Biography

Chris Longmuir is a crime novelist as well as a short story and article writer. She is a member of the Society of Authors, the SAW (Scottish association of Writers) and is a founder member of Angus Writers Circle.

Chris lives in a small seaside town on the east coast of Scotland. She considers herself a Scot because although she was born in Wiltshire she has lived in Scotland since the age of two.

Her parents divorced when she was five and she was brought up in a single parent household at a time when these were less common than they are nowadays. As a result she often felt the odd one out at school and didn’t make friends easily. Seeking solace in books she formed a lifelong addiction to the written word. As a child she dreamed of writing her own book but this was a dream she never thought she could make true because writers were mystical people, not really of this world. It was to be many years before she attempted to become part of this strange and fascinating world.

Chris left school without any qualifications when she was fifteen, but obtained an Open University Degree at the age of forty and then a post graduate qualification in Social Work two years later. She has recently acquired a qualification in criminology.

During the course of her life she has worked in shops, offices, mills, factories and was a bus conductress for a time. After gaining her degree she worked as a social worker for Angus Council and latterly was Assistant Principal Officer for Adoption and Fostering.

Chris started writing round about 1990 and admits her first attempts were dire. But, she’d caught the bug. Her addiction to reading expanded to include writing. Initially she wrote short stories and had her first one accepted by People’s Friend in 1991. Since then her stories have appeared in My Weekly, Dark Horizons (British Fantasy Society) and small press anthologies. Despite considering that article writing was her weakest form of writing she has been published in The Leopard, Foster Care, Prism(British Fantasy society), Scottish Memories, and is a regular contributor to a US magazine The Highlander. She also does regular book reviews (I’d sell my soul for a book, she says) and these have been published in Scottish Home and Country, Prism, Leopard, and Scots Magazine. Other achievements are a monologue performed at the Meffan, Forfar; street theatre performed in Forfar, and an Idiot’s Guide for a specialist computer database programme for Angus Council.

Chris has now turned her attention to novel writing. Her first novel, a saga, written in 1997 just as sagas went out of fashion, is in the bottom drawer and she has no intention of resurrecting it. She has lots of 15,000 novel beginnings written in an obsessive desire to win the Constable Trophy but after coming second many years in a row (she stopped counting after five) she still has not achieved this. However she did win the Pitlochry award in 2001 for her second crime novel ‘Night Watcher’, now retitled ‘Cold Vengeance’. Her first crime novel ‘The Death Game’ had come in second the previous year and was also one of the twenty winners of the international Crème de la Crime competition for new, unpublished crime writers.

Up to the present Chris has written three crime novels, all unpublished, but she continues to live in hope.