Why subscribe?

I’m writer and journalist Jeremy Craddock. I’ve written for a wide range of newspapers and magazines including the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the Daily Express, the Daily Mail and Metro.

I also teach multimedia journalism at Manchester Metropolitan University.

My new book, The Lady in the Lake: A Reporter’s Memoir of a Murder, is published by Mirror Books. It is based on a real murder case I covered as a reporter. It was shortlisted for the 2025 Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for Non-fiction, and highly commended at the 2025 True Crime Awards, where it was shortlisted for two awards. It is currently being developed for television by West Road Pictures.

My true crime book The Jigsaw Murders: The True Story of the Ruxton Killings and the Birth of Modern Forensics was longlisted for the 2022 Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction.

It is currently being developed as a TV drama by Elaine Collins, the producer of ITV’s Vera and the BBC’s Shetland.

Truth is stranger — and more compelling — than fiction. And true stories are definitely in huge demand right now from publishers and TV and film producers.

Look at some of the biggest recent successes in books, movies and Netflix and Amazon series, and odds are they were based on a true story.

This might be true crime, it might be a life-affirming underdog story or it could be a real-life tale of espionage.

Fiction is great of course, but if a compelling story also happens to be true, then a huge audience will be hungry for it.

It’s one thing to have the facts, the bare bones, but quite another to tell the story in a way that will have that audience on the edge of their seats, held in suspense and desperate to know what happens next.

This newsletter is for you if you are at all inspired by bestselling narrative nonfiction writers such as:

• Erik Larson (Devil in the White City)

• Laura Hillenbrand (Seabiscuit, Unbroken)

• Kate Summerscale (The Suspicions of Mr Whicher)

• David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon)

• Simon Winchester (The Surgeon of Crowthorne/The Professor and the Madman)

• Joe Simpson (Touching the Void)

• Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm)

• Dava Sobel (Longitude)

• Michael Lewis (The Big Short/Moneyball)

• Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers)

• Simon Garfield (Just My Type)

• Bill Bryson (One Summer: 1927)

• Blake Morrison (And When Did You Last See Your Father? — made into a great Jim Broadbent and Colin Firth film)

• Walter Lord (A Night To Remember)

• Rebecca Skloot (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks)

• John Preston (A Very English Scandal)

• Carol Ann Lee (The Murders at White House Farm)

• Daniel James Brown (The Boys in the Boat)

• Ann Rule (The Stranger Beside Me)

• Maureen Orth (Vulgar Favors — the book adapted into the Netflix smash-hit The Assassination of Gianni Versace)

• Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs — adapted as a movie by Aaron Sorkin; Einstein — turned into the NatGeoTV series Genius)

These books were all bestsellers, many of them major blockbusters. Many were turned into successful movies and TV series. They proved highly lucrative for their authors.

You could be writing these sorts of stories, too. (You’ve probably guessed all the above examples are some of the amazing creative nonfiction authors and books who have inspired me. If you don’t know them, then make sure you check them out.)

In this newsletter I will show you how great true stories told as narrative nonfiction, using all the same tools and techniques used by novelists and screenwriters are a dynamite formula.

I will share behind-the-scenes material about my own book, The Jigsaw Murders. I will point you in the direction of some of the writing and storytelling wisdom I’ve benefited from.

And I will lead the rallying cry for all those writers out there who believe they are too old to start a successful writing career.

Many, many successful writers were late-bloomers. You are never too old! I have been working as a journalist since my early 20s, but I was 52 when I published my first book.

I hope you’ll join me at The A-B-C of Writing True Stories.

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