A Little Flattered, I Admit

WELL, I shan’t pretend I wasn’t a little flattered when the good folk at Keyboardink Publishing came round to try and talk me out of my comfortable retirement with an offer almost nobody could refuse.

It all centred around “The Haunted Highway Series”, one of their cozy family mystery offerings. Original author Jonathan Hartley was finding that his day job had become so demanding that he simply no longer had the time to devote to writing, especially to the demands of writing books to a deadline, which is one of the problems with publishing a series.

Having read both “Murder at Misty Ridge” and “Murder at Marberg Dam”, I was already familiar with garage owner Jacques “Jakes” van der Merwe, artisanal baker Annie Lomax and her endearing Jack Russell terrier, Crumpet. Moreover, I live not far from that Midlands stretch of the old R102 between Pietermaritzburg and Mooi River, which gave rise to the haunted highway where the series is set.

What an amazing group of protagonists to work with! And to have their creator’s unequivocal blessing in my attempts to continue their amateur sleuthing along a stretch of road I know well. I must have done something truly good in a previous life to have had so much good fortune.

We worked together on the third book, “The Silent Station”, and although my input was more editorial than creative, Jonathan was insistent that I should be listed as the author.  As we were running close to the limit of KeyboardInk’s publishing deadlines, there was little time to argue.

My first solo effort “Strange Sightings at Fernlea River” will be published as an e-book on Amazon Select in mid-November.  It is shorter than the first three books in the series, for which I make no apology.  Readers of the earlier volumes may detect a change of style and also a little more emphasis on the spirit world, something in which I have an abiding, and – according to my wife, unhealthy – interest.

Whatever it lacks in length, I hope it makes up for in intrigue, and those of you who are hoping for a larger helping of Annie, Jakes and Crumpet will be happy to hear that the following book in the series will be a much longer read.

Like both Jonathan and KeyboardInk’s publishing editor, Richard Lyon, I attended Michaelhouse, the all-boys boarding school which is the real-life model for All Saints College, and where “Mango the Ghost” is well-known to generations of boys. The intimate knowledge of how this type of institution functions has been very helpful to me in drafting the plot for the fifth book of the series, which is due to be published early next year.

If you have any comments on “Strange Sightings at Fernlea River”, or on anything else “Haunted Highway” related, please message me on my brand new e-mail address, don@keyboardink.com.

Don Halliday

Hillcrest

September 2026