needed a story. 

I decided to write about the Mossad, the Israeli version of MI6 for several reasons. Among them was that while I think The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is an almost perfect book and I’m a great admirer of the rest of the Smiley series, I felt that le Carré, in The Little Drummer Girl hadn’t written either Jews or women particularly well and it bothered me. I found the needy and neurotic Charlie irritating and the dour, brooding case officer hard to believe

Another reason for choosing Mossad was cowardice and expediency; I don’t think I could attempt to better what le Carré and Deighton wrote about Cold War British intelligence. Nor what Charles Beaumont does now for MI6 and what David McCloskey and I. S. Berry do for the CIA. There also aren’t many authors writing about the Mossad despite all the mystique about this particular intelligence service.

But I still didn’t have a story.

I read and re-read le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl. Then I moved to The Honourable Schoolboy, Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Then Len Deighton’s Bernard Samson series and as I was reading I was trying to identify what it was that I liked about the narratives, why they worked and why they didn’t. I also watched Homeland episodes back-to-back and The Americans. 

It was while I was noodling around on the CIA website looking for reviews of spy fiction books that I saw a mention of a non-fiction book called Gideon’s Spies by Gordon Thomas. 

I have since been told by those who apparently know that there are inaccuracies in the book but there are also plenty of facts. It was my lodestar. I went through the book in forensic detail; marked it up, made detailed notes and I extrapolated the information I needed for a second document. From that document I brainstormed and identified the different types of true stories in espionage. All the facts suggested story ideas. There were disinformation and recruitment operations that had rich story possibilities and, of course, the ubiquitous, ‘find the mole’ story. 

From the list I brainstormed 13 different scenarios ranging from moles, recruitment, assassination and disinformation 

That was the beginning of the Amiram series. After that, of course, it wrote itself!

Merle Nygate’s latest novel, The Protocols of Spying, is out now as a £10.99 paperback from No Exit Press, part of Bedford Square Publishers.

In the aftermath of Hamas's October 7th attack on Israel, Mossad's London station chief Eli Amiram is fighting battles on all fronts. When his ambitious rival plans an assassination on British soil - supposedly authorized by Trump supporters - Eli suspects a deeper conspiracy. Meanwhile, British intelligence asset Petra is hunting for redemption. Tasked with recruiting Wasim Al-Arikhi - whose sister she failed to save from becoming a suicide bomber - Petra's drawn into a deadly game of cat and mouse. Can Wasim be trusted or has she become a target? As Eli and Petra's paths converge, they discover that in the shadow world of international espionage, the greatest threats often come from within. They must confront not just their enemies, but their own moral choices. A sophisticated spy thriller that weaves together tradecraft, betrayal and the human cost of intelligence work.

More information about the author and her work can be found on her website. You can find her on Facebook @merle.nygate and on X @merlenygate and on Instagram @mnygate 

Who is Mason Coile?

 

Enthusiastic book reviewers often want to tell others when they have enjoyed a book immensely, discovered something special, a narrative that provoked deep thought.

EXILES by Mason Coile

So what’s this book about?

It’s 2030

The human crew sent to prepare the first colony on Mars arrives to find the new base half-destroyed and the three robots sent ahead to set it up in disarray.

In the four years since they arrived, the machines have formed alliances, chosen their own names and picked up some disturbing beliefs. Each robot must be interrogated.

But one of them is missing.

As the astronauts close in on the truth, it dawns on them that in this barren, hostile landscape - where even the machines have nightmares - none of them is safe.

I just finished this extraordinary work by an author I had never heard of - Mason Coile and reviewed it -

This slim novel punches well above its word count. It has heft in terms of provoking thought and stopping you in your tracks to ponder upon the ideas, themes and emotions it evokes.

There is a tragic finality in the climax - one that grips the mind.

Presented as a Science Fiction Thriller, it is actually a philosophical exploration of what it means to ‘exist’. As worthy as that may sound, it stretches the edges of this futuristic scenario into a cerebral examination of loneliness and why ‘humans’ and ‘non-humans’ behave in the ways they do when mentally and physically isolated.

Read the Full Review HERE

The climax caused me to put the book down and sit in silence, lost in my thoughts as I gazed at the stars glittering in the infinity of the night sky.

I felt alone and insignificant.

The writing was so assured and evocative it came as no surprise to discover that Mason Coile is a pen-name of the award-winning Canadian Author Andrew Pyper. The novel’s melancholic theme is matched by the sadness in the knowledge that Exiles is his final novel. It was published posthumously as Andrew Pyper tragically passed away earlier this year aged 56.

He dedicated his final novel to his wife.

I was fortunate to meet Andrew during Bouchercon 2013 held in Albany, New York State – where we discussed his incredible Horror Novel The Demonologist – which would be awarded the International Thriller Writers [ITW] hardcover novel of the year [in 2014].

If you’ve not read Andrew Pyper / Mason Coile – here’s his bibliography

Kiss Me (1996)

Lost Girls (2000)

The Trade Mission (2002) 

The Wildfire Season (2005)          

The Killing Circle (2008)

The Guardians (2011)        

The Demonologist (2013)  

The Damned (2015)

The Only Child (2017)       

The Homecoming (2019)   

The Residence (2020)       

Oracle (2021)           

As Mason Coile

William (2024)         

Exiles (2025)

More information > https://andrewpyper.com/