About

MILLION SELLING NOVELIST

Keith Houghton is a bestselling hybrid author – both independently and traditionally published. His books have topped the Amazon charts in America, Australia, and the United Kingdom and have been awarded “Best Books of the Year” status by Amazon Editors. Since publishing his first police procedural thriller in 2011, he has appeared as guest speaker at various publishing trade events and seminars, including The London Book Fair, Authoright, and the Amazon Academy.

With a whopping 13 Kindle Store Number One Bestsellers to his name, and more than 160 individual genre #1 chart-toppers, Keith is one of the bestselling crime fiction authors on Kindle. He is published in Italy and Turkey, and two of his standalone psychological thrillers have been long-listed for the Crime Writers Association Dagger Awards. All-told, he has sold more than ONE MILLION COPIES and 95,000 audiobooks in 14 countries, and has more than 12,000 Five-Star Reviews across Amazon, Audible and Goodreads.

Keith lives in a small town in northwest England with his wife Lynn and their crazy Cairn terrier Jake. When Keith isn’t writing, he loves nothing more than to spend quality time with his family and his four granddaughters. He is also partial to the occasional first-person shooter video game and his chocolate addiction.

 

More Me

I’m English (yes, it’s a nationality as well as a language!), and I write about contrasts and opposites, like good versus evil and right versus wrong. My good guys are half bad and my bad guys are half good, pushed and pulled both ways along story lines that are split equally between denying truths and embracing lies. In the real world of my imagination, not everything is black and white. Sometimes it’s blood red.

I actively split infinitives all day long, boldly going wherever my imagination takes me. And when I’m not doing everything I can to distract myself from my writing, you can usually find me deconstructing everything I wrote the day before, or eating chocolate, or both.

My favourite kind of music is rock (from Goo Goo Dolls to Extreme), and my favourite reading genre is science fiction, with Larry Niven being my all-time fave. I like Mexican and Italian food (sometimes together), playing computer games, holidaying abroad, and daydreaming, which means my idea of heaven is sitting under a parasol on a beach in Florida, eating fajita pizza while thinking about shooting zombies.

Our children are all grown up and flown the nest. They’ve all done well for themselves (thank goodness!) and have blessed us with four beautiful granddaughters, which makes me a much-in-demand grandpa.

My favourite film is Same Time, Next Year, closely followed by The Big Lebowski – both of which are excellent examples of pacy word craft, and I encourage any aspiring writers interested in honing their dialogue skills to check out the scripts.

A few little-known facts about me that really ought to stay hidden:

• At age 14, I held the high-jump record at school (1.76 metres / 5′ 9″).
• I started my first novel when I was 13, an epic space opera titled Hisk.
• I completed my first full-length novel at age 18, a sword and sorcery fantasy epic called The Well Of Magic.
• I have written 2 drama screenplays as well as 3 comedy stage plays, one of which was produced by an English theatre company. It was called Spare Ribs and told the story of Adam and Eve from a Neil Simonesque perspective.
• In the mid 2000’s I ran a worldwide online video game community with more than 1000 members. It was called Knights Of Freedom and focused on the games Halo and Battlefield 2. I gave it up in 2008 to write Killing Hope.
• I am  blind in my right eye (no retina, since birth). I don’t see blackness with this eye. I see an absolute absence of everything. Imagine trying to look out of the back of your head and that’s what I see: nothing! With just one working eye, it means I see the world in 2D and always have. I’m incapable of judging distance, which means I bump into everything all the time! So, if you see me looking slightly crosseyed in a photo, now you know why! That poor eye doesn’t know which way is up!

These days, I am extremely lucky enough to be able to earn a living doing something I love, which is writing. It’s only taken me thirty years of relentless pursuit, 100 rejection slips and a receding hairline to get here.

Let’s see how long the journey lasts! 🙂