Backstories

A middle-aged man, author Michael Ridpath, with gray hair and a beard standing outdoors near the Thames, with a city skyline and bridge in the background during sunset.

This is the interesting stuff.

Websites today are supposed to be slim and streamlined. They are not supposed to include much text because of the low attention span of today’s web users. In the rest of this site I have followed that principle.

But not in this section.

Over the last twenty years, I have written plenty about my books. Much of this was included in obscure sections of my old website or in my blog or in my quarterly emails to readers. My intention is to include the most interesting material here.

I will start with just a few items, but over the next few months I intend to add to them.

Articles are posted in the following categories:

- Me and my writing

- The Foreign Correspondent Mysteries

- Magnus Iceland Mysteries

- Stand-alone historical thrillers

- Financial thrillers

Me and my writing

The Foreign Correspondent Mysteries

Magnus Iceland Mysteries

From 2020 to 2024 I wrote a blog entitled Writing in Ice, which was about researching and writing my Magnus series. You can see the whole blog here.

Here are three of the more popular posts:

Dinner, Elves and Björk

The Icelandic Language

One man and two women walk into a bar: a banker, a priest and a detective.

Here are some photographs of the locations in the Magnus novels: Magnus Books Photos

Other articles:

Stand-Alone Historical Thrillers

Launch Code: Nuclear Near Misses

Financial Thrillers

At the bottom of each of the individual book pages for the financial thrillers, there is a section on why I wrote each book, written in the early 2000s. You may find these interesting once you have read the books in question.