I'm coming to the end of a productive year as a writer.

In March, the Welsh firm of GG Books, headed by the charismatic Dr Gareth John, took a punt with my first novel, Slowly Burning, about a former Fleet Street crime bureau chief washed up on a Welsh weekly newspaper. It's been reviewed by Dan Bradley in New Welsh Review and other notices are imminent.

In November, the Kent-based publisher Cultured Llama brought out my second book of stories, Who Killed Emil Kreisler?, which includes the story Christ, Ronnie, Christ, winner of this year's inaugural Templar Shorts Prize. The title of the collection is based on a real incident: the fatal shooting of the Viennese composer Anton Webern in Austria towards the end of World War 2. Added to the dedicatees is an in memoriam for Raymond Norwood Bell, the US infantryman responsible for the death. Bell's is a sad story: he survived the war but died an alcoholic, filled with remorse for the wartime incident.

Rather than give complicated links (URLs) to these titles here, I urge you to look for them on Amazon and other distributor sites, or just to Google the books' names. You'd please me no end by buying them and even more by reading them and passing on your comments.

My first story collection, Funderland, is still available and won the admiration of reviewers in the Guardian, the Times, the Independent, and several others, including the New Welsh Review and Planet-the Welsh Internationalist.

I'm now at work on a second novel.