Welcome to my blog

My writing falls into two categories:

• My fiction
• My work in education.

In my fiction, I will post about my projects; writing processes and stories from the news or history that inspire my themes. In education, it may be specific lessons or techniques that can make learning more memorable. As I no longer work full-time in schools, I am just leaving a few archive resources, so the I using the site to publicise my current writing and any interviews or festival events.

My current projects:

My debut novel, Days of Long Shadows was published on February 1^st 2024 – Thanks to Crescent Swan publishers for bringing the book to market. Details can be found on Amazon by searching on Tim Franks or Days of Long Shadows – either way will get you there.

Or there’s a handy QR code

I am writing in the crime thriller genre using story lines to pose uncomfortable moral questions. Currently, I am at the early stages of writing a story set in The Blitz – a body is discovered in a city littered bodies, but what is a girl in a haute-couture dress doing on The Isle of Dogs in an air raid? This is a story that digs below the myth of the Blitz Spirit (I recommend anyone to watch the Lucy Wordsley programme on iPlayer to get a feel for what I mean https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000sm7s/blitz-spirit-with-lucy-worsley ). I have moved from contemporary crime to historical because I am an historian. I have taught history and written history textbooks so, for me, it logical that I should play to my strengths. Also, setting a story in the World War II brings some real opportunities. In contemporary technology and the precision forensic science can generate some really interesting stories, but in the times before these were so developed provide a chance to focus on characters and human nature. I am further attracted to writing a story set in these times because it allows interest to be generated in many ways e.g. unmasking the myth that was manufactured about the period, exposing contemporary moral dilemmas by posing similar scenarios but set in the past; using detail and world building to enhance interest and shine a light on past prejudices and social divisions.

In April 2015 BBC 4Extra broadcast one of my short stories entitled Through My Own Fault. This was originally broadcast on Radio 4 and on the World Service.

For me, crime fiction has many functions – as pure entertainment to bring us comfort away from everyday stresses, all the way up to being a morality tale for the modern age, holding up a mirror to ourselves and society. In its reflection, we may see the good in the human spirit and the depths to which it can plummet. A cosy crime might flatter our intellects as we sit with the central heating turned to max, while something nearer to the real world might illustrate the choices and struggles that stand between us and our better selves.

But if we’re having a bad day, it’s okay to pick something that wraps its arms around us and tells us – It’ll all be fine in the end. For myself, I embrace the diversity – I can be alongside Rebus as he wades through corruption, knowing there’ll be no neat and legal resolution if Ger Cafferty is anywhere near, while simultaneously thinking the perfect accompaniment to a lunch break is Mark Williams playing Father Brown.

My career and experience as an author

I began writing in my mid-twenties as a result of undertaking a course about developing my pupils’ reading skills. One task was to write factual based stories to support history and other subjects.  When given the task of writing at a certain reading age, the course tutor would comment on the quality of my prose. This was a surprise, but it encouraged me to begin writing.

My earliest published work was educational. Originally, I wrote to Oxford University Press explaining how they could set out the questions in their history books to better support reading skills and comprehension. At an initial interview, I mentioned my specialist training in phonics and was commissioned to write the teachers’ manual and workbooks that supported the phonic branch of the Oxford Reading Tree. Thereafter, I was commissioned to write history books with strong anthropological themes, and I was the author of their textbook on Ancient Greece. I have also written for Longmans (now Pearson) and acted as a readability and questions consultant for other publishers.

My current focus

But, for now, my concentration is on fiction. Fiction with villains that so many of us will recognise stalking our daily lives –  The pressures that makes ordinary people perpetrators, facilitators and fellow-travellers in evil, as they strive to save themselves from leaders who sacrifice morality on the altar of their own power and status.

In 1976 I took my finals exams and I remember a question that said, ‘In his book, Herzog, the novelist Saul Bellow poses the question, ‘How should a good man live?’

It was a three hour paper, but I’m still trying to write the answer.