I started Michael O’Leary’s collection of his non-fiction writing A Different Hat at the end section on Obituaries and Elegies. I wanted to read his obit of David Mitchell, the poet who back in 1960 at Wellington Teachers’ College was my mentor and occasional inside-back partner in social rugby on [...]

My 60 published books had virtually no presence outside New Zealand until AI fortuitously entered my working life. Admittedly the lack of presence was of my own making, for I aspired to write solely about New Zealand. I recall seeing 12 copies of my book ‘Ghost Towns of New Zealand’ [...]

At first, I didn’t know what Jeff was up to when he offered to redo the covers of my seven Dan Delaney thrillers. Digital book mentor Diana Holmes had suggested a cover makeover and I saw what she meant; I had seven very different, unrelated covers. Diana sent me examples [...]

Sanderson’s Way is my morning constitutional. It is probably no more than a kilometre there and back through this uniquely biodiverse wee forest sandwiched between the former State Highway One and the railway line at the entrance to Paekakariki. Such is the protection of the majestic old pohutukawa and macrocarpa [...]

Larry Bird is often waiting on the deck when I pull the morning curtains. He does not squawk insistently, like he did a month ago when I first met him. He has the bright eye and dipping head, signalling he is ready for breakfast. Jack next door told me he [...]

Eddie Pedder is a benign elderly gent pictured in the Press Gazette obituary May 5, 2020. It was updated two years later because Covid interrupted the planned celebration of his life I knew little about despite working a few metres away from him for five years in the late 1960s [...]

The Tears of Christ did not get past the early cover rough depicted for what became the third Dan Delaney mystery. It was the second attempt I made to call a book by that title, the first ending up as the Waiheke thriller The Monstrance. My childhood in the Bay [...]

Grant Robertson eyed my McGill tartan and said if he’d known I was wearing my kilt he would have worn more of his own clan colours than his scarf. We were gathered at Unity Books in Wellington for him launching my novel The Plot to Kill Peter Fraser. We had [...]

The gloriously kitsch Indo/Egyptian Civic Theatre at the centre of downtown Auckland is where my rookie detective Dan Delaney first encounters his Nazi nemesis. He has followed the nude cabaret dancer Freda Stark to the rehearsal room beneath the cinema, where the woman he is seeking is an onlooker. Freda [...]

The boundary between crime novels and literature was once wide but has now narrowed. Grant Robertson launched my second Dan Delaney mystery The Plot to Kill Peter Fraser at Unity Books in Wellington months before he became Finance Minister. ‘It’s really a novel,’ he said to me with a puzzled [...]

Nelson librarian Alyson Baker has reviewed my seven Dan Delaney spy mystery novels on her blog and the Crimewatch website. She concludes the first in the series, The Death Ray Debacle: ‘Read this book and learn about an amazing piece of New Zealand history, and at the same time try [...]

D2D, Draft2Digital, has so far offered me 16 distributors world-wide for my seven Dan Delaney e-book mysteries. These include Kobo, Amazon, Overdrive, Barnes and Noble, Gardners, Apple, Smashwords, Tolino, Bibliotheca, Scribd, Baker and Taylor, Hoopla, Vivlio, Barrowbox and Odilo. All I require now are orders for my books. I hope [...]

The Dan Delaney Mysteries ended last November with the final story Back Home in Derry. Coincidentally, both character and author made their final bows at age 79. The first outing was in 2015, when Delaney was a rookie detective aged 19. Every 10 years he has another story to tell, [...]

Publishing and writing began for me as two sides of the same coin. In 1961 I was elected editor of Wellington Teachers’ College student publications. A year of assembling student magazines with Wellington printer John Milne encouraged my own poetry and prose publication Miscellany. There was no subsidy, so I [...]

In 2015 I published The Death Ray Debacle, sub-title A Novel About the 1935 Kiwi Invention Spies Tried to Steal. As one reviewer said, it could as easily have been non-fiction, because most of it was true. I went for fiction so I could move between the true stories of [...]

Dan Fesperman’s The Double Game references every great spy writer from Childers and Buchan to Graham Greene and Le Carré. Gerald Seymour begins The Crocodile Hunter with his self-effacing and dispirited retirement-age spy catcher Jonas Merrick sitting by The Thames near Westminster next to a suicide jihadi on his way [...]

Back Home in Derry (by David McGill) review by Michael O’Leary The beginning of McGill’s latest Dan Delaney book is one of the most exhilarating or disturbing start to a story a reader could imagine, depending on whose side you are on. The time is 1970 and the scene is [...]

Paul McCartney offered his hand and hoped I would write a good article. John as in Reid the cricketer, not John Lennon. The nearest I got to him was saying hello back in the mid-sixties as I went on to the John Reid squash courts opposite Victoria University of [...]

Life as a Novel is a magnificent 575-page, two-volume biography of Maurice Shadbolt by Philip Temple. I won it in a competition to write about Shadbolt. The biography is as readable and complex as any of Shadbolt’s novels. It also proves yet again what is observed in the biography, namely [...]

Kia ora! Slainthe! Gesundheit. Greetings in three among many languages throughout this mainly English fictional literary autobiography by our Paekakariki poet laureate, Michael John O’Leary. He has Irish, Maori and a little German in his genes, and all are to the fore in these dream weavings of his literary coat [...]

Correction to yesterday's blog: It was my stuff-up yesterday, I should have said NZME launched a court case to get Australian owners of Stuff to negotiate sale, and failed, and today Stuff purchased for $1 by its NZ CEO and thus it is back in NZ hands. So I have [...]

Virtual launch today 6 May 2020 for print and e-book versions of my new thriller The Manger, the Mikdash and the Mosque Fifth Dan Delaney Mystery set in Israel in 1975. NZ Fiction reviewer Alyson Baker’s blog review published in Crime Watch: ‘Dan Delaney, now ‘damn near 60’, travels with [...]

The TV One evening news showed the shocking sight of the Christchurch building engulfed in flames. The Riccarton Road heritage structure had been abandoned since the earthquake, but it was really abandoned long before that, in my view. I had visited some years ago to see what had become of [...]