About Me

After that we lived in Inverbervie, Scotland, near Muscat in Oman and I went to school there and finally to a boarding school, Box Hill School, in Surrey, England. After that, City University in London, where I studied Journalism and Psychology and then, finally, I was free of education. 

I was close to getting married and settling down then, a frustrated wannabe writer, but for some reason took off with some friends of my brothers, on a whim, to Galway, Ireland, and so started bumming about the world doing odd jobs and, finally, teaching English. I wandered through France, Germany and Thailand with a few stops along the way, before finally landing up in Madrid, Spain, where I fell in love with the city and a beautiful lady who became my wife. We got married in Las Vegas with Elvis doing the duties and now live about sixteeen kilometres from the capital with our two teenage children. I work as a teacher in a local school.

Writing wise, it's hard to know where it all started. I can't really remember a time when I didn't write stories or poems or lose myself in my books. Over the years I've thought about it a lot and think a lot of it's to do with having a very active imagination from a young age - for good and for bad. With a vivid imagination you get all the good and all the bad in the world infinitely, and this affects your sleep, your psychology and your creativity. In those early years it was like being born with a mad twin and it's taken me many years to reconcile the fact that imagination is something very real but also something which doesn't exist. Like love or dark matter, we can't see it but we know it's there. It has to be there. It is there.

Thanks to my mum and dad I got lumbered with a very writerly name, James Alexander Hartley, which marks me out from the crowd. These days I'm your bog-standard white, middle-class, straight, Anglo-Saxon bloke, for better and for worse. Back in the days on the Wirral I was like an alien from another world when my name was read out among the Mikes and Daves and Sams and Claire's. Never quite fitting in has always been a theme for me, whether I was the scouse idiot at boarding school or the posh idiot in Liverpool. Now I'm the English idiot in Spain but when I go back to England I'm the Spanish one. Being a writer can be like that, too, I think, like being in two worlds a lot of the time but never quite fitting into one or the other.

I have a memory of sitting at the front room table one night with my brother Ben when we were young. He was drawing or colouring - he's a great artist - and I was writing. Only I didn't write anything. I think I had folded the paper and made a cover with my name and the name of the book - Madness - and I remember telling him, "I'm not going to tell you what this is about because you won't understand it." I must have been about six. Him, four. And I always go back to that memory and think there's a lot about it which describes the personality of a writer - or me, at least. The way I think I was born with a love of telling stories and the mystery of it, the pretension of it. I always loved books. Always loved reading. Just having books about me, looking at covers and using books as a kind of mantra-like object, the words within or a single word being capable of sending me into a trance.

I was always good at English at school. Teachers and other kids liked my stories. I could come up with ideas, seemingly without trying, and read and read. I won a couple of prizes along the way, a bible story competition in Scotland and then, crucially, came second in a national competition run by McDonald's in secondary school. The prize was to be in a published anthology (and a meal for four in a restaurant in Swindon - long other story). In the end the anthology was not published and that became a huge, huge grievance for me. I think one of the most painful disappointments of my life. An injustice.

By the time I was in University I was drinking way too much but still managed to get second prize in a ghost story competition - getting a handsake and a cheque off Jeffrey Archer in London somewhere - but then, in my twenties, the boozing blurred things to the point where I was living the life of the itinerant writer without actually doing much writing. I still can't work out a positive to that time of sex, drugs and rock and roll except that I think I knew I had to do it then. Now, sitting here writing this as a fifty-year old, at eight in the morning on a Saturday with a cup of tea, I think, "well, I hope you enjoyed it". And I think I did.

After a personal tragedy in Thailand sent me finally home from my drifting, an old friend of mine passed a manuscript I'd written on to someone at Orion publising. I received a glowing reader's report and remember spending the following Christmas celebrating like a rock star - it seemed my dream of publication was finally upon me! However, in the bleak, painful glow of a January London morning, I was told to sod off - that they'd decided in the end not to publish. I was gutted again. Rejected again - and again, so close. I went home and wrote, very quickly, a book about marian appartitions happening in Birkenhead and quickly got back a reader's report. "Dear oh dear, oh dear," it began.

I was a fly to the literary gods. They were playing with me.

Just before my dad died he passed me a cutting from a computer magazine he'd been reading which talked about a new trend - self-publishing and publishing on demand. I looked into this and, around the time my girl, Carmen, was born, sat up and wrote Playing God - a real, proper novel about British football (write about what you know and like, I thought) - and published it, and two more books, with Lulu (which cost me about 2400 pounds), none of which sold anything. I tried to convince myself I was a writer but couldn't.

A few years later, while my kitchen was being refurbished, we stayed with my mother in law here and I wrote another book about two things I love - Macbeth and memories of my first years at boarding school - and this was accepted by John Hunt Publishing and published as The Invisible Hand - the first part of a trilogy called Shakespeare's Moon. Finally, although, for the first book at least, I'd had to hybrid publish, I got a taste of writerly life. I worked with Shakespeare's Schoolroom in Stratford, ran a national comp for the Arts Council and was in the local papers and did Waterstones signings (one with zero attendees). I even got Christopher Ecclestone to give me a quote (he read the books to his kids who apparently liked them). And I sold fairly well - the first book well enough for JHP to ask for two more. The third - my favourite - Cold Fire - was based on Romeo and Juliet and is the only book I think I can say I really had published. I paid nothing towards the cost of it and it became a staple in many schools here in Madrid (til Brexit scuppered everything). The third in the trilogy - The Unexpected - about AI, the environment and probably the most adventury in the series, was scuppered by Covid. But by that time, too, I was very disenamoured by the book business. I had seen behind the screen. I had re-read my contracts.

These days I largely self-publish. I have three horror books under the name A.J.Leehart which all received decent reviews (I was compared to James Herbert in one, one of those names I'd stared at years ago, trancelike) and got some press - but the marketing side of things is not me. I know what I have to do. I know what I should do but I don't and can't do it - so here I am. 

My most successful books are a series I've written and self-pubbed for kids here in Spain - Cognate Readers - which are aimed at helping them with their English - and giving them a reading option which isn't watered-down Jane Austen or Harry Potter. 

These days I write poetry and have published a fair bit online. I enjoy it. I'm an Associate Editor at Tint Journal and the founder and editor of The Madrid Review. Right now I'm studying a post-grad in Teaching and trying to get my Spanish up to at least B2 level. I'm going to do some open water swimming in summer. I go out and get drunk once a week on Fridays. I'm currently reading a biography of William Burroughs and love listening to podcasts and music, although there things are changing. I find myself doe eyed listening to Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata more than the Pixies these days. I saw Guns and Roses play three hours here in Madrid last year and will see Metallica this year. I wear slippers and pyjamas. I have an armchair and am very much a man of routine. And, oh, I'm writing a book called Madness. But I'm not going to tell you what it's about - you wouldn't understand it.