The Sword in the Stone-Dead: A 1930s Murder Mystery

Paul Tomlinson was born in Nottingham, England, in 1966. He began making stuff up at the age of eight, but never thought he could make money doing it-which is good, because he hasn’t. His parents got him addicted to books at an early age, teaching him to read before he started school, and bought him his first typewriter at the age of 12: they cannot, therefore, plausibly deny culpability. Science fiction and Sherlock Holmes dominated his teenage reading, and he puts his interest in the macabre down to a love of Alfred Hitchcock movies-though one therapist did suggest a much more disturbing root cause, which is why he ended up in a wood-chipper. A fascination with story structures has led to various experiments with genre novels and screenplays, and some of his experiments have escaped out into the world. Fortunately they are too weak to do much harm. The Sword in the Stone-Dead is his first crime novel, and he is currently working on a follow-up featuring magician-turned-detective Benjamin Vickery, and a contemporary crime novel set in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire’s answer to St. Mary Mead-if St. Mary Mead were to ask: Where’s the least exciting place you could set a crime novel?