Background

Gregory Hall was born in 1948. Now he lives in the city of Bath.

Career

Before becoming a novelist Gregory Hall worked as a solicitor, a teacher, and an education officer. Gregory Hall’s suspense novels feature strong, interesting women as protagonists who are thrust into unexpected vortexes of intrigue and life-threatening danger.

His first novel The Dark Backward was published in 1995. It tells the story of Mary Grapelli and her husband Geoffrey Reynolds, who suddenly disappears. In Hall’s follow-up, 1997’s A Cement of Blood, he turned to his own background as an attorney. His main character, Sarah Hartley, is a solicitor who leaves her stressful position in the city for a job she thinks will be less demanding in a small West Country community. Hartley then becomes ensnared in a circle of deception and danger.

In 1998, Hall published the novel Mortal Remains. During the next eighteen years, his other books were published.

Achievements

• Critics praised Hall’s ability to write smart books with unexpected plot turns, as well as his ability to write convincing female characters. They also praised A Cement of Blood as “a cleverly plotted page-turner.”

Works

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  • Hot Water

    (When the previously unknown Subjects of King Brim brutall...)

    2011
  • Everything She Wanted

    (Thames Valley suburban housewife Laura has everything she...)

    2016
  • Mortal Remains

    (Mortal Remains is a brilliantly plotted story of crime an...)

    1998
  • A Sleep and A Forgetting

    (A suicide letter from a young woman with everything to li...)

    2003
  • The Dark Backward

    (When a woman's husband dies mysteriously, everything she ...)

    1995
  • A Cement of Blood

    (In A Cement of Blood, the author turned to his own backgr...)

    1997

Views

Quotations: "I admire writers of the past who kept up a great correspondence as well as writing huge substantive works without the benefit of any technology except pen, ink, and paper. Despite the absence of modern tools, things happened more quickly than we think. The post was excellent, with several collections and deliveries every day. Publishing was fast. Books were printed almost as quickly as the author could write them."

"Writing is a feat of imagination and one shouldn't feel there are things that you can't write about. I don't at all believe in writing about what you know. Extend what you know into what you want to write about is my motto."

"Art should not only delight; it should shock and disturb and question. If it doesn't, it doesn't interest me."

Interests

• cats, sunshine, France, red wine and black coffee

Connections

Gregory Hall is married. He and his wife have two children.