Hello. Since you’ve come to the website, and are reading this, my guess is that you have some interest in finding out a little more about me – although if you also plan to go through my bins to discover more, like A.J. Weberman did with Bob Dylan’s garbage, I wish you luck, and ask only that you be sure to clean up after yourself. I was born in Dublin in 1968, and have been writing fiction for money ever since my elementary school teacher, Mrs. Foley, paid me to produce “Tarzan” stories at five pence a time. This, though, wasn’t likely to be a sustainable model long-term, five pence only getting a person so far, even in 1974. (It was sufficient to buy two bags of popcorn and two Chew Man Chew chewing gums, back when slightly racist comestibles were still okay.) Thus it was that I largely shelved the idea of writing as a profession, aided by the fact that I didn’t know anyone who did it. Rialto, the area in which I grew up, was pretty much devoid of professional writers and artists, although for a time we did a good line in drug dealers. 

Torn from the indulgent and, indeed, profitable bosom of Mrs. Foley, I attended Synge Street CBS from the ages of seven to seventeen. I can’t claim it was an entirely happy experience, but I suspect that was rather the lot of most schoolchildren in Ireland in the seventies and eighties. I was sent to Synge Street because a) my father had gone there, and b) it was free. The Christian Brothers and their associated teachers generally did their best, but it was a secondary school in which art was not taught, music education was unavailable to senior students, physical exercise ceased after first year, and biology was not a subject option, in part because it was expensive to teach properly, but also because the bits about reproduction might have proved awkward for all concerned in a boys’ school: awkward, but undeniably informative, and even potentially useful. Still, never mind. I think I’ve caught up now. 

After school I worked in local government, as a barman, a shop assistant ,and a dogsbody (go-fer) at Harrods department store in London before studying English at Trinity College, Dublin, and journalism at Dublin City University. After graduation, I began working at the Irish Times newspaper as a freelance journalist, and continued to do so while writing what became my first novel, Every Dead Thing. It was the first piece of fiction I had written since school, one dreadful short story at university excepted. I had always believed that journalism would be the way I’d make a living through writing, but the Irish Times had many far better journalists, and it had quickly become clear to me that my preference lay with colour and feature writing, which are perhaps the closest journalistic forms to fiction. 

While I was at Trinity College, a summer work visa brought me to the Black Point Inn in Scarborough, Maine, and that state would eventually become the base of my fictional series detective, Charlie Parker. Parker made his first appearance in Every Dead Thing in 1999, as a former policeman hunting the murderer of his wife and daughter. Parker has since appeared in 21 further books in the series as well as a novella, The Reflecting Eye, and the standalone novel Bad Men – although the latter has since been absorbed into the larger series.

My other novels for adults include the aforementioned Bad Men (2003); the internationally bestselling The Book of Lost Things (2006) and its sequel, The Land of Lost Things (2023); and he (2017), a novel based on the life of Stan Laurel. 

In 2009, I published my first novel for younger readers, The Gates, which developed into a trilogy featuring young Samuel Johnson, his faithful dog Boswell, and a variety of demons, friendly and otherwise. The Samuel Johnson vs. the Devil series continued with Hell’s Bells (published in the US as The Infernals) in 2011 and The Creeps in 2013. A short story about Samuel and his friends, “The Monks of Appalling Dreadfulness,” was included in an omnibus edition of the Samuel Johnson books published in 2020. Actually, while I say they’re written for younger readers, I’ve never really made much distinction between writing for the young or the old. Apart from avoiding sex and swearing, the Samuel Johnson books simply assume that younger readers are at least as smart as older ones, and probably even smarter. I’m very fond of those novels, as I think the narrative voice is probably the closest to my own, and when I was young I loved books that made me laugh and think – oh, and maybe scared me a bit, too. I still do. 

With my wife, Jennifer Ridyard, I wrote The Chronicles of the Invaders, a science-fiction trilogy for young adults, comprising the novels Conquest (2013), Empire (2014), and Dominion (2015). I’ve always loved science-fiction, but it has always suffered from being somewhat male-dominated. (If it’s female, it’s fantasy; if it’s male, it’s science-fiction.) The Chronicles were an attempt to address that issue, and also gave me the opportunity to discuss the genre in schools through books and film. Showing teenagers extracts from Planet of the Apes, Silent Running, and Alien was always likely to prove more popular than double math. My short stories have been collected in two books, Nocturnes (2004) and Night Music: Nocturnes, Vol. 2 (2015), although many of the tales were written specially for those volumes, and a third is in the works. “The Caxton Private Lending Library and Book Depository,” included in Night Music, won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award for Best Short Story, while “On The Anatomization of an Unknown Man (1637) by Frans Mier”, also from Night Music, won the CWA Dagger for Best Short Story. 

As for non-fiction, with my co-editor, Declan Burke, and assistant editor, Ellen Clair Lamb, I won the Anthony, Agatha, and Macavity Awards for Books to Die For (2012), a collection of essays by mystery writers about the piece of crime fiction they would recommend above any other to a reader. Alone, I’ve published, Horror Express (2018), a Midnight Movie Monograph that used the titular 1972 film, and the making of it, to discuss nostalgia, childhood, the romance of trains, the history of the Hollywood blacklist, and the dietary, creative, and even sexual peculiarities of various actors, among other subjects. Horror Express was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award. More recently, I’ve compiled Shadow Voices: 300 Years of Irish Genre Fiction: A History in Stories (2021), a history-cum-anthology that uses Irish genre writing to discuss the development of genre fiction in general, and to address some of the misconceptions we continue to have about genre writing, particularly here in Ireland. Seriously, don’t get me started on that. There’s a reason Shadow Voices is more than a thousand pages long… 

Finally, I host ABC to XTC, a weekly radio show on the internet station RTÉ Gold, that celebrates the punk, post-punk, electronic, and New Wave music of the late 1970s and 1980s – in other words, the music of my late childhood and adolescence. Look, 1978-85 was as good, and certainly as varied, as music got. Other opinions are available, but they’re wrong. 

Jennie and I continue to live in Dublin, where we walk our dogs, support various wine industries, and enjoy company of our grown-up sons and their significant others, as long as they don’t eat too much."