On how I grappled for a gun - but could never use it in a book ... Let me tell you a story, and before we get started, let’s break all...

As Alfred Hitchcock once said, people tend to be most frightened not when something happens, but when they are waiting for it to happen....

When he was sixteen, Alan applied for a scholarship at Atlantic College, the international sixth form boarding school in Wales, which, at...

It is hard for most people to comprehend what a grip Francisco Franco had on Spain, but perhaps one story will illustrate it. Franco...

Alan (aka Sally Spencer, in case you didn't know) was born, a few years after the end of the Second World War, in Marston, a salt panning...

Actually, the Shahbanou - Empress of Iran - comes calling. The school where we worked was on a new development at the edge of the desert,...

As you can see, Tehran is surrounded by mountains, making its airport one of the most dangerous in the world to land at. In 1976, when we...

My readers devote several hours of their valuable time to reading something I have written – so how could I not love them? But there are...

Somerset Maughan once said "there are only three rules to writing, but unfortunately nobody knows what they are". And he was dead right...

When I first started writing, books stayed in print for several years, but over time the publishing/book selling processes have...