Twelve Days of Bookmas: Martin Edwards

Martin Edwards was born at Knutsford, Cheshire and is an Oxford-educated attorney. He's also a member of the Murder Squad collective of crime writers and chairman of the nominations sub-committee for the CWA Diamond Dagger Award. He's served as archivist of both the Crime Writers Association and the prestigious Detection Club.

Martin is the author of a series featuring Liverpool lawyer Harry Devlin—with titles of books taken from hit songs in the 1960s—as well as the Lake District Series with DCI Hannah Scarlett and Oxford historian Daniel Kind. His latest Lake District novel is The Hanging Wood, in which Hannah Scarlett takes on a cold case when a young woman seeking Scarlett's help is found dead.

Martin sent along this holiday offering, which has a very special significance for him tied to today's day, December 28th:

My burning ambition was always to have a crime novel published, and shortly before Christmas 1990, I received the marvellous news that my first Harry Devlin novel, ALL THE LONELY PEOPLE, had been accepted. A fantastic present, but in fact it was topped by events on the 28 December that year, when my first child was born. My aim from childhood had been to be a writer rather than a father, but I realised that day what matters even more than writing. And today, Jonathan celebrates his 21st, while in less than three months' time, ALL THE LONELY PEOPLE enjoys a fresh life as a Crime Classic in the series published by Arcturus. Suffice to say, I have been very fortunate.

My favourite charity is St Luke's (Cheshire) Hospice. The people there do marvellous work. My father spent the last weeks of his life in the hospice, and although for us it was a terrible time, the atmosphere in St Luke's did a very great deal to ease the pain.