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In the final post of Strident Publishing Month, tall tales & short stories talks to Strident Publishing’s Managing Director, Keith Charters and Commissioning Editor, Graham Watson.

Strident Publishing is the publisher of several award winning books including, most recently, Linda Strachan's Spider.

Spider won the 2010 Catalyst Award.  The winner is voted for by teenage readers and Spider was chosen as The Book of the Year 2010.






Keith and Graham, welcome to tall tales & short stories and thank you for agreeing to be interviewed.




I’m the Commissioning Editor of Strident. I’ve been in the book trade since I was a teenager and have been involved in every part of the process from commissioning books in publishing houses to selling them over the counter in bookstores. All my heroes were writers, so being an editor is pretty much a dream fulfilled.







It’s to do with history. Before I became a publisher I was an author ( and I still am). And before that I worked in business, running parts of other people’s companies. I always knew that one day I would set up my own business, it was simply a question of what.

By the time my first LEE novel (Lee and the Consul Mutants) was published I had alread

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All that follows is true, I swear…

I was born the son of a fairground showman. For the first year of my life, my family and I travelled the southern byroads of England, pitching up on town greens with helter-skelters, ghost trains, waltzers, sideshows and the infamous ‘Wall of Death’ (an almost vertical circular track around which a motorcyclist would hurtle at phenomenal speeds). When I was still in nappies (‘diapers’ to our American cousins), we settled in the seaside town of Skegness. ‘Skeggy’, as it is known to the locals, is famed for its ‘bracing’ offshore winds – which basically means it’s bloomin’ windy up here! Anyway, the Husseys may have stopped travelling, but we were still fairground people at heart and so, during the school holidays, I helped out on my uncle’s infamous ghost train ride – the scariest spookhouse on the East Coast!

At school, I was always a fairly average student – rubbish at maths and science but pretty good at English. It was only when I went to secondary school that my grades started to improve. It was all down to an amazing English teacher – Mrs Breeds – who inspired me to read and write my own stories.

I went on to study Law at university. Why, oh why, did I study Law?! Not got the foggiest. Just seemed a good idea at the time. What I really wanted to do was write. But I always felt that writers were these mythical, god-like beings that lived in a kind of literary Olympus: powerful, unknowable, untouchable. How could a mere mortal such as I aspire to such divinity? Of course, now I know better. We writers are the least god-like and the most human of, well, humans. Prick us and we bleed. Wrong us (like with a bad review) and we’ll revenge! Or, more likely, mope about the house for a bit filled with loathing and self-doubt! Hmm, seem to be going off on a tangent there…

Eventually, after pursuing a half-hearted legal career, I started a Masters Degree in Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University, bagged myself an agent pretty soon afterwards, and embarked on the life of a writer of horror stories. Last year, after being challenged by my bookseller friend Deborah Chaffey to write a horror series for kids, I sat down and penned the first Witchfinder book. It was a revelation. Witchfinder is the most fun I’ve ever had as a writer.




What inspired you to write WITCHFINDER: DAWN OF THE DEMONTIDE?

As I say, it all began with Deborah. She’s absolutely committed to children’s fiction and basically threw down the gauntlet. I’d had a couple of adult horror books published by this time (Through a Glass, Darkly (2008) and The Absence (2009)) – now Debs set the challenge to write a genuinely exciting, spooky, inventive and mysterious horror book for kids. For one of my earlier books I’d done some research into the history of the 1

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