The Cobalt Sky - blog tour

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The Cobalt Sky by Keith Dixon

• Paperback: 317 pages

• Publisher: Semiologic Ltd; Pocket Size ed. edition (3 Sept. 2019)

• Language: English

• ISBN-10: 2490675087

• ISBN-13: 978-2490675081

Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cobalt-Sky-Sam-Dyke-Investigations/dp/2490675087

BLURB

Edward Ransome is one of England's most famous artists - rich, a friend to celebrities and known for his devotion to his craft for almost fifty years.Then someone steals his favourite painting - the painting that set Ransome on course to fame and fortune but was never sold and rarely seen.Sam Dyke is hired to find the painting, and the thief, but quickly discovers that the loss of the painting is only one of the many losses suffered by Ransome, and his family. What's more, whoever stole the painting is keen to keep it a secret, and committing murder to do so is not out of the question. Soon Dyke finds he has more than a simple burglary on his hands - it's a case that spans generations and includes more than one ordinary crime.The Cobalt Sky is a subtle but exciting exploration of the ways in which families can hurt each other over time ... without even trying.From the two-time winner of the Chanticleer Reviews CLUE Award in the private eye/noir category, for The Bleak and The Innocent Dead.

Cheekypee Reads and Reviews – Guest post – 10 Things About Me

1. Although I’m British, I’ve wanted to live in France since I was 18 and saw a TV program about Lawrence Durrell, the writer, who owned a château in France and wrote in his courtyard. I now live in France, but my wifi won’t reach to any nearby courtyard, so I write indoors, looking outside!

2. I began reading crime novels seriously when the boss of my department at college (I taught drama and American literature for a while) brought suitcases full of crime novels back from his US holidays. I soon discovered lots of writers I’d never heard of before, and they were writing gripping and intelligent detective and police procedurals and I knew one day I wanted to do the same.

3. I was born in Yorkshire and brought up in the Midlands, but I don’t have the same sense of displacement that my character Sam Dyke has. I was three months old when my family moved south. Sam was in his twenties when he moved across the Pennines to the North West. He has a firmer sense of his Yorkshireness.

4. There’s a debate amongst writers as to whether you’re a ‘pantser’ or a ‘plotter’. The former is someone who writes by the seat of their pants, making stuff up as they go. A plotter is someone who does what it says on the tin – plots everything in advance. I used to be the first, having only a start point, a middle crisis and an ending in mind. However, it was taking me too long to write books (the first Sam Dyke took 7 years, the second 4) and always required a lot of re-writing. My view now is that structure is really important in crime novels – you have to be able to surprise your readers by taking them in a different direction, or by not giving them what they expect. And for me, I have to build those moments in advance. So I have to plot. Besides, I like it – it’s actually a very creative process and means that when I’m writing I know where I’m going and can focus on the quality of the writing itself.

5. I learned a valuable lesson about character building from reading the novels of James Lee Burke. Practically every scene in his novels – which are brilliant – turns around conflict between characters. And it’s compelling.

6. As I get older, I find I write later in the day. When I was young (I mean really young) I used to write after school or after work – 7 o’clock onwards. These days I find it can be after 11 o’clock before I start. There’s something about clearing the detritus from the day out of my head before I have the clarity to write.

7. Between the ages of 20 and 22 I wrote 7 novels, ranging from rip-offs of Frederick Forsyth and Len Deighton to science fiction and contemporary ‘literary’ books. They were all written on a Smith-Corona portable electric typewriter and I lost the manuscripts in a basement flood about ten years ago. No great loss!

8. I don’t know why, but I seem to have an affinity for American popular culture. I watch American cop shows, read American crime novels and my favourite ‘serious’ literature is American – The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath and so on. On the other hand, I’ve never been to America …

9. I don’t like writing sex scenes, so I don’t. I wrote one once for an early Sam Dyke book and took it out. It made me cringe.

10. I have both introvert and extravert tendencies. I’ll often find ways to be by myself – to read or to write – but I worked as an organizational psychologist for 19 years, standing in front of groups of up to 60 people training them in leadership or teamwork or whatever. I think this may be true of many writers – we don’t mind being alone, but we can learn to ‘up our game’ when confronted with larger groups. It’s a useful skill.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Keith Dixon was born in Yorkshire and grew up in the Midlands. He's been writing since he was thirteen years old in a number of different genres: thriller, espionage, science fiction, literary. Two-time winner of the Chanticleer Reviews CLUE First in Category award for Private Eye/Noir novel, he's the author of nine full-length books and one short-story in the Sam Dyke Investigations series and two other non-crime works, as well as two collections of blog posts on the craft of writing. His new series of Paul Storey Thrillers began in 2016 and there are now three books in the series.

Learn more about Keith by following him on Twitter @keithyd6, by reading his blog at http://www.cwconfidential.blogspot.com/or connect with him on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/SamDykeInvestigations/

You can find out more from his website at http://www.keithdixonnovels.com/