Blue Toad Murder Files Discovers Budding Murder Mystery Author

19 April 2011

Today we announced the winner of the Blue Toad Murder Files™ writing competition run in conjunction with The Independent online.

Ben Borland from Glasgow won with his short story WolfSkin, beating off stiff competition to win a place on the ‘Thrillers – Writing a Bestseller’ writing course run by the London School of Journalism, together with a copy of Blue Toad Murder Files: The Mysteries of Little Riddle on PC and a Dell laptop to play it on.

The competition ran for two months exclusively on The Independent’s website – budding writers were challenged to write their own murder mystery short story – and drew entries of a very high standard, including a collection of highly commendable stories from under 16s.

The short stories were judged by Jade Tidy, Relentless’ assistant producer, and Sue Moorcroft, a lecturer at London School of Journalism and author of a variety of bestselling romantic novels.

Sue Moorcroft writes romantic novels of dauntless heroines and irresistible heroes. Want to Know a Secret?, All That Mullarkey and Starting Over are all published by Choc Lit. Combining that success with her experience as a creative writing tutor, she’s written a ‘how to’ book, Love Writing: How To Make Money Writing Romantic or Erotic Fiction  (Accent Press). Sue also writes short stories, serials, articles and courses and is the head judge for Writers’ Forum. You’re welcome to befriend her on Facebook or follow her on Twitter (@suemoorcroft).

“With storytelling at the heart of Blue Toad Murder Files, we felt this was a really great competition for us to run to find a new talent in the writing world,” commented Andrew Eades, executive director at Relentless Software. “It was a tough decision to decide on a winner, but Ben’s story really captured the judges’ imagination.”

"The idea for WolfSkin came to me one day when I was on my way to work and then shortly afterwards I saw the competition in The Independent, so I knew I just had to have a go. I'm just glad the judges thought it was a worthy winner." said winner Ben Borland.