John Le Carré’s first novel, Call For The Dead, is a hybrid thing – a spy novel masquerading as a murder mystery, or perhaps a murder mystery masquerading as a spy novel. It feels appropriate that its genre is as slippery as a spy’s legend, but however you choose to classify it, it’s a thumping […]
John Le Carré’s fourth novel, The Looking Glass War, was a satirical rejoinder to all those who had, he felt, got the wrong end of the stick in respect of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Feeling that they had missed the point that the spy game was a futile, squalid, hopeless affair, […]
So 2012 was a hell of a year for me, personally. I started the year two stone overweight, in financial freefall and actually pretty much depressed. I had no writing gigs lined up, was struggling to find any joy in my day job and generally felt like things were Not Going My Way. But did […]
I started this year with a long list of shit I needed to get done, some personal, some professional. The personal stuff has gone damn well, thanks for asking 🙂 On the professional front, I needed to get my hand back in to writing after a year off. I picked four projects and worked through […]
New and imminent Bad Haven talk to me about stuff, including my involvement with the film of School’s Out. Mass Movement Magazine review Highlander: The Four Horsemen “Moran and Andrews have taken show favourites and crafted incredible tales that carry the legacy of the show to new realms.” I have a long memoir in the second issue […]
There are certain tropes that those of us of a certain age (cough…40ish…cough) were conditioned to expect in comedies and children’s films. The evil boss who gets their comeuppance at the end of the film, when the downbeaten hero realises they don’t have to put up with it and can Follow Their Dream instead, is […]
The news story below appeared in Screen International yesterday, so I can talk about it now. In brief: the film has got development funding, I’m on board as script consultant, and Oliver Milburn is writing and directing. I met with Oliver and Emma, the producer, a few weeks back. We got on famously and they have a […]
Well, it’s been an interesting day, and it certainly got this new site off to a flying start. I was first told that School’s Out was about to be optioned over two years ago. Needless to say I was pretty excited. Quick as a flash, nothing at all happened. The recession hit, companies retrenched, silence […]
Abaddon’s ‘Attack the Block meets Lord of the Flies’ novel optioned by Multistory Films Abaddon Books is proud to announce that it has struck a deal with Multistory Films to bring School’s Out by Scott Andrews to the big screen. Attack the Block meets Lord of the Flies in a post-apocalyptic landscape where pupils at a public […]