About

In years gone by I travelled extensively in Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey. I should also admit that I made bubble gum in Philadelphia, so my record on public health isn’t good.

I have always been as interested in music as the written word. In addition to listening, I have composed quite a lot. A violin sonata and a clarinet trio were performed in public, both of them written on manuscript paper and now lost. Since those early days technology has moved on and I have written directly into notation software, exporting the music to audio. But real musicians do it much better. However, thanks to the cloud, nothing gets lost anymore.

For many years I published poetry in newspapers, magazines and anthologies of Scottish verse. This was a sensible choice, since running a recording studio (spoken word, music and sound effects for radio and theatre) left little time and even less energy for anything longer.

For a few years  now, I have been able to concentrate on novels. Time to Talk was published in October 2013, to be followed by A Serious Business early in 2014. Both are set in Edinburgh. I have just published (November 2019) a new title, The Ears of a Cat, in which I range far and wide and don’t set foot once in my native city. A paperback edition of Interleaved Lives will appear early in 2022 courtesy of Eventis Press, a book which sees me back in Edinburgh.

I live with my wife in the grounds of an old convent from which, I read, five nuns were expelled in 1938. I wonder why?

I read a lot, write reviews and am active, by fits and starts, on Goodreads and Twitter.