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Welcome to the website of crime writer Leo McNeir

The site is maintained by Enigma Publishing and we update it at regular intervals. You will find brief biographical notes, details of Leo’s novels and how to order them. Please do that! To navigate around the site, just click on the links above (Author, Titles, Orders, etc). We'd like to point out that the excerpts from Leo's novels and articles are copyright of the author.

Writer’s Blog?

Someone recently suggested to me that I should consider writing a regular daily diary of the life of a crime novelist.

When the proposal was first made, my initial reaction was near-hysterical laughter induced by a state of shock. Anyone who has had any contact with me will know that the only way I find time to write my books at all is to get up early in the morning and spend an hour or two on them before the interruptions of the working day.

I’m sure that for me, Writer’s Blog would very soon degenerate into Writer’s Block!

There must be many reasons for writing a blog, but the basic one must surely be to communicate a point of view. Perhaps it’s because writing novels is closely linked with that idea that I don’t feel the incentive to blog. In fact I don’t know any other crime writers who do. If they did, I would certainly read them, because I find the whole subject fascinating and absorbing.

Being realistic about it, the chances of my ever finding the time and energy to write a blog are very remote. To be honest, at the end of a long day editing dictionaries in various languages – after my early morning stint at the keyboard – I feel quite lucky if both eyes are pointing in the same direction simultaneously.

And there is another dimension. I am not by nature a shy, retiring little flower, but I am a rather private person to the extent that I would not feel very comfortable baring my soul in public, even to the relatively small number of readers of this web site. I try to convey in my books a wide range of ideas about life, with its contradictions, its passions, its ups and its downs. Perhaps for someone like me, fiction is the best way to communicate.

Talking of which, I’m managing to make good progress with the latest book and I’ve been compiling more notes on others to follow in the series. I’ve recently been reorganising my study and trying to be ruthless about throwing away papers that have no place there any more. Looking through old files has brought up memories of the time when I was first published back in 2000.

It seems like yesterday, and it surprises me to reflect that six novels have now been published, with (I hope) many more to come, both in the Marnie Walker series and in others that will emerge in the fullness of time.

I hope you have enjoyed the journey so far as much as I have. Thanks for coming with me.

All good wishes,