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Flash Fiction: A flaw in the hourglass

13th March 2026 by claireladds Leave a Comment

Image shows an hourglass in blue, surrounded by swirling mist, also in blue, with a dark background. Text reads: A flaw in the hourglass, flash fiction

Images used courtesy of BookBrush.com

It is only mid-March, and Friday 13th has already come around twice, with another one to come in November this year. So, today, I’ve taken it as my cue to share an eery piece of fiction with you, which I very much enjoyed writing. This piece of flash fiction was first published in the Bolts of Fiction anthology in 2024 (Devils Rock Publishing), edited by the wonderful Daniel Willcocks and Sam Frost.

I hope you’re not ready for sleep right now…

A flaw in the hourglass

Tired, are you? Restless? Wish you could sleep? Let me help you. Let me tell you a bedtime story.

***

You’ve heard of the Dream Catcher, haven’t you? I watch her, every night. She doesn’t know I’m there. I’ve become adept at hiding from her, and darkness holds no fear for me.

The moonlight betrays her prey. With snake-like ease, she empties the dream catcher that hangs outside, swaying in the gentle breeze. The silvery sack slips up and over it, catches it unawares as it tinkles and twinkles, glinting beautiful and benign. The dreams make no sound as they slide into the silken sack. Neither do the nightmares. Not yet. Not even when they’re separated into ‘good’ and ‘bad’. It’s an uncomfortable process. Don’t try it.

Now the once shiny dream catcher is left lifeless, like a dead thing; colourless, soulless, desperate for revival, hoping that people are asleep and that they can hear the wails of pain in the wind, seeping through their walls of safety as they dream. Make me live again, I beg you. But the pleas are worthless because its time is up. It will soon be dawn.

I follow the Dream Catcher to her lair. Here they all are, lined up, row after row after row: hourglasses full of nightmares. You’d think this room would be full by now, wouldn’t you? But it seems to have an everlasting floor, walls that span the centuries, the ether, space and time. Endless. This prison is endless.

I watch as the Dream Catcher pours her night’s takings into the newest hourglass. It takes a whole hour to empty them in. They fight, struggle, claw onto the silky, silvery sack. It happens every time. Would you want to fall into the top of this hourglass if you knew what your fate would be?

The nightmares scream as they slide through the hole, powerless to stop it. Monsters, stalkers, unseen and lurking fears
– each one knows its fate. The screams and the scratching on the glass have already started, the frantic scramble to the top by those who are trying to rebel against the certainty that, when it becomes their turn to fall forever into the glass pit, they will become nothing but tiny grains of sand.

And that’s what this room is full of – rows and rows of nullified nightmares as far as the eye can see, and where it can’t. Of dead, giant timers. Their time is running out. The pain of that knowledge screams through the hole in the top of each hourglass where, once the nightmare is inside, it cannot shrink its own terror to fit back through.

How long does it take for nightmares to turn to dream dust? Who knows? The weight of the unanswered question crushes the nightmares. And it bears down on me, too.

The Dream Catcher nods at her good night’s work and locks the room. I hear the deadbolts thud into place – one; two; three; four; five.

I stand there alone, my only company the screaming and the terror, the scratching of glass which makes my ears bleed. I look down the room at the rows of destroyed imagination. It’s one eternal nightmare.

But what if the sands of time can be reversed? Have you ever thought about that? Has my old adversary, the Dream Catcher? I know how to do it, you see, because I’ve been watching, learning, biding my time.

And so I tap on the glass of this newest timer which is already set in motion. I must give the nightmares hope. They stop screaming for a moment, and I tell them, ‘Watch.’ And I wink.

They become transfixed as I head to a soulless, still hourglass, full at the bottom with nothing but grains of the night’s evil. All I have to do is this. ‘Watch,’ I tell them. ‘Watch,’ I tell you. Are you keeping your eyes open? Is your imagination paying attention? Keep your eyes closely on the hourglass: the sands of time shift as I turn it upside down.

It’s so simple. All it needed was time. Someone would catch her out, eventually. Who’d have thought my old adversary would fail to catch the flaw in the design?

These newest nightmares pour out of their own private hell and onto the floor. The next bit is easy. They only need one of their own kind to give them life. So I blow. The sand swirls across the stone. I blow harder. It gathers momentum, feels the freedom, and fills the air. One more life-giving breath is all it needs. Can you see it? Picture it, circling, seeking its way out. One; two; three; four; five. Out the keyholes and into the night. And you thought keyholes were just for peeking through, didn’t you? Naughty.

Dream dust is precious, especially the darkest dream dust of all. Who deserves a sprinkling of nightmares? Who’s to judge? My learned friend – or fiend – the Sandman, of course. Have you been good recently? Any bad dreams lately? Did you never wonder how the Sandman has so much dream dust to sprinkle on his dreamers? Neither did I, once upon a time. Recycling is good for the environment, they tell us. The world of imagination is no exception. The Sandman recycles the nightmares. Who knows what they might become. That depends – depends on dreamers like you.

***

How do I know all this, you ask. Haven’t you guessed? I’m the nightmare that got away. One moment of carelessness in the pouring was all it took. So now I can tell bedtime stories to those who deserve them.

I’ll be in your dreams later tonight, when the darkness falls over your eyelids and your deepest imagination awakens. Won’t I? You know I will.

What’s that? What do you mean, you’re not ready for bedtime now? We’ll see. Everyone seeks the comfort of sleep – eventually.

Image shows a photo of Claire Ladds, author, and a bookl cover of the Bolts of Fiction flash fiction anthology. Text says: Featuring 'A flaw in the hourglass' by Claire Ladds.

Bolts of Fiction promotional image courtesy of Daniel Willcocks.

Have you read any of my other short fiction? I write emotion-driven psychological literary fiction, exploring the most secret, often painful and self-sacrificing moments of my characters’ existence. Sometimes they make an unnerving peace with their turmoil, and sometimes they find other ways to deal with their relentless agony – which just may lead to desperate measures…

Image shows short story collection, The Reason for Everything, in paperback, on a tablet and on a phone. the Books cover is black with read wooden hearts and red lilies.

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THIS SHORT STORY COLLECTION

If you enjoy novels which are dark, as unpredictable as the nightmare in the hourglass here, or tinged with something other-worldly, then you may especially enjoy two of my Darker Minds books. Click the images to learn more:

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Image shows a spiky chair in a dungeon, with silhouettes of dancing marionettes above.

Death on the Nile (Read Christie Challenge, February 2026): Book Containing Beloved Characters

27th February 2026 by claireladds 3 Comments

February’s task for the Read Christie 2026 challenge, as set by the Agatha Christie team, has been to read a book containing ‘beloved characters’. The team chose Mrs McGinty’s Dead, and it’s a great choice, featuring as it does both Hercule Poirot and Ariadne Oliver. As with January’s read, I have chosen to deviate from the suggested novel to reflect on my own choice for a book with characters beloved to me: Death on the Nile.

As with the Christie team’s choice, mine also contains Hercule Poirot, who happens to be my absolute favourite Christie detective, and possibly my favourite detective of all time. He was the first detective I encountered in adult crime novels, when my dad bought me a copy of The ABC Murders. I devoured it at the age of ten and became completely devoted to all of the Poirot stories. Without really realising it, I had also encountered Poirot much earlier, growing up as I did on Sunday afternoon cinematic films on the TV, several of which were the Peter Ustinov versions of Poirot, glamorous films, with Death on the Nile being one I saw multiple times, and also featuring the wonderful David Niven as Colonel Race. Moving on several decades, the David Suchet version of Death on the Nile is one of my favourite films in which he played Poirot. With all that in mind, I was always likely to be drawn to this novel like a moth to a flame. And it is the characters in the novel that I will discuss here.

Hercule Poirot

Out of all of Christie’s novels which involve recurring characters, it is Poirot who is my enduring love. I’m not even sure I can fully explain, even to myself, why he intrinsically appeals to me. What I do know is that I love his quirky dress and mannerisms, and the way he goes about picking at the carcass of a crime, piece by piece, until all the scraps of clues have been used up and explained. I also find it very endearing that he has such a humble backstory, one of being a child of a large family who had to make a success of himself to support them. A man who was injured during the First World War and was taken care of by a woman in England (and if you read The Mysterious Affair at Styles you will get a fuller flavour of this), and has a strong appreciation of poverty and desperation, and of skills of workers, which makes him an empathetic detective who treats a Duchess in the same way as he treats her maid (or, indeed, in Death on the Nile, the downtrodden, poor relation in the same way as the high-born, wealthy one).

Most of all, I love his approach to the human side of crime. He knows that, somewhere at the heart of the motive, is something intensely personal which reflects the way the victim lived their life and how it impacted the people around them. And he also shows himself to be, not just a problem-solving machine, but a human, too, considering the feelings of other people in the case, showing empathy, sympathy and, indeed, humanity. There are several cases he solves whereby he allows justice to take its course in an unconventional way. This is one of those cases, and highlights Poirot’s knowledge and acceptance that, sometimes, there are morally grey areas to consider, along with intertwined compassion for the perpetrator as well as the victim. This is, of course, Poirot’s subjective view, but it leaves the reader with plenty to consider: how would we have handled the final dishing out of justice?

The underrated sidekick

Now we turn to the sidekick. Ex-MI5 agent, Colonel Race is deployed by Christie in this role here. He appears part-way through, and is there to do some investigating of his own (the sub-plot of which I won’t spoil here). I always enjoy an appearance by Colonel Race; I find him a truly likeable man and a consummate professional, therefore a great extension of Poirot’s own impeccably performed investigations. It is interesting to watch these two professionals work through their findings. An appearance by Colonel Race always means that something much wider-reaching than a crime motivated by the private and personal is lurking in the background, which gives an extra edge of danger to the atmosphere, and therefore joining his investigations with Poirot’s reminds us that the world can be a dangerous place, both without and within our own lives. For me, Colonel Race is one of Christie’s underrated characters.

Impassioned suspect

I’ve alluded to the crimes I feel Christie is particularly expert at creating: those seeded in the intensely personal. These frequently interweave with the emotional, and are character-driven. And, as we know, getting inside the head of the people close to a crime is Poirot’s forte! There are few characters in any of Christie’s novels in which the emotional comes into play as much as in the initial prime suspect here, the impassioned Jacqueline de Bellefort. She is immediately suspected of the killing of Linnet Doyle, her former best friend who stole her ex-fiancée, Simon Doyle, and married him within weeks. After this devastation to her life, we next meet her as she follows the newly-weds to all the locations of their exotic honeymoon and confesses to Poirot that she has strong desire to shoot Linnet. Poirot both sympathises with her desperate emotions and is extremely fearful that such strength of feeling leaves Jacqueline herself in danger from her own passions.

Jacqueline frequently lingers in my mind when I think of Christie novels. Her emotional intensity has stayed with me from the very first time I read about her, decades ago. She is one of those stand-out characters who make me consider whether my actions would have matched hers, should I have been placed in her situation (which contains such huge spoilers that I cannot detail them here), and has gone a long way to inform me, as a writer, how someone could be driven almost entirely by the emotions burning within them. I believe that Death on the Nile is worth reading to follow Jacqueline’s story alone.

Other enduring characters to give us pause for thought

There are other truly enduring characters for me in this book. Once again, my choices revolve around the human qualities with which Christie has endowed them. I want to focus, in this section, then, on the mothers, and their younger female counterparts. Two mother stand out: the tormented Mrs Otterbourne, writer of romance which has been shunned by the libraries and increasingly her readership, and has turned to drink, and Mrs Allerton, possibly the most kind and caring mother that Christie ever wrote about in her fiction. The absolute pain of Mrs Otterbourne, which plays out in the tempestuous relationship she has with her long-suffering daughter, Rosalie, is placed into opposition with the almost idealised mothering of Mrs Allerton. She is an extremely endearing person, whom Poirot likes immensely, and who is ultimately able to provide comfort and love to Rosalie in a very humble, selfless manner. As a reader, I can’t help but feel desperately sorry for one, and admire the way the other is prepared to take on a ‘found family’ mother-daughter dynamic, based purely on her innate kindness of soul. Combined, they leave us with a lingering unease around the concept of motherhood, and the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship.

There are two other characters I would like to make mention of here, too: Rosalie Otterbourne, long-suffering daughter of the aforementioned Mrs Otterbourne, and Cornelia, poor and downtrodden relation of the high-born Mrs Van Schyler who has a secret. I have immense sympathy for Rosalie, dealing as she does with the difficulties of her mother’s professional and personal downfall, and struggling with her own entanglements of resentment of her mother and her undeniable love for her. Cornelia, by contrast, is blissfully unaware that she is being treated abominably by her rich relation and is grateful for the opportunities afforded her in being allowed to come on the excursion down the Nile. This unawareness and her accompanying obliging behaviour, led by the controlling Mrs Van Schyler, is what makes me have huge sympathy for Cornelia. However, what I love about both Rosalie and Cornelia is their strength of character, Rosalie’s which has had to be of a sustained nature to protect her mother, and Cornelia’s, ultimately, in choosing to follow her own path of love, unrelated to social position or money, both of which she could have and which would give her a ‘better’ life.

So then, for me, Death on the Nile contains very particular kinds of ‘beloved characters’: the repeat characters who are respectful and consummate professionals, and the women who fill this entire novel with everything it is to be human: the passion, suffering, resilience and, yes, love. In saying this, I am, of course, very aware of the discrepancy between gender roles and that males are given that of logical fact-finder and puzzle-solver whereas women are given the roles of the impassioned, the reactive, driven by a need of some kind. Yet, heading towards a hundred years after the book was written, this is what makes the women in particular stand out as sympathetic, real people, of their era and beyond, and I love that. There are other men in this novel whose actions provide the plot points for the story, such as the thief, or the fraudulent professional, yet continually it is the women who provide the heart of the story so that it is not merely a two-dimensional puzzle (and Christie’s books never are! If you don’t believe me, then I urge you to read Endless Night or And Then There Were None). This gender separation throughout may even be why the book ends with the promise of marriage between a man and woman who find a tempered middle ground between hard, factual logic and passionate interiority, thus drawing together facets of both. Could it even be Christie suggesting that extremes of either are unhelpful to us if we want to live a happy life? I’ll let you decide.

What’s at the Heart of my Psychological Suspense Fiction?

15th February 2026 by claireladds

Ever since I was a small child, I have been a reader and a writer in equal measure (most of the time). Without even realising it for a long time, I would delve the depths of a book I enjoyed for whatever I felt was at its core: the reasons behind whatever was its central theme or moment. It has always been that I have wanted to get under the skin of a story, right to its very heart. The same has always applied to my writing. To make me interested, then obsessed by, a story enough to pursue it to its ending (however dark, tragic, twisty or heartfelt) there needs to be this same kind of heart, one which makes me love to be at my desk with the story, the characters, and the very words themselves. The elements of this beating heart are rarely the same for two stories running, yet they make up all the parts of writing my books that I absolutely adore. In this post, I’ll give you a run-down of several of my psychological suspense books, to show you what I mean when I say that each of my stories has a heart. And, for me at least, this heart often beats on well after typing the last sentence.

I’m going to begin with Show Me Dead, as it holds a very special place in my emotions. There was so much I fell in love with, the deeper I went into this novel. This was the first book in a brand new series linked by theme – and I had the opportunity to write as if no one was watching (which they weren’t)! I wanted a book full of Gothic-inspired atmosphere, which is why I set it almost exclusively in the catacombs of a dilapidated theatre. As I was writing, I had in mind a visual image of the entire book, scene by scene, almost as if I was watching an entire theatre performance myself (although, thankfully, I’ve never sat through performances that this one had to offer!). I imagined lights flickering, the dust in the air, the old and battered seats – and the terror on the stage. This book has been described as “claustrophobic”, and that’s exactly the atmosphere I was aiming for. Who wouldn’t want to escape from there – especially when the actors, themselves already captive, begin to go missing…?

I’ll refer to setting again later. But, as all readers know, characters are an endless source of fascination, and there are always some characters you love writing most as an author. As much as the tension and almost living dread in the walls of the setting of the catacombs of the theatre, I loved creating the characters. They felt very close, very special, to me, especially Angel, my main character, and the young girl, Pierette, who has also been held captive and terrified by the Puppet Master, for as long as she can remember. It was the vulnerability I found within them that made me care so much (and I genuinely, at times, cried for them; I can be a very emotional writer). And, ultimately, this drove me to dig deep and find what was at the heart of the strength they never knew they had. The journey from disempowerment to their own very particular kind of emancipation captivated me, and the characters of Show Me Dead continue to live on in my writer’s brain. I may even write more in their strange, terrifying world. If I do, then their emotions will play a huge part in finding the heart of the reason for the story, both theirs and mine.

Something similar happened with regard to character when I began writing That Killer Image, I knew almost instantly that I was going to love writing about Anthony, the completely obsessive photographer with only one objective: to capture what, to him, is the perfect image. Maybe, in a writerly way, I wanted to capture my own ‘perfect’ image of him as a dangerous man – more dangerous, as we discover, than anyone had realised before. But, as with all villains, he has his own motivations which, to him, make complete and logical sense, which is always what makes villains and antagonist characters so fascinating. His backstory is of immense importance here, as his present is haunted by his past, driven by the events which took place in his young life, and most importantly, how he felt and reacted emotionally and viscerally to them. There are times when he makes me feel incredibly emotional and sorry for him, yet these same incidents leave me completely terrified of this man. No surprise there – he’s a serial killer! And, the more I wrote his chapters, the more I realised he was an even darker character than even I expected him to be. That’s one of the challenges and the fun parts: the more you write about a character, the more you find out about them (even when you’re the one who invented them in the first place!).

Sometimes it is a theme combined with a sense of atmosphere which pulls me to a story, and it was the Gothic-inspired nature of everything about No Deadlier Time which held me captivated with this story from start to finish. At the heart of the book, it questions where reality ends and where fantasy born of a destructive mental state begins. It also questions something which is fundamental for me in my suspense literature: who or what is truly guilty and morally, as well as physically, culpable?

The book actually began life as a short horror story, which I weave into the book in monologue conversations my main character, Harry, has with his father. Harry blames his father for the dark past lurking in the house (and for something which happens there when he returns with his pregnant wife) which pull him into a terrible and deadly chain of events. I said I would return to setting, and in this book the house itself is at the very centre, and acts as a character in its own right, which I found fascinating. All the way through, I could picture the ancient, crumbling family home which sits on the edge of a cliff, isolated from the village full of deviants and criminals. Ravens live there and become integral to Harry’s declining mental state, infiltrating the landscape, his dreams – and the curse which the family, the house, and its grounds will not let die. There is a feeling of dark foreboding felt by the guilty and the innocent in this house – right to the terribly dark conclusion. I wonder who (or what) you would feel is the most guilty if you read this novel?

I’ll leave my Darker Minds novels now, and move onto a couple of standalone psychological suspense/thrillers. It may not come as a surprise, given what you’ve read so far, that I’ve always loved books with twists, and particularly with characters who have emotional-driven, dark and deep-rooted motivations. When I began writing Hers or Mine and delved further into the characters of paranoid and desperate wife, Lucy, and the enigmatic Charlotte, owner of a creative retreat where Lucy decides to spend time, I realised this was the kind of book I was going to write. It was clear immediately that there was so much more to these two women than met the eye. And there really is! This psychological suspense is a slow-burn by necessity. We have to get to know these characters (or at least think we know them), because each twist revolves around the characters themselves – their pasts which won’t stay buried, their actions, and in particular the deep-rooted, agonising and obsessively dark emotions which live within them and drive them to do… ah, no spoilers here!

Hers or Mine is also very much about relationships. Broken ones, betrayed ones, and ones that grow from a love tied to loyalty, gratitude and something much deeper than we could expect. So love in its many forms features heavily in this book, although there’s nothing straightforward about that, either. At its most pure, it brought tears to my eyes as the writer; at its worst it’s love which destroys people from the inside. Everything that happens to the characters in this story stems from their individual personal experiences, circumstances and feelings for someone else. It makes it as much of a psychological drama as it does a psychological suspense novel, and I truly loved writing it.

Indeed, during the two decades since my very first short story was published, I’ve been exploring the theme of love in my novels and short stories. What interests me most is the way different types of love are formed, and changed based on experience. And how sometimes it doesn’t change but becomes deeper, even darker, more obsessive and – potentially – dangerous. This danger could be to the one who holds such love in their heart, or to the object of this love. So I find it intriguing to explore the grey areas between innocence and guilt, and between heartfelt love and something that morphs into the (self-) destructive kind. I took this to the limits in my psychological suspense thriller, You Know You Shouldn’t.

Love with the darkest heart pervades this entire book from start to finish. A passionate (and, unknown to my protagonist, Eva, at the time, manipulative) relationship from the past leaves a shared history with a dark secret between her and the villain which affects the entire story. Obsessive love plays its part, too: it’s this obsession which is lethal, and which dictates the villain’s behaviour, leading Eva down a path which she realises too late that is affecting everyone she loves. Her emotions drive her, consume her, and undermine her, until she has no choice but to make (or struggle to make) some impossible decisions to try and keep her loved ones alive. Different forms of love become entangled, from the romantic to the co-dependent, to the familial, to the need to love oneself. Only this can stop a love that has gone so bad, so dangerous, that no one is safe. Such an intense, unpredictable and terrifying love was quite an experience to write.

What I hope is evident, then, is that the very heart of my psychological suspense, even the darkest ones, have at the very core feelings. My characters are very much driven by their emotions, whether, for example, because of a romantic relationship gone bad, or obsessions, desperation to get out of a situation, or loyalty and pure love. Feelings are by their very human nature, complex, and this complexity is what creates the twists and turns in the plots, as the characters themselves drive various actions due to how they feel. In a similar way, a reader’s feelings are extremely powerful, and for their own feelings to run amok as they become invested in the characters’ emotions, and in the psychological and emotional pull of settings which breathe life and darkness into a story is everything I sincerely hope for in a reading experience of one of my books. Reading itself is a feeling: one of being transported to the world of someone else and experiencing the events with them at a deep level (even if, in the case of my books, these events can get pretty dark, dangerous, and deadly). This is what I love about reading. And it’s what I ultimately love about writing,

You can find all the books listed above, and the stores where they are available for purchase, using the links below:

Show Me Dead

That Killer Image

No Deadlier Time

Hers or Mine

You Know You Shouldn’t

The Sittaford Mystery (Read Christie Challenge, January 2026): Book with the Best Opening

30th January 2026 by claireladds 3 Comments

I am absolutely thrilled to be joining in with the Read Christie challenge for 2026. Agatha Christie has been my inspiration since I was ten years old, when my dad first gave me a copy of The ABC Murders. Little did he realise what kind of literary obsession he had started; Christie has been my constant source of reading, and remains my deep-rooted inspiration as a writer. So, how could I be even remotely reluctant to get involved with Read Christie for 2026?

So, let’s start with January’s prompt for reading. The Agatha Christie team chose ‘best opening’ for eager participants’ monthly enjoyment. What does, or could this mean? The best opening line? Best murder from the outset? Most creepy start? Something else entirely? Whichever way you interpret it, there are some great options here. Right at the top of my list would be Appointment with Death, for its first line (which I will not spoil here for you – please do go and read it! I love this book, and the TV Poirot adaptation). The Christie team chose to read The Body in the Library, a great choice in which a random female corpse is found in the library of the Bantrys, friends of Miss Marple, and sets up a marvellous plot for this book.

But, I confess, I had a more visceral reaction to the prompt and ‘best’, while left open to subjectiveness, for me became an indulgence. I’m an unashamed lover of the snow. I love everything about it – the way it looks as it falls, the stunning beauty of its undisturbed settlement on the ground and house roofs, the way you can track footprints through it, from a pigeon to the postman. And there is a Christie book which opens with, for me, an idyllic wintry landscape: The Sittaford Mystery.

The novel begins with the sparsely numbered residents of Sittaford, cut off from everywhere by the vast amount of snow which has recently fallen, being invited to Sittaford House by Mrs and Miss Willett who have blown in from abroad and rented the large house from Captain Trevelyan for the winter months. The Captain has, himself, rented a small house in Exhampton six miles’ walk away and is oblivious that, at 5.25p.m. that evening, in his house, what begins as a fun game of table turning (getting ghosts to spell words by knocking against the table while the participants link hands via thumbs and little fingers) turns into something much more deadly. At 5.25p.m., Captain Trevelyan’s own table raps out the letters to inform the guests at Sittaford House that he is dead. And that he has been murdered.

There has been a fall of several feet of snow in a village which is so insular and tiny that it only consists of the big house belonging to Captain Trevelyan and the six cottages he has had built. All told, you would barely run out of fingers if you counted the residents of Sittaford at the beginning of this novel. This snowfall in such a place doesn’t merely satisfy my aesthetic nuances, it excites me because it provides the perfect backdrop for a mystery. But why?

Firstly, it provides a wonderful atmosphere for a novel which focuses intensely on the way everywhere is isolated from the its neighbour. The unsullied snow stops being a thing of beauty and becomes a means of a kind of imprisonment for the residents, or creates complications and difficulties for movement. This then forces a ring around the people who ‘could not possibly have committed the murder’, as they were holed up together, while the snow ravished the countryside beyond. Imagine looking out of the window of a large old house into the darkness while the snow batters against the windows and believing that you have just been sent a message from beyond to inform you of the murder of the man who owns the house you are standing in. The atmosphere of a perfect wintry village changes exponentially, doesn’t it?

Indeed, the snow sets up the entire landscape of the book, both physically and structurally. It acts as an inhibitor, just as the witnesses and suspects sometimes do. The picturesque snow could also, potentially, give the game away for the culprit, should any footprints be discovered around the house in Exhampton where Captain Trevelyan’s body is discovered, and again, one look at the beautiful, snowy hillside from Sittaford village all the way downhill to Exhampton makes us wonder how anyone could have managed to get to the house to murder the Captain. Cars cannot pass, and trains are disrupted. Travelling into Exhampton from other areas has been somewhat possible, so other suspects can be ruled in as they are proven to have reason to want the Captain dead. Does this, therefore, mean categorically that no one at Sittaford could possibly have committed murder? Suddenly, everything starts to feel impossible, unsolvable as with every great mystery at some point in the story.

Perhaps most importantly of all, without the snow established to great effect at the very outset of The Sittaford Mystery, this book simply would not work. Everything relies on it. The depiction of the village is not merely picturesque and establishing a wintry atmosphere. It’s not only hinting that the snow can be dangerous and cause problems for people (both with and without the intention to murder). It is absolutely essential to the plot, the clues which Christie plants so expertly from the very beginning, and is among the most vital pieces of evidence in piecing together the means and opportunity of the guilty.

I hope you can see why, despite so many incredible choices for ‘best opening’ that I could have chosen to kick off Read Christie 2026, I have sunk straight into the snowy Sittaford. There is so much more to this deceptively picturesque beginning than meets the eye. And this is just one of the many things I absolutely adore about Agatha Christie’s books.

Claire Ladds Readers’ Club News: August 2025

30th August 2025 by claireladds Leave a Comment

Image shows black strip on brown background and stack of books. Text says Claire Ladds Readers' Club news.

Welcome to my August writing update. It feels like an awfully long time since I gave you an update on my work, and I can only think that this is because I’ve been so focused on my writing that time feels like it’s gone a bit awry. There are three major project areas that I’ve been working on this month, each one very different, and each for a very different purpose. So what have I been doing?

Loving every moment spent with my work-in-progress

I mentioned in a previous month’s update that I am privileged to have been accepted by Faber Academy onto the Writing a Novel (online) course. This is genuinely one of the most fulfilling ventures that I’ve ever participated in as a writer. Not only am I working on a brand-new literary fiction novel, but I am part of a community of author peers who are wonderful writers. Everyone is very generous with their time and feedback which is of invaluable use as I find my way through the themes and the character arcs in my work-in-progress.

Anyone who has followed my work for a while will know that I tend to start at the end of a project, knowing where my characters are going and then figuring out how to get them there. This project is no different. I have been working hard on the last quarter of the novel (this may seem like a bizarre way of working to some, but it seems to work for me). Additionally, I also have the majority of the first quarter organised and written, and also all of those chapters I tend to call my ‘marker’ chapters, which are the main event or twist points in the story. I absolutely adore this book, and I’m excited to sit down and work on it every single writing session. For me, the best part of being an author is creating and working with an idea that I love, and I really hope that, when this book is finally published, it will find those readers who connect with it and love it as much as I do.

Other project: different lengths, for different places, and for different reasons

Although I’m working on a new novel, I have also been working on a number of shorter projects, namely short stories, and also flash fiction, the latter of which is a relatively new fiction adventure for me. These stories are all highly emotive in nature and I have submitted several pieces for consideration in various magazines and competitions. When I first began my writing career almost 20 years ago, this was where I began. It feels very exciting to be spending time in this arena once again. I have always had an enduring love for short stories and now have a huge appreciation for flash fiction and the writers of it. To be able to fulfil all the requirements of this specific kind of story arc within an exceptionally tight space of 1000 words or under, and sometimes much, much less than that, requires very special skills. I look forward to developing mine further.

I find short fiction extremely satisfying to work on. I love working with story prompts, which is how the stories I wrote for and contributed towards the charity Bolts of Fiction anthology, produced by the amazingly talented Daniel Willcocks and Sam Frost, came about. I’m also a big advocate for using visual prompts, and have used a myriad of photos and paintings previously, as well as songs, as inspiration for stories. If you write stories and I’ve never tried this as a way of sparking ideas for your work, I thoroughly recommend it.

Coming soon: a new gift for my Readers’ Club VIPs

As you will be aware if you’re reading this post, elements of my Readers’ Club news and stories are now available here on my website for anyone to read. There is, also, an extra part to my Readers’ Club, a VIP section made up of readers of my books and stories. That has always been a way to sign up to this VIP section until quite recently, when I put it on pause. The reason for this is twofold: firstly, it was sparked by my return to psychological literary fiction. To my mind, those interested enough to sign up for extra communications should therefore be receiving a welcome gift in line with the kind of fiction I will be writing and talking about, going forward. This brings me to the second reason: I am in the process of creating a new signup offering which consists of psychological literary short stories, and am hoping to have this ready sometime during the autumn.

If you’re interested in signing up for my VIP section of the Readers’ Club and also receiving this welcome gift, then keep an eye on my future monthly updates and on my blog where I will share more news when it becomes available. I will also share this on social media, if you happen to follow me there.

So, really, I feel a bit like I’ve spent time as a hibernating hedgehog during this month, but as I’m really not keen on hot summer weather, hibernating with all my writing ideas has been the best fun I could have in August! It’s been a very productive month and I’m really hoping September is as enjoyable. There will be more news next month. In the meantime, if you’d like to try my more emotive and literary fiction (which can, and does, sometimes go to dark places), you could try my short story collection, The Reason for Everything, or my novel, The Secrets that Haunt Us. If you’d like to keep up with me and my writing on Instagram, or other social media, you’ll find me at @claireladdsauthor.

Claire Ladds Readers’ Club News: July 2025

27th July 2025 by claireladds Leave a Comment

Hello, and welcome to this month’s news from my writing desk. And, I am rather stunned to say, it genuinely is from my writing desk!

If you have followed me on social media, or read previous blog posts I have written, you may have the distinct impression that I have somewhat of a loathing for my desk. You would, given everything that I’ve said about it previously, have drawn an accurate assumption that I can’t stand it. I’ve had this desk for around two decades now, and I have spent the bulk of that time avoiding sitting at it for any extended period (apart from November 2014, when I decided to challenge myself to write 50,000 words of three different novels. Short version: 115,000/150,000 words were completed, and I didn’t write a thing during December; one of the novels eventually became The Secrets That Haunt Us, several years later. The other two continue to languish in a ‘Book drafts’ folder on my computer).

Back to the desk situation: I took it upon myself to make what may turn out to be a monumentally brilliant decision (I don’t have many of those, so bear with me). I decided to tell myself that I want to write at the desk, and that anywhere else just won’t be as good, as useful, as practical, as… I’m sure I’ll keep adding to the list as time goes on. So far, it’s working, with the odd exception of the times, usually later in the afternoon, when I find myself gripping at my knees in some kind of mental rebellion. That, I’ve realised, is my indicator to tell myself, ‘You are now genuinely sick of looking at this room. Get out of here. Now. Before this brilliant decision you’ve made falls apart like one of your homemade biscuits.’ I don’t make great biscuits. At that point, I handwrite in an armchair with the TV on and calm myself down with a cup of tea. Or three.

This ludicrous but apparently workable process has enabled me to produce an almost complete structure to my new work-in-progress, and 10,000 words of the actual book, along with an array of scenes and character studies that may work themselves into the novel where appropriate. So far, so good. I’ve also completely fallen in love with my main characters and walk around, thinking what they might do, say or ponder in various given situations. I even drew up a shopping list for one of them the other day (it seemed to primarily consist of pizza, cereal bars, tea bags and a collection of cocktails in cans. Not the world’s most arduously constructed shopping list, to be fair).

This month has also kept me extremely busy with Faber Academy’s Writing a Novel (Online) course. I am utterly thrilled and delighted that I chose to apply for a highly competitive place on this course. I won’t go into details of the course itself, as that’s Faber’s and not mine. What I will say is that being on this course has reignited a blazing fire inside me for fiction that I had feared was in potential peril of snuffing itself out due to the current exhausting content of my day-to-day life. It’s fabulous being able to connect with, and support, other writers who are all working with the same end goal as me, dealing with similar emotions about their work, having moments of despair and epiphany about their writing. All of this also includes our wonderful tutor for the course, also an extremely experienced writer and teacher who is immensely helpful and astute with comments about our writing and our novels in general. The feeling of being in this together makes the process less isolating than it can be, sometimes. Writing is, by its very nature, creation performed in isolation (as a rule): just the writer and the keyboard or pen and paper, and the ideas percolating inside their brain.

Books on sale or half price – but be quick!

Until the end of July, you’ll find ALL of my e-books on sale for half price on the Smashwords store. If you get your books from Smashwords, definitely hop on over to grab any of mine – and of other authors – that you’ve been meaning to get, while they’re 50% off the usual price. You’ll find the promo here: https://www.smashwords.com/shelves/promos/

If you buy your e-books on Kobo, you can grab a copy of my psychological suspense with a gothic-inspired undertone, No Deadlier Time, for a reduced price. This offer applies to the UK and Australia and New Zealand. Again, be quick – this sale ends on 31st July.

For short story lovers: A short story to read

As well as my new novel-in-progress, I’ve written several short stories over the last few weeks, which are all destined for various places, be that collections of mine, submissions to publications, or as part of my work-in-progress. For various reasons, I can’t share these with you, however…

In case you missed it on my blog, I have recently added a short story for you to read. This first appeared in That’s Life: Fast Fiction magazine in Australia a number of years ago, and is also included in my short story collection, The Reason for Everything. The initial spark for this piece of fiction was prompted by a memory I have of being very tiny, a toddler possibly, and locking my mum out of the house by somehow sliding across a heavy bolt that went across the bottom of our door (I don’t believe that bolt remained in that position for long afterwards!). I have a snapshot, but vivid, recollection, of Mum climbing back in through the kitchen window which, luckily, she had open, since she was using the twin-tub washing machine on a hot day.

If you’d like to read the story, you’ll find it here: https://claireladds.com/2025/06/29/short-story-instinct/

Until next time, happy reading!

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Which of my books have you read? Here’s a list:

The Reason for Everything and other short stories

The Secrets That Haunt Us

Hers or Mine

You Know You Shouldn’t

Darker Minds:

Show Me Dead

That Killer Image

No Deadlier Time