www.leomcneir.com
The website of crime writer Leo McNeir
About Leo
Leo McNeir is the author of the series of crime novels with a waterways setting featuring Marnie Walker, her lover Ralph Lombard, her close friend Anne Price (sometimes known as "Anne with an ‘e’ ") and several others. He doesn’t guarantee that all the characters, even some of the central core, will feature in every book. Some of them may get bumped off from time to time. That’s crime fiction for you!
When not writing novels, Leo is a linguist and lexicographer. He has compiled and edited ten dictionaries in fifteen languages since the first one was published by Cassell in 1993.
They include the official dictionaries of the National Assembly for Wales (English and Welsh), the Scottish Parliament (English and Gaelic) and a joint project for the Irish Parliament and the Northern Ireland Assembly (English and Irish).
For the record, the others are specialist dictionaries in Basque, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
Leo and his team have recently produced an online spell-checker for Scottish Gaelic, the first of its kind. They are now working on the Scottish Parliament's interactive online dictionary service -- probably the first of its kind in the world -- and have just completed their work compiling a Gaelic thesaurus.
Leo and his wife, cookery writer Cassandra McNeir, share their 300 year-old cottage in Northamptonshire with their cat, Mog, who adopted them in 2002. Leo and Cassandra have discovered that they are very intelligent people; Mog had them fully trained in less than a week.
Their previous cat, Dolly, died in a road accident shortly before the first novel was published in 2000. She lives on in this series of novels.
They keep their narrowboat on the Grand Union Canal not far from their home in a village that bears no resemblance whatever to the imaginary village of Knightly St John, described in the books.