About Chris
Chris was born in an ambulance racing through a town he’s only returned to once, which probably explains a lot.
Straight after graduating in Spanish and French, he hopped on a bus from Cardiff to Catalonia where he stayed for the next twenty-odd years, first in the small and beautiful city of Girona, then in the big and beautiful city of Barcelona. He’s also lived in Bilbao, pre-empting the Guggenheim by a good few years, and in Madrid, where his love of Barcelona football club deepened. During this time, he worked as a teacher, in educational publishing, as a travel writer and as a translator. He still spends part of his day translating lofty and noble academic and arts texts.
Besides this, he also lived in Grenoble for six months, where he studied the French Resistance movement, a far deeper and more complex subject than history often teaches us and one that has fascinated him for years.
He now lives in his native Wales, where he writes crime novels and translates stuff.
The result of his lifelong interest in World War 2 and resistance and collaboration in Occupied France, The Unwanted Dead (Orion) is Chris’s first novel set in Paris, featuring Detective Eddie Giral. The series will see Eddie negotiate his way through the Occupation, trying to find a path between resistance and collaboration, all the time becoming whoever he must be to survive the ordeal descended on his home.
He also writes the Elisenda Domènech series (Canelo) set in Girona, featuring a police officer in the devolved Catalan police force. The head of an experimental Serious Crime Unit, she fights the worst of human excesses in the most beautiful of settings.
When he’s not writing or trying to keep up with his reading pile, Chris loves travelling, languages, red wine, Wales and Barça at football, Wales at rugby, cryptic crosswords, art, rock music and losing himself in European cities.
He’s especially proud to be a member of the Welsh crime writing collective Crime Cymru, the Crime Writers’ Association and the Society of Authors.
And finally, three things about Chris that are not at all as interesting as they sound
He once interpreted for Salvador Dalí.
Well, yes and no. I was hired to interpret for an English-speaker, who didn’t show up, so I spent an hour looking surreptitiously at Dalí, who completely ignored me, while the other people around the table carried on their conversation. Dalí himself didn’t actually say a word.
He trained some of the forwards in the Spanish Rugby World Cup team.
Yes, that’s technically correct, but what it fails to mention is that they were nine years old at the time. I helped coach a taster session for young kids in Barcelona. Two of the future members of the Spanish squad took part in the session, but it was a good ten years before they actually ended up playing for Spain. Sounds good, though.
He had coffee with a Nobel prize-winner.
Actually, that is a bit interesting. It was at a book fair in Barcelona and William Golding came for a coffee with me when I suggested it to everyone on a stand he just happened to be on. I was terrified, but he was very pleasant. Thing is he wouldn’t talk about himself or his books, but wanted to know all sorts of things about living in a bilingual community. I had coffee with William Golding and he asked me the questions: that’s the bit that wasn’t so interesting.
