Murder among children
Every evening in Watton is more or less the same. Around six, the children start to gather in the cafe in the High Street, sitting at the moulded plastic tables, pushing butt ends round the ash trays,...
View ArticleThe hatred of strangers
It didn't take long for Jeremy Whaley to realise something was wrong. It was four in the morning, he was alone in his cottage near Petworth in the shadows of the West Sussex Downs, his dogs were asleep...
View ArticleThe selling of Postman Pat
When John Cunliffe sat down in the back bedroom of his home in the Lake District 15 years ago and started to write a story about a postman called Pat, something very strange began to happen. Cunliffe...
View ArticleWhere there’s a will, there’s a lawyer
Theobald Mathew died early one Sunday morning in July 1983, as he lay in his sister's arms in his villa in Le Treyas on the French Riviera. He was only 44 and his death was sudden but he had written a...
View ArticleMurder as a choice of lifestyle – the case of Elsey and Petrolini
Jamie Petrolini sits alone in his prison cell. Last year, he was a schoolboy cramming for his A levels at a sixth form college in Oxford, striding around in baggy purple jeans and a big white tee-shirt...
View ArticleClimbing out of old age
There is something about climbing that lends itself to symbolism - the struggle towards the highest peak, the search for footholds on the future - and so naturally, it is tempting to take one look at...
View ArticleThe stolen children
When Archie Roach was a small child in the early 1950s, he lived in a place called Framlingham, a short row of tin shacks and little brick houses which stood on a dusty, dry plateau near the edge of a...
View ArticleSatanism in Sussex
Lewes is the kind of old English town that tourists like on postcards, with a flag fluttering over a Norman castle and good old pubs in twisting streets of antique homes and churches. It is an island...
View ArticleBob Hoskins and the filming of Captain Jack’s Adenture
He was obviously an idiot. In the summer of 1991, most national newspapers carried a short story about a man they called “Yorkshire's answer to Captain Haddock” who lived in Whitby and owned an ancient...
View ArticleThe strange case of the vanishing boy
Just over four years ago, on the afternoon of Monday June 13 1994, a 13-year-old American boy named Nicholas Barclay vanished on his way home from playing basketball near his home in San Antonio, Texas.
View ArticleThe frustrated dreams of ordinary people
It was a dark day in Lewes Crown Court, and the man in the dock looked guilty. He was a shabbly little guy, probably in his early 50s, with a balding head and a black leather jacket and he was accused...
View ArticleThe dark side of the Bay City Rollers
It's hard to be sure exactly when Les McKeown's bubble burst. Maybe it was right back on his first night in the Bay City Rollers when the lead guitarist ordered him to dump his girl friend and Les...
View ArticleLies and confusion around the fatal sinking of a trawler
Luck sometimes gets so bad that it no longer seems like luck at all.
View ArticleA lifeline on Death Row
Jane Officer did not think much of her driver. He was playing redneck country music on his radio, he had a big belly, untidy grey hair, a mouth full of chewing gum and he was determined to inflict his...
View ArticleGiving Nick Davies a bad name
I have never liked my name. I've always thought it dull, but, on the other hand, it has never done me any harm. Now, however, nobody at all likes my name. Suddenly, it is mud of the nastiest sort, so...
View ArticleThe Westminster Abbey Game
The Westminster Abbey Game is a contest for two teams. On one side are the Wrist Slappers, who may be male or female, are invariably elderly and grey-haired and usually wear conservative clothes from...
View ArticlePlastic people
This is the story of an American romance, of a man and a woman alone in this crazy world with only their dreams and a standard set of surgical tools to inspire them, and of how they found happiness in...
View ArticleSolving the mystery of Arlena Twigg
This is a most peculiar story. It has nothing to do with the Presidential election or the space shuttle or anything else. It does not even really tell you very much about America. It is just peculiar...
View ArticleThe stolen children
When Archie Roach was a small child in the early 1950s, he lived in a place called Framlingham, a short row of tin shacks and little brick houses which stood on a dusty, dry plateau near the edge of a...
View ArticleSatanism in Sussex
Lewes is the kind of old English town that tourists like on postcards, with a flag fluttering over a Norman castle and good old pubs in twisting streets of antique homes and churches. It is an island...
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