A green label reads: “Are we there yet?”
A soft case for your imagination to solve: what happened to the owner of the boots left with the bag on a city street?

Welcome to Christina James’ crime fiction blog.  Here I hope that you will find something to whet your appetite for reading my D.I. Yates novels and pursuing lines of inquiry of your own.  I certainly don’t want anybody to be clueless!  As most of you will know from writing yourselves, putting a story together can be pretty challenging; then, when you do manage to get through to completion, everyone from your nearest and dearest (whom  you thought you could rely on to massage your ego!) to complete strangers is out to pick holes in what you’ve done.  It’s unnerving and can often be soul-destroying, but then there are those constructive critical comments that just help you to see how to improve on first efforts.  I’m certainly getting used to the metaphorical red ink and to being objective enough to know when to stand by my way of doing it and when to bow to better judgements.

I’ve always loved writing and it won’t be hard to believe that I spend a huge proportion of my life reading other people’s stuff, which of course influences what I do, though I may not always be aware of what or how.  I just hope that my stories grab readers in the way I remember from childhood: reading into the night because I couldn’t bear to put the book down.  If that happens to somebody when reading one of my books, then I know I’ll have got something right!

Just one thing: I used to have a fanciful idea about what being a writer was like: immersed in it from morning to night and never stopping.  Now I know that the real world is banging on the door all the time and concentrating is as hard as trying to sleep when you have the builders in.  Perhaps it will get easier, but I’m not banking on it!