Sam Blake's Blog, page 4

We can’t travel this Mother’s Day, but you can give your Mum something that will transport her to a mysterious country house hotel in West Cork called Hare’s Landing…

And this Mother’s Day, Sam will write your mum a special note that you can enclose with your gift – just contact her at [email protected] with your proof of purchase and she’ll pop a (free) signed, author exclusive card (see the image below) into the post with your message to your Mum.

What people are saying about The Dark Room:

Blake… has a wonderful gift for description, ensuring the reader can picture every scene in exquisite detail. Her atmospheric depiction of West Cork triumphs in this novel, along with the wonderful portrayal of Rachel’s dog – a German Shepherd called Jasper who is pivotal to helping them with their investigations.

Sunday Independent

From creepy portraits whose eyes follow you around to hidden love letters, long-buried bodies and illicit affairs, The Dark Room is an infectious blend of Agatha Christie-esque murder mystery (a fact the characters playfully allude to) and Gothic whodunnit with a hint of supernatural chiller. It’s also deliciously good fun.

Sunday Business Post

Watch the trailer to see the magnificent landscape of West Cork:

Make Mother’s Day special this year with a personalised gift – click here to order your copy in your preferred format. The Mother’s Day card offer includes print books and The Dark Room audio book read by Aoife McMahon – Sam will be delighted to send the card to wherever you are in the world. Contact her at [email protected] before Wednesday 10th March to ensure your card arrives in Ireland on time – if you are outside Ireland please allow for postal time/delays.

You can order a signed copy of The Dark Room from The Gutter Bookshop or pick it up online at *my* local bookshop, The Village Bookshop in Greystones .It’s also available from Dubray Books and Eason here or in audio from Amazon.

Click here to read the opening of The Dark Room or click the image below to listen to an excerpt of the audio book:

Happy Mother’s Day!

#IrelandReads is a fabulous public libraries initiative running in partnership with publishers, booksellers, authors and many others as part of the Government’s ‘Keep Well’ campaign. On Thursday 25 February people of all ages are invited to get reading, to take some time to relax and to do the things you enjoy (like reading!) as an essential part of looking after your mental wellbeing. I’m reading an extract from The Dark Room for Cork Libraries, and chatting to Wicklow readers online about what I read. I’ll definitley be switching off for part of the day to read too!

Readers and writers all over Ireland have taken the pledge at www.irelandreads.ie to squeeze in a read.

You’ll only need 20 mintes (and a cup of tea or a lovely frothy coffee!) to read the opening of The Dark Room – click below to find the Prologue and Chapter 1. The Dark Room will transport you to West Cork and a mysterious country house hotel called Hare’s Landing, but first meet Alfie Bows and Rachel Lambert…

The-Dark-Room-Extract-3Download

The Dark Room was an Eason No 1 for three weeks, has been in the Irish top ten for five weeks, outsold Graham Norton (woot!) and has been getting fabulous reviews – you can read some highlights here – just scroll down.

To read more, you can order a signed copy from The Gutter Bookshop or pick it up online at MY local bookshop, The Village Bookshop in Greystones (perfect for Mother’s Day, see my post tomorrow for a special extra you can add to your gift!) It’s also available from Dubray Books and Eason here or in digital or audio from Amazon.

Thank you for squeezing in a read! I hope you enjoy it

Audio is a massively growing area, and particularly now, when it can be hard to concentrate, it’s a superb way of consuming fiction and getting away from it all in your head, without needing to focus on the page. We might be at home but with homeschooling and trying to work, the space you need to read is often squeezed out – with an audio book you can even listen on your walk, an added incentive to get out for some exercise and a way to make it more interesting!

I’m really blessed to have the fabulous Aoife McMahon reading The Dark Room, out now from Bolinda Publishing – Aoife has extensive experience in theater, television, and narration. Winner of the 2002 Best Actress Gemini Award for Random Passage opposite Colm Meaney, Aoife has also performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Old Vic, and recently completed a U.K. tour of Goodnight Mister Tom. Aoife is known for her work on Broken (2017) and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (2020). She has an audio book fan club all of her own having read so many brilliant Irish books, including Normal People and LOTS of thrillers!

It’s available in audio from Bolinda the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa – not yet in the US for American listeners, as we’ve held onto US rights as they will go to a US publisher if we can tempt one to take a gamble Rights enquiries to Simon Trewin!

I chatted to author James Murphy recently who gave his verdict of The Dark Room audio book, as someone new to the medium. He’s also about to launch a new podcast A Life of Crime (Writing), which promises to be excellent listening!

I’m delighted that The Dark Room is still getting incredible feedback – today in a review by the Irish Times. Declan Burke really knows his crime!

This is such lovely feedback to add to the five star reviews The Dark Room has garnered so far:

There’s shades of Rebecca in this small-town mystery, full of atmosphere and menace and with a satisfyingly complex plot. The Dark Room is another winning page-turner from Blake and the perfect read for curling up in front of the fire on a winter’s night. Although with its shocking reveals and ghostly undertones, good luck getting to sleep afterwards…NY Times bestseller and Edgar nominated author, Catherine Ryan Howard.

‘Laced with creepy menace and dark characters that live in the mind… gets under the skin very quickly.’ Daily Mail

‘Thriller fans won’t be able to resist this ingenious thriller that is deftly crafted and beautifully plotted. Rich in atmosphere, intensity and suspense, Sam Blake’s The Dark Room is a gripping and tense chiller where the pages just turn themselves sure to go down a treat with fans of Lisa Jewell and C L Taylor.’ Bookish Jottings

Grab your copy from your chosen retailer and in your preferred format here:

The Dark Room

I’m absolutely thrilled with the response to The Dark Room, it’s hit the No 1 slot in Eason for THREE weeks in a row, and is an Irish Times TOP 10 bestseller! The blogger response has been amazing with a solid 4* and 5* rating from the blog tour organised by the incredible Anne Cater. Here’s just one review from Bookish Jottings:

A sinister, twisted and atmospheric thriller sure to send many a chill scuttling down your spine, Sam Blake’s The Dark Room is a nail-biting page-turner readers will not be able to put down….Thriller fans won’t be able to resist this ingenious thriller that is deftly crafted and beautifully plotted. Rich in atmosphere, intensity and suspense, Sam Blake’s The Dark Room is a gripping and tense chiller where the pages just turn themselves sure to go down a treat with fans of Lisa Jewell and C L Taylor.

The Daily Mail also had lovely things to say

‘Laced with creepy menace and dark characters that live in the mind… gets under the skin very quickly.’

The press has been fabulous, with a huge article in the Sunday Independent

And I did a really lovely interview with RTE Arena’s Sean Rocks which is now on the RTE Culture website, find out all about how I came up with the story (or it found me, more accurately) and the spooks in my house! :

Andrew Lynch got the scoop on my top 10 favourite tracks for the Business Post’s Rhythm Nation, which includes Katy Perry’s Firework (mindblowingly brilliant at the #BidenInauguration)

The most exciting thing is hearing the feedback from readers and seeing their posts on social, I’m thrilled that this book has been received so well, it’s a bit different from what’s out there and readers are telling me it really does transport you to a country house hotel in West Cork called Hare’s Landing….

Inspiration comes at the strangest times. I write when I’m on holiday (in fact I write ALL the time), and I was just finishing a book that I thought would follow Keep Your Eyes on Me – another standalone, but set in London rather than Ireland –  when an image popped into my head that wouldn’t go away.

It was the height of summer, and I was in Helford Passage, Cornwall, where we’ve been going for every summer for three weeks for about fifteen years. I was sitting beside the river (only a few hundred yards from Frenchman’s Creek) when a picture arrived in my head of a dark-haired woman in green shorts, jogging down the beach, a German Shepherd lolloping along beside her. I could see her so clearly – her hair pulled up into a loose pony tail, her feet pounding the wet sand.

Helford Passage beach.

Directly across the river from where I was sitting is an old cottage and the ruin of what I discovered (with help from author Liz Fenwick who lives on that side of the river) was the original customs officer’s gaol. I felt sure the ruined building and the woman were somehow connected, but I had yet to find out how…

The custom officer’s cottage and gaol at the mouth of the Helford River. Photo by author Liz Fenwick, who I take the ferry over to meet every summer.

I didn’t know who the running woman was or what her story could be, but a few days later I visited Mel Chambers‘ ceramics studio in the nearby village, and I was struck by the hares on the tiles she makes. A print of running hares had recently lit a creative lightbulb in my head, and suddenly the story of a country house hotel called Hare’s Landing, with a ruin in the grounds, began to unfold – but it wasn’t in Cornwall, it was in Ireland, in West Cork.

When she believed in herself miracles happened…a specially commissioned tile from Mel Chambers’ Alchemy Tiles

In The Dark Room, Rachel Lambert is a film location scout based in London, who, trying to discover the story behind the death of a homeless man, Alfie Bows, is led to Hare’s Landing. In New York, crime journalist Caroline Kelly has been suspended – furious and needing a break, she books a holiday in West Cork. When the two meet, they discover that Hare’s Landing has a story of its own, one which someone doesn’t want them to uncover.

Below is the house that inspired Hare’s Landing itself, it’s a hotel in Falmouth called Merchant’s Manor – there are two large statues of dogs outside the porch (you can just see them here), although in The Dark Room they are hares. I often write here and plot in their beautiful book nook, and it was calling out to be in a book!

Merchant’s Manor Hotel in Falmouth



The perfect book nook plotting spot in Merchant’s Manor Hotel, Falmouth. Tea is served on a table made of books!

As I worked on the idea, getting closer and closer to what had actually happened at Hare’s Landing, I could hear violins and smell perfume – doors slammed mysteriously and it became clear that Alfie Bows, a violinist, and Honoria Smyth, the original owner of the house, were making their presence felt. I was almost at the end of the first draft when I discovered that in Irish mythology, hares are the messengers between worlds – and everything began to make sense.

This is the first time I’ve set a book in the same month that it’s being released, and while we can’t travel at the moment, I hope The Dark Room will give you a glimpse of January in West Cork – and Hare’s Landing, a house full of secrets…

There’s shades of Rebecca in this small-town mystery, full of atmosphere and menace and with a satisfyingly complex plot. The Dark Room is another winning page-turner from Blake and the perfect read for curling up in front of the fire on a winter’s night. Although with its shocking reveals and ghostly undertones, good luck getting to sleep afterwards…

NY Times bestseller and Edgar nominated author, Catherine Ryan Howard.

Pick up your copy here, in digital, audio or print:

The Dark Room

It’s launch week for The Dark Room, but in these strange times we have to adapt! I normally have two launches for each book – one in Dublin and one at The Royal St George Yacht Club. The Yacht Club launches are huge, and filled with friends and family, with the bookshop provided by Dubray Books. The Dublin launch is my chance to have a night out with my writer friends and thank them for all their support during the year; past launches have seen us move from Hodges Figgis beautiful bookshop (the oldest in Dublin) to The Blind Pig Speakeasy (a secret cocktail bar in the heart of the city) and the legendary library at Lillies Bordello.

This year we can’t meet to raise a glass of wine, so I’m going to be live on the Sam Blake Facebook page at 1pm every day this week (4th-8th January) talking about the inspiration behind the story, the characters and the setting for The Dark Room.

I’ve got some fabulous giveaways lined up including the hare tile below, and a brilliant video created by the genius team at exhalemedia.ie that will be premiering on the Eason site and in their social media to give readers a flavour of the book. Despite not being able to leave the house, I plan to have a great week!

‘When she believed in herself miracles happened’ : Mel Chambers ceramic hares were a significant element in the inspiration for The Dark Room, and this specially commissioned tile made by her, is a Facebook giveaway prize for one lucky reader.

I loved writing The Dark Room and I adore the cover created by the brilliant team at Corvus Books. Check out my post about the inspiration for the story later this week, and you’ll see how eerily close the house on the cover is to the real house I had in my head as I was writing. There have been lots of serendipitious moments in the creation of this book – starting with the hares and the name of the country house hotel in West Cork where the story is set. It’s a spooky place where the secrets of the past linger, where doors slam and the sound of violin music is ever present – it was only when I was well into the story that I discovered that in Irish mythology, hares are believed to be the messengers who travel between worlds – and so many elements of the story began to fall into place.

No book is created without a team behind it, and I can’t give a thank you speech at a launch, but I can say thank you here to the whole team at Corvus, my fabulous editor Sarah Hodgson, my brilliant copyeditor Steve O’Gorman (what would I do without you?!) and to my amazing agent Simon Trewin, who is my sounding board for ideas, my creative partner in a whole range of initiatives and without whom none of this would have happened. THANK YOU!

Here’s the 30 second teaser video

With paperback of KEEP YOUR EYES ON ME hitting the shops now, and proof copies of THE DARK ROOM reaching reviewers ahead of publiation in January, I ‘finished’ the second draft of REMEMBER MY NAME yesterday – which will be Sam Blake book 6, and is due out January 2022 – I’m ahead of myself!.

When I say ‘finished’, it’s a very loose term – I’ve finished it enough to send it to the printers to be spiral bound for the next stage. The third draft I always read on paper – I’m already thinking of things I need to add, but reading it like a real book (as opposed to on the screen) shows me whether the plot works and if the flow is right.

I think I enjoy this part of the process the most – I was telling the Writers Ink writing group yesterday that the first draft always feels like an uphill sprint – after many years of practice I know not to stop and start a deep dive into research on the way up the hill – most of that has been done in the planning stage, but there’s often the odd thing I realise I don’t know, or I forget someone’s name. Rather than interupting the flow, that sprint, I just leave a gap and mark it ‘888’ in the text so that I can find it again. If I stopped, I know I’d take ages to get back up to speed again!

For me, the first draft is about finding the story, discovering things that, despite my fairly detailed planning at the start, I didn’t know about the characters. Then I go over it on the screen from beginning to end, tweaking and (mainly) deleting the repetition, fixing or changing names, making sure there’s enough descriptive detail for you to see the picture.

This next part of the drafting process, reading it on paper, gives me a chance to stop running, and wander into the garden and look at the flowers, pulling out the weeds and reorganising the pots so everything is displayed to its best advantage. I read this draft right through, red pen in hand, adusting lines as I go and making notes on the parts to check/bits to add.

As I was driving home from the school run today (I do a lot of plot ruminating in the car) I realised that I very rarely write THE END on a draft – I think I may have done in one book, but only one (and I’m not sure if it got to print!) I think it’s because the stories never really end for me, the characters all have lives that will continue after I’ve left – I’m only framing their story, looking at them through a window – for a short period of time. It might be our end, yours and mine, but it’s not theirs.

The picture here is the shelf of printed drafts in my office – some books have needed more than one to really get right – one day they *may* be worth a fortune (I live in hope

When I start to develop an idea for a book, character is a vital element that I spend a lot of time on. From working out my protagonists birthdates, to what they studied in college, I check out what was in the charts when they were 16, and 18, I look at world events that may have been formative, how they drink their coffee and what make of car they drive. I really try and get inside their heads.

I love research – clcik the image below to watch back Six Minutes on Story below – ahem, perhaps ten minutes – which touches on the research I did for Keep Your Eyes On Me. It involves stolen and forged art, stolen antiquities, jewellery design, a complex journey from London to Dublin and back in 24 hours (and yes, I checked every single step of that trip to ensure that it was possible – and how to make it, crucially, untraceable). It’s essential to me that if a jewellery designer, or psychologist, or an art forger or indeed art collector, reads the book, that they believe my creation of their world.

And this attention to detail is one reason that ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ is so brilliant. Based on the novel of the same title written by Walter Tevis, the New York Times says:

FORGET just for a moment that Walter Tevis’s ”The Queen’s Gambit” is a novel about the game of chess – the best one that I know of to be written since Nabokov’s ”Defense.” Consider it as a psychological thriller, a contest pitting human rationality against the self’s unconscious urge to wipe out thought….The battlefield here is a mind – the prodigious power to reason of Elizabeth Harmon, whom we first encounter as an 8-year-old in a Kentucky orphanage. The forces for evil in the fight are drugs and alcohol, which Beth at first comes to know because of the orphanage’s practice of keeping its children tranquilized. Later on in the novel, Beth’s mind will be invaded by extremes of loneliness and inferiority. 

It’s a brilliant story, and Beth Harmon is a fabulous creation – I love to write strong female characters and I’m rooting for her and loving her confidence and skill through every minute of the series. She’s brave and uncompromising, and has a mind that is always three steps ahead of her opponent, at every juncture.

But it’s the detailed research and delivery that makes this series a masterpiece. It would have been easy to fudge the matches, to focus on character and emotion and lose the true heart of this intriguing story. But the filmmakers went the extra mile:

Working with two consultants, Garry Kasparov, the former world champion, and Bruce Pandolfini, a well-known New York City chess coach, the creators of “The Queen’s Gambit” have avoided those errors. (Pandolfini even has a cameo role as a Kentucky tournament director.) The actors were trained on how to play and to move pieces like experts, which is usually done with swift, almost machine-gun-like movements. Taylor-Joy actually developed her own, more fluid style, as she explained in an interview with Chess Life magazine, which was based on her training as a dancer.

New York Times

and when it comes to detail, you don’t get much better than this:

The games portrayed in the series are not just realistic, they are real, based on actual competitions. For example, the match in which Beth defeats Harry for the Kentucky state title was from a game in Riga, Latvia, in 1955; the last speed chess game in which she beats Benny was played at the Paris Opera in 1858; and the game in which she faces the Russian champion Vasily Borgov (Marcin Dorocinski) in the series finale was played in Biel, Switzerland, in 1993.

New York Times

Not only is the chess play real, the costumes, colour and tone of 1960s America is captured brilliantly, as viewers are agreeing in their droves. Here’s the full New York Times article:

I’m a Chess Expert. Here’s What ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ Gets Right

If you haven’t watched it, put it on your must see list. It makes a total change to other series, and there isn’t a dead body in sight!

Cross posted from www.writing.ie

A welcome addition to the genre, the new revenge thriller from bestseller Sam Blake allows two wronged women to reap their revenge, while still questioning what is right and what is wrong, in a world where seemingly the only way to succeed is by screwing someone else over.

A chance meeting on a flight to New York sends two strangers on a headlong hunt for revenge and justice. Lily has had her family business stolen by greedy con-man, Edward. Vittoria’s husband, Marcus, has set himself up a secret life with his pregnant mistress. Both men think they’ve gotten away with it, but these two women will make sure they won’t.

But, the lines between right and wrong become blurred. And as Lily begins to have doubts, Vittoria doubles down. The result is a taut thriller that will keep you guessing to the end.

Blake is famous for the Cat Connolly books; the series that chronicles a Dublin detective who always felt very genuine, engaging and likeable as a character. Our two leads this time once again fill this role.

What I’ve always been drawn to about Blake’s writing is the humanness of it. Whether its an unplanned pregnancy or managing a child with Aspergers. She always creates stories that are true to life, with characters that are so genuine, you could meet them walking down the street. Keep Your Eyes On Me, is no different.

As Lily manages her brother’s depression, and as we see the scars (both physical and emotional) left in Vittoria from a terrible trauma in her youth, the novel takes a life of its own outside the page, as the world it occupies is so clearly real.

This, I feel, is where Keep Your Eyes On Me truly excels. The story isn’t only about two people, and the objects of their revenge. Its also about the collateral damage. Lily and her brother are collateral damage to Edward, as he struggles to fix a deal with the Russian mob that has gone ary. While Marcus’ mistress, Stephanie, and her unborn child, are caught up in the whirlwind of disaster that Vittoria (through Lily) brings about on them.

Lily is a woman who is on the cusp of having all her dreams fulfilled, but she risks it all to save her family business, and by extension, her brother’s life. While, Victoria is fighting to take back a life that she feels was stolen from her. It may seem that solving each other’s problems is the easiest way, but, are you supposed to feel less guilty about ruining someone’s life purely because you don’t know them? Or, because they “deserve it”? There are a lot of questions, both logistical and metaphysical, as the thriller bends towards its conclusion.

With references for lovers of Blake’s other books, and lots of juicy twists for fans of the genre, this book is perfect for people looking for some excitement and enjoyment from the get go. And a great way to start of the storm that is the amazing line up of Irish writing in 2020.

(c) Emmet J. Driver

To celebrate the launch of the paperback, Keep Your Eyes on Me is a Kindle Monthly Deal! It’s only 99p from 1st – 30th November 2020, CLICK HERE to grab your copy now! You can’t go wrong…

Just in case you missed my relentless reminders, here’s the blurb!

· · A NUMBER ONE IRISH TIMES BESTSELLER · ·

‘Pacey and exciting and totally joyous.’ Jo Spain, author of The Confession
________________________

You won’t be able to look away

When Vittoria Devine and Lily Power find themselves sitting next to each other on a flight to New York, they discover they both have men in their lives whose impact has been devastating. Lily’s family life is in turmoil, her brother left on the brink of ruin by a con man. Vittoria’s philandering husband’s latest mistress is pregnant.

By the time they land, Vittoria and Lily have realised that they can help each other right the balance. But only one of them knows the real story…

‘Delightfully dark and satisfying’ Roz Watkins, author of the DI Meg Dalton series