Family Jewels

Family Jewels was once known as The Kleiber Monster, but it is back with its original title and an updated refreshening. It’s the kind of thriller sometimes called a treasure hunt, but it’s not for kids, even a little bit. Nazis and neo-Nazis don’t make for light reading. Steve Evans always has a serious purpose in his thrillers and this one is no exception. “They still thrill,” he says, “but if that’s all they did would they be worth reading?” A generation after it was written, Family Jewels is if anything even more relevant to today’s world.

Demented

Dementia is a curse, and Steve Evans wrote this book to show just how much of a curse it is, set behind the closed doors of a unit in an old people’s home in Glasgow. It’s something to confront. Being who he is, he didn’t want to stop there and he brings the hot topics of our time into the story. Racism, terrorism, euthanasia, sex and power, revenge and more don’t tiptoe through the background.

Attila’s Angels

Ghost stories aren’t the usual for Steve Evans, but he says he found writing this one an enjoyable challenge. “It turned out to be an opportunity to explore some issues about death and dying as well as contemporary life,” he says. “Yes, philosophy! But don’t be afraid.” There’s more there too – the role of the past in the present, understanding the differences between cultures, Nazism, neo-Nazism, populism and nationalism, politics, hatred, sadism and love. . .what more do you want? That too? Take a look – you might find it.

About Steve Evans

Steve Evans admires the German writer B Traven, who washed up in Mexico in the 1920s and spent the rest of his life artfully disguising his real identity from quite a large number of inquirers. Steve’d like to be like that – hiding behind a nom de plume, mysterious and beguiling, beguiling because mysterious. Sadly, he can only go halfway and if he’s pushed, will probably have to confess. Meanwhile though, what you can learn about him is on the back cover of his novels.

About Steve’s writing

Many writers want to be “literary” and think to be a serious writer, it’s necessary to have an “elevated” style. Steve Evans thinks it’s great to have great themes, but he’s not so sure about the literary part. Writing is both a craft and an art and if he has to choose, he’ll be crafty. He admires some writers now regarded as literary, like Shakespeare, but who were really more keen to be popular than elevated in style. Steve claims that one of Shakespeare’s sonnets suggests he was not at all enamoured of the conceits of the English renaissance he dominated. At any rate, Steve Evans knows he is not Shakespeare, but would like to say that he does try to talk about serious things while entertaining! His writing heroes include the Bard, Euripides, and Dostoevsky, but also Dashiell Hammett, B Traven, Agatha Christie, Thomas Bernhard, Margery Allingham, Balzac, Celine, and Jane Austen.

As he lives in New Zealand, he writes in New Zealand English.

Finding Steve Evans’ books

Most of the prominent e-book sellers stock them. They’re not dear and you can download them to your e-reader’s format. Some sellers offer a printed version – real books, the sort you can hold in your hand, with pages you can turn using your fingers. The covers are nice too.