Just a short post to say, as the postcard  says, Inspector Bucket and the Beast will be formally launched on October 13 at Waterstones, Kingsgate, Huddersfield. I’ll be there signing copies of my novel between 11am and 1pm so I hope you’ll come along if you can  – or I shall feel very lonely! The book will be discounted at the store on the day (at £9.99) so it’s much cheaper to buy it there  – and of course you get my autograph too! What a great deal!

But, of course, if you can’t wait (!) it’s actually available now via http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/peter+cooper/inspector+bucket+and+the+beast/

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Or, of course, you can order it from  the lovely people at http://dahliapublishing.co.uk/

You might be interested to know (or you might not) that I did an interview for Two Valleys Radio on Sunday which was great fun. Millie and Matt were very friendly and made me feel at ease immediately. Apart from being upstaged by a nine year old (not difficult I know) and losing my place whilst reading out an extract, it went very well. There’s a link to Two Valleys here:

http://www.twovalleysradio.co.uk/listenagain

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was nerve wracking waiting to go on air (as us broadcasters say) especially when I was listening to the Sunday style thought for the day from the Reverend Joe and then the little 9 year old girl, Abigail, talking about her book, Miriam and the Hens – a title structured in an eerily similar way to Inspector Bucket and The Beast. Suddenly the extracts I’d chosen to read (about little children being murdered and half dead people crawling though the midnight mist to take their revenge) seemed slightly out of place! Also when Matt asked me, just before we went live, what music I’d been listening to whilst I was writing the book, that threw me too. (The true answer is I don’t listen to music whilst I am writing.) All I could think of at that moment was Dylan’s new album Tempest that I’d been playing just last week. Perhaps fortunately they didn’t have that album,  although on reflection the  barely restrained violence in Dylan’s lyrics would have matched the darker aspects of the novel really well! But  inspiration hit and I thought of Bryan Ferry’s As time goes by album. The title track from that album seemed to reflect  the novel’s dip back into  former time very well. Playing Miss Otis Regrets, with all its repressed horror, also seemed to fit my last extract. Seeing as that reading ended with a reference to the moonlight, the playing of Van Morrison’s Moondance seemed a nicely apt way to finish the interview.

My brother says I sounded like Olivier when I was reading the Beast. But then he is my brother. The truth is I sounded more like Gollum!