About

It started with a dog.

That is not a metaphor or a convenient origin story tidied up after the fact. It is simply what happened. A dachshund named Nala was a partner and daily companion for many years, and when she was gone the space she left behind was the shape of something that needed to be made. The Brass & Bone Investigations series is what got made.

Writing was not something that announced itself as a plan. It arrived sideways, without warning, the way the worthwhile things tend to arrive. There was no long-held ambition to be an author, no manuscript waiting in a drawer. There was a dog who deserved to be remembered properly, and a city that arrived in the imagination fully formed — fog-layered, class-stratified, breathing — and a former Watch Inspector who appeared at a desk in that city one day and declined to leave.

Gearhaven came first as a feeling. The sense of a place where the elevation of your street determines what you breathe and who notices you. Where the institutions that govern you are trustworthy right up until they aren’t. Where the fog is not atmosphere but politics, and the most honest thing about the city is what it chooses not to see. That feeling became a map. The map became a city. The city became two books, with more to come.

The series is set in a world that runs on steam and class distinction and the particular silence of things that have been deliberately not said. It is a mystery series, but the real subject is always the city — how it is organised, who it protects, who it forgets, and what it costs to keep seeing clearly when every institution around you has an interest in selective blindness. Tim Blackwood and Nala take the cases that conventional authorities have abandoned or quietly decided not to look at too closely. They take them seriously.

Away from the desk, the work tends to be with hands rather than words — woodworking, crafts, making things that weren’t there before. There is a satisfaction in that which writing shares and does not share simultaneously. You can hold a finished piece of woodwork. A finished book is a different kind of object. Both feel like something completed. You can find me at local comic conventions with some regularity, which tells you most of what you need to know about the rest of it.

One book published. More coming. The fog is still there. The office lamp is still on.

Built on loyalty.