Michael Walters's Blog

I've just received a first sight of the proposed cover for The Outcast which is due for release by Quercus in November.  A s you can see, it's really rather splendid.

In celebration of the first sighting of the cover, I've now added a new page for The Outcast on the website.  I'll also be adding an exclusive extract very shortly, so keep watching the skies. 

Finally, thanks to Maxine of the ever-excellent Petrona blog for her endorsement of the books in this week's Sunday Salon.   All this, and a starred review in Publishers Weekly...

You'll probably be aware by now of the three Mongolian manly sports of archery, horse-riding and wrestling.  But you've possibly never heard of the sport of ankle-bone shooting.  If not, this article from the ever-enlightening UB Post will tell you everything you need to know. 

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the sports front, there seems to be nothing to stop the global expansion of football (that would be soccer to any US readers).  As over here we wend our way into the latter stages of the European Championships, out east the Mongolian Premier League has just kicked off. 

We Brits seem to have exported our perhaps not entirely enviable reputation for pre-nuptial drinking and carousing to most of the known world, but Mongolia had largely escaped.  Until now. 

You might have noticed a few minor changes to the main Shadow Walker website over the last few days.   With support from the ever-excellent webmeister John O'Malley, I've now been let loose to update the site for myself, with the result that I've now (finally...) added some reviews of The Adversary as well as one or two other minor updates.  We've also added a news page which I'll be launching very shortly, and, most importantly, I've finally included some links from this blog to a number of the other excellent crime fiction blogs out there - I'll be adding more of those shortly. . 

I'll also be adding a page for the third Nergui book, The Outcast, in the very near future, including an exclusive excerpt...

I recently posted about Richard Tuschman's excellent work on the cover for the forthcoming US edition of The Adversary.  Berkley Prime Crime have now sent me the final version, which is very slightly different and, I think, even better than the version Richard posted on his blog. 

Apologies for the shameless self-promotion, but I couldn't resist drawing your attention to what I think is a pretty stunning piece of work.  Thanks once again, Richard. 

No - not a previously undiscovered Robert Ludlum novel (see Peter Rozovsky's comment on my last posting...), but a new blog set up by my agent, the estimable Peter Buckman of The Ampersand Agency.  The blog is designed to stimulate interest in and discussion about - well, people like me, I suppose. 

Apart from yours truly, the Agency's clients include a number of crime writers - Helen Black, S. J. Bolton and Cora Harrison, amongst others - and a pretty diverse range of other authors.  So best wishes to Amy Wigelsworth who's maintaining the blog - give her a visit!

The academic and critic John Sutherland is adept at highlighting literary quirks (as in his splendid books and Is Heathcliffe a Murderer? and Where was Rebecca Shot? which explored the possible implications of apparent literary anomalies).  In a piece in Saturday's Daily Telegraph, he examined the tendency, common in crime fiction but unusual elsewhere, of applying themed titles to series novels.  Some are obvious - Erle Stanley Gardner, James Patterson - but others are less so.  The Raymond Chandler thematic signature is obvious but for some reason had never occurred to me.  And of course I'm also guilty of this practice myself...

Incidentally, the list of James Patterson's 'nursery rhyme' titles seemed ripe for parody and reminded me vaguely of a New Statesman competition some years back in which readers were asked to come up with suggestions for as yet unpublished novels by famous authors.  My favourite was John Le Carré's One Potato, Two Potato, Spy.