Death Watch Cottage: 'A murdered tourist and a community tearing itself apart was too good to pass up'

Death Watch Cottage is the fourth novel in the CSI Ally Dymond series which is set in North Devon. When I began writing the CSI Ally Dymond series, I always knew I wanted to set it in North Devon.

Having grown up there, I returned to live there a few years ago and I know the area extremely well. I have always felt that North Devon’s blend of coastal communities, market towns, isolated farms and desolate moorlands would give me ample locations for my crime novel and so it has proved to be the case.

When called upon in my stories, North Devon has certainly done its fair share of the heavy lifting. It has provided an authentic backdrop for poor mobile signals, easy getaways down narrow roads that are barely mapped, slow police responses from an emergency service stretched thinly over a huge area and communities that sometimes know a little too much about each other.

But it isn’t just North Devon’s landscape that has provided me with inspiration for my novels. I am also interested in the issues facing the place I call home. 

First and foremost, I write crime novels which means there is a certain contract that I must fulfil with my reader but, beyond that, I also like to play with themes pertinent to the area. 

With my first novel, Breakneck Point, I wanted to look beyond the breath-taking landscape and that classic image of a thatched cottage and roses growing around the door which is why I set it in fictional Bidecombe, a struggling coastal town beset with problems relating to social deprivation. 

My latest novel Death Watch Cottage tackles the other end of the scale. It is set in a former fishing village a little further down the coast called Maidcombe, but, unlike Bidecombe, most of the properties in Maidcombe are holiday homes. 

Second homes and holiday lets are a live issue in North Devon. There are approximately 4,770 holiday rentals listed in the area, according to Airbnb. This has placed the permanent rental market under considerable pressure with local people finding it difficult to find a place that they can afford to live in. 

On the flipside, visitors generate around £600 million for the local economy, supporting in the region of 11,000 jobs. It’s against this backdrop that I wanted to write Death Watch Cottage.

The novel opens with a public meeting where tempers flare over the closure of the local school due to a fall in numbers. 

There are those who believe the fault lies with the increasing proliferation in holiday homes which are pushing up house prices and driving local families out of the area. Others at the meeting argue that many of the restaurants and pubs would not exist without tourists.

The meeting is interrupted by a teenage boy who, on seeing a light on in his father’s holiday, went to check, only to discover the body of a tourist in the shower. The only problem Leo Hawkins is meant to be staying at a different holiday let in the village. Is his death the result of a faulty CO alarm or is something more sinister at play.

As the investigation begins, it becomes clear that some locals resent outsiders enough to wage a campaign against them in an attempt to drive them away. Would they go as far as to murder a tourist?

Alongside the issues surrounding second homes, I am also taken with the idea of community. In North Devon, there are many close-knit communities, similar to the one I grew up in, where families have lived side by side for generations. But what exactly does it mean to belong to a community and what is the best way of protecting these communities? Those were the questions I wanted to try and answer in Death Watch Cottage.

It is often this sense of community that attracts visitors to the area, but there are those in my novel that feel their community is being eroded by the presence of holiday homes that remain empty for large parts of the year. 

On the other hand, there are those who believe communities must adapt to survive and that includes accepting villages can only remain viable if they offer holiday lets.

In reality, North Devon is as welcoming to visitors as it always has been but for a crime writer such as myself, a murdered tourist, along with a community tearing itself apart felt like a potent mix that was just too good to pass up.

Death Watch Cottage by T. Orr Munro (HarperCollins Publishers) Out Now

Assume nothing. The body of Leo Hawkins is found in a Devon holiday cottage, the cause of death carbon monoxide poisoning. Was this a tragic accident or something more sinister? CSI Ally Dymond will follow the evidence wherever it leads. Believe no-one. Leo’s wife gives an account of his final hours, but something isn’t adding up. Graffiti left by an anti-tourist group is discovered nearby. The only consistent thread in the investigation is that no one is telling the truth. Challenge everything When a second body turns up, Ally and the murder team must examine everything they thought they knew, untangling a web of suspects to get to the truth. Is there a single killer? Are there more deaths to come? Ally will need to uncover local loyalties to catch any killer before they strike again…

 T. Orr Munro can be found on Instagram @ t_orr_munro

Simon Mason on The Dangerous Man

The Dangerous Stranger is the fifth story in a series featuring a pair of mis-matched detectives in Oxford, both called Wilkins. Ryan Wilkins is Oxford born and bred, white, a chav who grew up on what the Americans would call a ‘trailer park,’ badly dressed, badly behaved, semi-feral in fact, with a chip on his shoulder and anger-management issues generally brought into play by encounters with privileged elites. Ray Wilkins is a member of the privileged elites, London-Nigerian, privately educated with a double first in PPE from Balliol College, Oxford, handsome, nattily dressed, articulate and suave, the golden boy of Thames Valley Police – until, much against his will, he was paired with Ryan. They are not related. They do not get on.

Oddly, what they get are results.

This new story is a thought-experiment. What if Oxford – gentle city of poets and scholars – had experienced a riot, as so many cities in the UK did, after the Southport murders? An out-of-control crowd lobbing Molotov cocktails at a hotel housing asylum seekers. And also: what if a young refugee was actually burned to death? (It’s an Oxford tradition, after all, if in abeyance for many centuries and formerly restricted to Jews and archbishops.) And furthermore: what if the victim then turned out not to be a refugee at all?

Perhaps it sounds very political. But the impulse wasn’t to discuss politics; the story seemed to arise naturally out of the anger and fear. There is action, for sure, but as Chandler said, what counts is emotion; and it seemed to me that there were unusual amounts of this arising, unstoppably, chaotically, from the basic situation I imagined.

This emotion affects all the characters, in different ways. Because it’s the fifth book in a series, some of the characters have naturally been around for a while. Little Ryan, for instance, Ryan’s four-year-old son. And his father, Ryan Senior, released early from prison (overcrowding issues) and now resident, to his disgust, in a hostel for rehabilitating prisoners. The Wilkins’s Superintendent is familiar too, fresh, steely and blonde as ever, but having to cope with a disciplinary enquiry, which tests her considerable reserves to the limit, and the Chief Constable, a massive, battered, malevolent presence, who openly hopes to get rid of those Wilkins ‘clowns’.

But there are new characters too. A sly criminal from Rotherhithe who hates Oxford even as his job keeps him there. An eager new DC, William, who simply won’t shut up and is a little too naïve for his own good. ‘Milky’ Nolan, twelve years old, excited to find himself at his first riot. Yemi Kosoko, world food grocery shopkeeper in Oxford’s ethnic Cowley Road and his friend, the chess-playing eccentric academic Nicholas Kinghorn, who dyes his beard lilac to remind him of weddings in Ghana. And finally, most important of all, Jallo (other names unknown, age unknown, country of origin unknown) who finds himself sleeping rough in Oxford’s nooks and crannies, and knows himself to be in horrible danger.

I like Oxford’s nooks and crannies, I must admit. I like the city’s double nature. Its deep Englishness (dons and quadrangles, meadows and river), and simultaneous air of foreignness (all those foreign post-grads, language students and care workers). I like its strange blend of permanence (we who live here) and transience (those who arrive and go, students, tourists). And I like its rooted elderly and great waves of youth. It seems to me excitingly unstable. Perhaps it’s that quality that gives rise to stories, not all of which it wants to tell.

The Dangerous Man by Simon Mason (Quercus Publishing) £16.99 Out Now

On a warm and pleasant evening in Oxford, gentle city of poets and scholars, rioters outside a hotel full of asylum seekers set a young refugee on fire. The city - the country - convulses in shock. Is this who we are? It's international news of the very worst kind, and the Chief Constable demands immediate and exemplary action in bringing the perpetrators to justice. The detectives leading the investigation fill him with misgivings, however: DIs Ryan and Ray Wilkins (no relation), Thames Valley's detective pantomime horse, one Oxford-educated, the other Oxford-trailer park. He doesn't understand why they work together. 'Do they even get on?' 'Somehow that doesn't seem necessary,' their Superintendent replies. Who burned the boy alive? Was it a far-right extremist? Was it an ordinary person who had simply gone along to watch and got caught up in the emotion? Could it even be one of the children who were there? Deploying a range of investigative skills, some standard, some unconventional and some frankly nuts, the Wilkinses do what they do: results with chaos. But when they discover that the victim was not an asylum seeker after all, or even a resident of the hotel, the whole investigation kicks into a completely different configuration.

The Shots review of The Dangerous Man can be found here.

Useful Idiots by Neil Lancaster

Writers are generally divided into two camps in how they deal with the difficult task of coming up with an idea for a book and then how to attack the job of getting the words down. 

We are either known as “plotters,” which is kind of self-explanatory, as in you plot all the story out, you know the story beats, and you know how it ends. 

Or.. we can be what is known in the trade as “pantsers,” which of course isn’t a word. However, it basically means you write by the “seat of your pants.” Sounds great, right?

So, as a dedicated “pantser,” mind I decided when planning the 7th Max Craigie novel I would change how I work, and come up with a cogent plot before I started typing onto the blank word document. 

But what? I’ve written about, drug runners, corrupt cops, long-term missing people, and even a psychotic serial killer stalking the Scottish Highlands. Then it hit me. Espionage. I’m a huge fan of spy novels, but really, as an ex-cop, police procedurals are where my expertise lies. Could I mix the two? 

You bet I could, but what’s the angle that links the words of counter-espionage, and modern policing in Scotland? So, I did what I always do. I stared into space, and hoped. It’s not that proactive, but it’s a thing, and so far, I’ve been lucky. Something would show up. 

And it did! 

Real life came to the rescue, with a shocking and high-profile case that hit the news right when I needed it. On the 20th March 2024 a large fire was set using an accelerant at a warehouse in East London. Eight fire appliances were required along with 60 firefighters to quell the blaze, which caused in excess of £1.4 million in damage.

But this was a factory with a difference. This premises was storing property and aid that was bound for Ukrainian forces engaged in the blood-soaked war that was still raging on that continent.

Not an insurance job. Not revenge. Not even wanton damage for damage’s sake, which we see plenty of. This was an attack commissioned by the proscribed Russian state proxy Wagner Group but carried out by a group of petty London criminals in exchange for comparatively modest sums of cash. 

The ringleader Dylan Earl, a petty criminal from London made contact with the Wagner group by joining a broadcast channel on the social messaging application Telegram.

He began chatting with two account handles called ‘Privet Bot’ and ‘Lucky Strike.’ Earl knew that these accounts were supportive of Russia, and he accepted an offer of money to undertake operations, the first of which as the East London factory attack.

His Co-conspirator Jake Reeves had helped Earl recruit a group of men, all petty criminals involved in drug supply to carry out the arson. 

After the group’s arrests, the whole plot was essentially uncovered by their communications on secure messaging sites where they openly talked of working for Wagner, and the sums they were being paid. None of the group had ever received training, nor travelled to Russia. They were just useful idiots. Petty criminals willing to be exploited in exchange for cash, who are now all serving long prison sentences.

This is hardly Le Carre, is it? I mean, where are the gadgets? Where are the double-agents? 

So what had changed?

The reality is that operational nature of Russian intelligence operations has changed. The world has changed, and it was two distinct events which propagated this. 

The poisoning of Sergei, and Yulia Skripal by deploying the weapons grade nerve-agent Novichok on British soil in Salisbury in 2018. This caused a massive response from the UK by the expulsion of 153 Russian “diplomats,” by the end of 2018. 

The next incident was a little more explosive. 

Russia invaded Ukraine.

Russia’s ability to propagate operational activity was severely compromised firstly by the lack of agents working undercover in Embassies, and secondly because of how the world has changing. Everyone now has a digital footprint. It’s harder to work covertly in a hostile foreign state in a perpetually online world.

So, the use of the criminal proxy model is attractive for a number of reasons. 

Firstly, a low-level petty criminal is cheap. The sums in the Dylan Earl case were comparatively modest. £2-3, 000 to torch a factory. 

Russia no doubt could carry out these acts with agents of the GRU, as they did in Salisbury. Or, for less money, and less risk, they could deploy useful idiots, who they never even have to meet. 

As a writer, this is manna from heaven, serious though it is. Espionage is no longer the preserve of a suave guy in a dinner suit, driving an Aston Martin. It could be the 17-year-old hoodie-wearing yob from a rough estate in inner London.

So, the sixth in the DS Max Craigie series, The Dark Heart was born. It’s a story that opens with a car bomb in York, when a renowned is killed in a devastating explosion in York, authorities quickly attribute the attack to Islamic extremists. But as the investigation unfolds, it becomes clear that all is not as it seems. Are dark forces really trying to sow division in the UK, and if so, why? 

The Dark Heart by Neil Lancaster. (HarperCollins Publishers) Out Now

A deadly bombing. When renowned author Dr. Daniel Solomon is killed in a devastating explosion in York, authorities quickly attribute the attack to Islamic extremists. But as the investigation unfolds, it becomes clear that all is not as it seems. A dark conspiracy. DS Max Craigie uncovers a chilling connection between a series of brutal murders, each victim linked by a secret that someone is determined to protect. A dangerous game. With the number of victims growing and an elusive figure known as The Cashier operating in the shadows, Max must navigate a web of corruption and hatred. Can he unravel the truth before more lives are lost?

More information can be found on his website.  He can also be found on Facebook @NeilLancasterCrime. On Instagram @neil_lancaster_crime and on X @neillancaster66 

 

Clare Mackay’s starter for ten

Seven years ago, I found myself on submission, the phrase that strikes fear into every writer’s heart. I had written a crime novel with a detective called Clare Mackay and had managed to secure an agent who was busy sending my book to prospective publishers. It was an exciting but anxious time as I waited for news, so I distracted myself by writing a second book with the same detective, handy to have if a publisher asked, ‘have you written anything else?’ At the time I hoped these books might become a two, or even a three-book series. 

Fast forward seven years and the tenth book, Watch Them Fall, is about to be published. How on earth did that happen? If I’d hoped for overnight success, I would be disappointed. I’d read stories of writers who’d had enthusiastic replies from publishers within an hour of reading their submission, making me believe it could happen to me. (Reader: it did not!) But I was thrilled to be offered a contract with digital first publisher, Canelo and my first book, See Them Run, came out in October 2019. There were no fireworks, no best seller chart appearances but slowly it gained traction.

As the months went on, I dreamed of bookshop and library appearances, of signing events and of, one day, seeing people read my book on trains and planes (still waiting for that one!) In February 2020 I made a trip to London to meet with my agent and publisher where I signed copies of my soon-to-be- published second book. Little did I know that was the last time I’d be promoting my books in person for quite some time. One month later we were in lockdown. Being shortlisted for the Bloody Scotland Scottish Crime Debut of the Year 2020 was both a thrill and a let-down. I was so happy that See Them Run had been shortlisted for a major prize but sad that the festival was unlikely to take place, in person, at least. I would miss the awards ceremony and the chance to meet so many writers who, over the years, had inspired me. The festival team did everything they could to make up for this with online activities, a short story jointly written by the shortlisted authors and festival appearances the following year, by which stage my third book, Lies to Tell, had also been published.

More contracts followed and this week I finished the first draft of book 11, to be published in 2027. It’s a privilege and a joy to be able to write what is becoming a long-running series. But let’s be honest here. There are days when the joy can be in short supply. Let me explain.

St Andrews, the setting for my books, is a beautiful university town that plays host to some ten thousand students, plus a large influx of tourists and golfers all year round. It’s a diverse population with the potential for a variety of crimes. So far, so good. But it’s also a fairly small town, geographically. Putting it frankly, I’m running out of places to leave bodies!

For the planned three-book series, this wouldn’t have been a problem. But as I wrap up book eleven and my thoughts turn to book twelve, I start to wonder where the next lot of crimes could take place. Where will my victims live? Where will the clues be found? And then there's the murders themselves. When you’ve shot, stabbed, garrotted, poisoned and bludgeoned victims to death, there’s little left in a murderer’s armoury.

The starting point is usually what do I want to write about? When I was planning Watch Them Fall, I knew I wanted to explore the problem of housing in an expensive town like St Andrews. Sound riveting, eh?! But throw in a body floating in the harbour, a protest march that threatens to get out of hand and a burglary where nothing is taken, and Clare is pushed to the very limit of her powers. 

And what of Clare? And Chris, her Wagon Wheel-loving sergeant? Over the course of ten books, they’ve become old friends to me as they progress in their personal and professional lives. Clare has acquired one dog, given two boyfriends the boot and (so far) has settled happily with the third. She continues to drink too much red wine, is domestically challenged (putting it politely) but remains fiercely loyal to her team and to the town that has become her adopted home. My affection for the detectives is undimmed but my favourite character – the only one I guarantee never to kill – is Clare’s badly-behaved dog, Benjy. He even has his own page on my website where you can see what he’s been up to. For the record, many of Benjy’s exploits are based on those of our family dog who takes ‘interesting behaviour’ to a whole new level.

What I love most of all is the way readers have taken Clare & co to their hearts. Last week a lady told me she’d made a traybake mentioned in one of the books and it’s now her favourite thing to bake. Some tell me they know exactly where Clare lives, what she looks like while others speculate about her having a baby. For readers to be so engaged, ten books on, is all the thanks I need to keep writing the series, and I hope to keep Clare busy with murder and mayhem for many years to come.

Watch Them Fall by Marion Todd (Canelo) Out Now

DI Clare Mackay is looking for danger in the wrong places. A body is hauled out of St Andrews harbour. This was no accident – DI Clare Mackay and her team have a murder investigation on their hands. Superintendent Penny Meakin is more focused on a break in at the salubrious home of local property developers. Many residents of the town oppose their plans for a new housing estate, and Penny insists that this controversy was a motive for the crime. Clare sees no evidence of this, but what is she overlooking? When another death occurs and links are found to the first victim, the intensity on all sides ramps up. Stretched to the absolute limit, how much strain can Clare’s officers take before something breaks, never to be repaired…

More information on Marion Todd and her books can e found on her website. She can be found on Facebook, Instagram, Threads and TikTok @mariontoddwriter and on X @MarionETodd

Paupers and Princelings by Simon Lewis

In Bad Traffic I wrote about a Chinese cop searching or his daughter in the UK. I wanted to show familiar territory from a fresh new perspective; and there’s great drama in someone trying to investigate in an alien country where they can’t even speak the language. For the sequel it seemed natural to keep him here, so I made him a target of China’s notorious ‘tigers and flies’ anti-corruption campaign - knowing he’ll be arrested on trumped up charges if he goes home, he has no choice but to live on as an illegal immigrant, reluctant daughter in tow. 

In No Exit they are living a precarious existence in a slum block of flats, beholden to a sleazy landlord. Their situation worsens when Jian is blackmailed by a gang into hunting down a thief who has robbed a Mah Jiang den. The trail leads them, unexpectedly, to elite society, and another kind of high rise, a penthouse in a new development on the Isle of Dogs. 

The seed for the plot of No Exit was the observation that some of the richest and the poorest Londoners are mainland Chinese. The poorest, like Jian live in a twilight world, at the mercy of unscrupulous gangmasters and landlords. Though, unlike many Chinese at the bottom, at least Jian is not beholden to a snakehead people smuggling gang, working off a high interest debt. 

As for the richest… they are often young, here to study, as a qualification from a British university carries prestige back home. Cash-strapped British universities love high-paying Chinese students, and some London colleges have up to a forty percent Chinese intake. Economics and the like used to be the most popular subjects, but now it seems to be the graphic arts. The kids are supposed to have a TOEFL English language score above a certain level - but it is not uncommon to find students who are clearly nowhere near that score. They are confident that their universities won’t fail them and are probably right: it would shut down a lucrative pipeline. (Knowing this, you have to wonder how long a British education will have any prestige in China. Or anywhere else). 

Among these kids are ‘princelings’ (tai zidang) - the children of the mainland political elite. With Chinese politics growing uncertain it can be a good idea to stow your kids far away. As the benefactors of nepotism, they are often much resented by other Chinese.

Others will be ‘white gloves’ (bai shoutao) - used for money laundering. The emigre can control a foreign bank account that can be stuffed with illicit cash from home. Wealth equivalent to two percent of China’s GDP is estimated to be hidden abroad. 

It's an urgent business because (as Jian well knows) the Chinese government does not mess around when it catches you: I know an ex-pat Chinese who was asked to become emergency adoptee for a mainland baby, as its parents, both customs officials, had been found guilty of corruption and were about to executed. 

To try to understand how these groups might see the city I interviewed among both. The wealthy students described feeling more at home in Canary Wharf than in Chinatown. They liked English tea, the parks and green spaces and the heritage buildings, though wondered where the London that they knew from costume dramas had gone - no bowler hats or gentleman culture. The poor, on the other hand, were brutally matter of fact: to them the city was expensive and unforgiving, and they only cared about opportunities to make money. 

Rich, rather naive kids abroad for the first time, and desperate illegals: there is much dramatic potential in a story that takes in these very different extremes. I think crime fiction is particularly suited for this kind of broad presentation of society’s highs and lows - I think it’s the modern form that a writer like Dickens would feel most comfortable with! I hope that readers appreciate the attempt to show groups too little written about in the west, and the familiar seen from a different angle - as well as a rollercoaster story full of twists and turns, taking in, as well as cultural dislocations, kidnap, blackmail, gambling and gangsters.

No Exit by Simon Lewis (Sort of Books) £9.99 Out Now

Inspector Jian and his daughter Weiwei just want to go back to their home in China: but Jian is facing a corruption charge in his absence and risks arrest. Instead, he tries to scrape a living on London's meanest streets as an illegal immigrant, reduced to hustling Mah Jiang for cash. A bleak future looks to be growing bleaker still when a triad gang blackmail him into tracking down an unlikely young robber. In No Exit Jian and Weiwei scramble between London's grimiest bedsits and its swankiest penthouses as they penetrate the glittering world of 'princelings' - the rich children of the Chinese elite, who treat the city as their playground. Locked in a desperate struggle, with no way out in sight, it will take all their wiles, as well as some lucky gambles, to come out of this latest venture alive.

More information about Simon Lewis and his work can be found on his website and at Inspectorjian.com He can also be found on Facebook @SimonLewisauthor and on Instagram @Simon7684

Author photo ©Mark Pengelly

Remi Kone - From TV Drama Producer to Crime Thriller Author

My first job in television was making up stories for a soap. I couldn’t believe such a role existed - I had loved telling stories all my life, and I was going to be paid for something I had been doing since I was a child. I joined a team of story liners and, over the course of a year, I wrote numerous stories about characters of all ages and backgrounds - some of whom had appeared on screen for decades; others whom I helped create. It was the best training I’ve ever had and, when I sat down to write my debut crime thriller novel, INNOCENT GUILT, those lessons I had learned at the start of my TV career proved invaluable.

INNOCENT GUILT began with an image: a woman covered in blood, carrying a baseball bat walks into a police station. She doesn’t say a word; she’s not injured, and the blood isn’t hers. Is she the victim or the perpetrator? Who is she? What has she done? I wasn’t sure at first, but I wanted to find out.

My lead character, Detective Leah Hutch, is outside the police station when the mute woman appears, and we mainly follow the investigation through her eyes. After several years of working in series television, I have first-hand experience of how attached audiences can become to characters, developing allegiances that bring them back to a TV show, season after season. I wanted to create a central character with whom readers would want to go on a journey across multiple books. I spent a while pondering who Leah is and how she sees the world, but it wasn’t until I started to think of the chapters as scenes that she really came to life. As I wrote, I imagined her in each scene - how would she react to each conflict - big and small? How did that drive the story forwards? The chapters became shorter and sharper, and the words started to flow. Sometimes Leah surprised me, and I had to change course from what I had originally planned. With each draft, I got to know her better and discovered layers I hadn’t envisaged. 

We mainly follow the story through Leah’s eyes, but hers isn’t the only point of view in the novel: A journalist called Odie Reid receives a mysterious tip-off about a dead body in a park. She has history with Leah and tries to link the dead body to the mute woman, determined to solve the case before Leah does. Thus begins a cat and mouse game between two women who don’t like each other, as they investigate the case in parallel.

When it came to structuring the novel from two different perspectives, I turned to the world of television once more. Since my days working on a soap, I have primarily worked on returning drama series. I have spent hours helping screenwriters plot multiple story strands across several episodes, building to the season climax, and I approached INNOCENT GUILT in much the same way. The main difference was that now, as opposed to working in a team, I was on my own. I have a fantastic agent and editor, but in those early stages, it was just me and the blank page.

I am often asked how working on a book differs from producing television drama and which I prefer: Writing books is in many ways solitary, whilst TV is more collaborative, particularly when it comes to the practicalities of TV production. Having said that, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how useful my TV experience has been, and I’m thankful for those early days spent sitting in a room with my fellow story liners, creating imaginary characters and talking about their lives as if they were real.

Innocent Guilt by Remi Kone (Quercus Publishing) Out Now

Victim or murderer . . . Can she discover the truth? On a misty autumn afternoon, a woman covered in blood clutching a baseball bat walks silently into a London police station. The two officers assigned to her case are DI Leah Hutch and DS Benjamin Randle. But the woman refuses to speak. She is not injured and the blood on the bat is not hers. What has she done? Is she the victim or the perpetrator? As Leah and Randle start their inquiry, a man is found battered to death in a nearby park. Journalist Odie Reid receives a tip off and is determined to solve the case first, trying to link this death to the woman held in custody. Leah and Odie have history and very quickly their cat and mouse game becomes personal, leading them both to the very darkest corners of their pasts.      

A review of Innocent Guilt can be found here on the Shots Mag website.

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British Nigerian Emmy-nominated producer, Remi Kone has worked on a number of well-known television dramas, such as KILLING EVE, SPOOKS and LEWIS. She lives in London, and INNOCENT GUILT is her first novel.

 

Instagram: @remikonewriter

Lynne McEwan on - How news photography prepared me for a life of crime.

Like many writers, I had a whole other life before I came to crime fiction. I’d already written my first published novel, In Dark Water, when a question at a festival event started me thinking just how much newspaper photography had influenced what I wrote. The answer was quite a lot and in ways I’m still discovering five books later.

I’d cut my teeth as a freelance photographer for The Glasgow Herald, straight out of college -very keen, very short – I’d cause amusement when, unable to elbow my way through a photocall scrum of big blokes I’d instead crawl to the front through their legs. It gave me a unique angle, as did the advice to always shoot a three or five picture series, a visual story, even if the job only called for just one. Little did I realise this created a subliminal narrative process that even now I find difficult to switch off. I see the world, and write my books, as a long series of images.

There were some big moments – the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the First Gulf War – but it was from working with crime reporters covering murders I learned the most about how people react when faced with the worst possible news. Some of the stories I covered faded quickly from the public consciousness, others did not.

The Pembrokeshire Murders, recently a three-part ITV drama staring Luke Evans, were a pair of double murders several years apart carried out in the national park in the 1980s. It took a cold case review in 2010 to convict the serial killer responsible by which time he’d also committed multiple burglaries, sexual assault, rape and an armed robbery. This wasn’t just down to the lack of forensic techniques. What I remember most was the fervent way the officers on the investigation stuck to the line of enquiry they’d formulated, that the crimes were so heinous they must have been carried out by an outsider, probably someone off the ships at the nearby tanker terminal at Milford Haven. They were wrong, the monster was among them and perhaps if they’d stress-tested their own narrative against the evidence, he’d have been caught sooner.

The murder in Cardiff of Karen Price, dubbed The Body in the Carpet was the first time a forensically reconstructed clay head was used to identify a victim, an example of creative thinking useful to crime writers ever since.

Through these experiences I spent time with police officers and forensic scientists. I even had a memorable day with a police pathologist who, once the portrait I’d come for had been shot, allowed me to tag along to a couple of sudden deaths, and subsequently becoming the model for Professor Sue Kitchen in my books. No pictures could be taken at the crime scenes, but she explained with knowledge and compassion how much responsibility she felt to find answers for the deceased’s loved ones.

And it was the victim’s families and friends that really stayed with me. Often, taking the actual photographs would only last a few minutes in an hour-long interview but I’d sit and listen as people poured their hearts out. In the early days there were no family liaison officers, police delivered the news and left. Journalists were often the first people the bereaved encountered. If you did not have empathy and respect you wouldn’t get far. Leafing through albums to collect pictures of the dead was one of the most moving experiences of my life and many of those encounters are still with me.

When I worked at the Sunday Mirror, a reporter and I were the only journalists to visit Stephen Lawrence’s parents the morning after his murder. Seeing the impact that case has made and the way it continues to change attitudes is a testament to the fortitude of Stephen’s family.

As Val McDermid once commented about her time as a reporter, ‘it’s the sort of job that gives you a card index of memories that you can dip into for a character, an atmosphere, a look’. In my case, I’m often not aware I have them until they’re shaken lose from their dusty folder by a line from a scene, or the need to portray some action or emotion.

When I first wrote the character of DI Shona Oliver she’d been brewing in my mind for nearly thirty years. Early in my career I worked for the Western Mail and lived in Cardiff where I sailed with the yacht club. Penarth RNLI had a female crew member, which was unusual for the time. Sitting in the bar in atrocious weather, we’d watch the lifeboat go out when everyone else was running for cover. I wanted to shoot a feature with her, but for one reason and another it never happened. It was one of those stories that got away, so I was never able to ask my burning question – why would you voluntarily put yourself in danger to help a complete stranger? The DI Shona Oliver series has been my exploration of that question and making her also a police officer as well as an RNLI volunteer felt like the perfect fit.

I’d travelled to most parts of the UK in my career, but when it came to finding a setting for my crime series, the Solway coast jumped out at me. It’s a crossing place between England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, so if I run out of home-grown crimes I can easily import more. It helps me link the location and crime to a national and international issues. It’s also beautiful but dangerous place. There’s menace in the very landscape itself.

For the latest in the series, A Troubled Tide, I drew not only from murders but the bread-and-butter photographer’s jobs – community fund raisers, amateur sporting events. Shona witnesses the drowning of a fellow officer at a charity triathlon, and what at first appears an accident soon takes a darker turn.  As novelist and screen writer William Goldman once said, life is material.

Being a photojournalist allowed me a window on the world and gave me pictures in all their fascinating, tragic, joyous glory. I’m still telling the stories I think are important, only now it’s the words rather than the pictures that make it onto the page.

A Troubled Tide by Lynne McEwan (Canelo) Out Now

The threat has never been so close to home… DI Shona Oliver’s fellow officer PC Hayley Cameron drowns during a triathlon in the Solway Firth. The post-mortem reveals drugs in Hayley's system, perhaps self-administered performance enhancers. But a puncture wound in the back of her wetsuit suggests foul play. Shona and her colleagues investigate, but those closest to Hayley grapple with the truth and risk letting personal feelings cloud their judgement. Could the answers to Hayley’s death lie within Shona’s own ranks? As the case hits the buffers, Shona clashes with her daughter and also faces difficult questions about the murder of her old boss. Will Shona keep her head above the water long enough to see justice done, and what will it cost her if she does?

More information about Lynne McEwan and her books can be found on her website. She can also be found on Facebook, Threads and Instagram @lynnejmcewanwriter 

Managing a Maverick! Peter Lovesey on the four smart women who tried and succeeded . . . mostly

Like me, the Bath detective, Peter Diamond, has reached the end of the line. He made his debut as far back as 1991 in The Last Detective, an odd title for a series that would last 33 years. It didn’t seem odd at the time, because the book was supposed to be a one-off, about a middle-aged rebel out of sympathy and out of touch with modern policing. He tackles one last challenging case and by the end of the book he has quit the force and become a department-store Santa Claus – another unsuitable job, because his last act as a cop was shoving a twelve-year-old against a wall and putting hm in hospital. But as a civilian he still managed to solve the case and inform the right people how it was done. For all his failings, he was second to none as a sleuth.

So what changed my mind about writing a series? The Last Detective was my nineteenth novel in twenty-one years of trundling along as a mid-list author. To my great surprise, this one had an outstanding reception. The critics lavished praise on it. Julian Symons in the Times Literary Supplement wrote the longest review I had ever had, calling it a brilliant performance. Marcel Berlins in The Times, noted that this was my first modern whodunit, “and a terrific job he makes of it”. The American connoisseur of crime fiction, Allen J Hubin, called it a marvellous achievement; Tom Nolan in the Wall Street Journal rated it as “a perfectly realized murder mystery”; and Josh Rubins in the New York Times described it as “a bravura performance from a veteran showman.” At the Bouchercon, it won the Anthony award for the year’s best novel. Closer to home, the chair of the Dagger judges, F E Pardoe, gave me an earful for not allowing the book to be submitted. I was chair of the Crime Writers Association that year and might conceivably have presided over an awards dinner in which I presented the main award to myself.

Reeling from it all, the “veteran showman” was persuaded to rescue the last detective from his latest job as a night-club bouncer and relaunch him as a series. I had no idea how long it would last, but over the next two books I found a way of getting Diamond back into the Bath police and there he has remained until the end of this year.

A long series brings its own problems and the most immediate was Diamond’s age. In The Last Detective, he was 41. The books were supposed to keep up with the times. He would be 74 by now. In the new one, Against the Grain, there is talk of his retirement – and no wonder. I have to hope my loyal readers will suspend disbelief and allow him to be forever middle-aged.

The challenge for me as the writer was to find a way of allowing this dinosaur to have a believable role in a modern police force. He has the deductive skills to solve crime, but I had cast him as a loner, uncomfortable working with a team who are partly in awe, partly in shock at his disregard of policing theory and protocol. By good fortune, his deputy is Inspector Julie Hargreaves, intelligent, brave and empathetic. She smooths the way for him, with the team and with his superiors. When there are murmurings in the ranks, Julie comes to his defence. But she is not afraid to let hm know when he is out of order. People like Julie deserve to be cherished. All too often, their value goes unappreciated. Diamond values her, but there comes a point, in the sixth book of the series, Upon a Dark Night, when his bull-in-a-china-shop attitude goes too far.  He doesn’t understand why Julie takes offence and puts in for a transfer. His wife Stephanie has to explain why. By then, Julie has gone.

After six books, I tired of Diamond and he was probably sick of me. I knew too much about him, his home life with his wonderful wife, Steph, his work with the murder squad in Bath, his clumsiness, his dislike of fast cars, his short fuse with troublesome colleagues and the men in white coats. I took time off from the series and wrote a book called The Reaper about a murderous rector called the Rev Otis Joy.  I still believe Joy was an inspired creation, but most readers didn’t agree. They wanted more Diamonds.

I decided the only way to rescue the series from tedium was to give Diamond a life-changing experience and find out how he coped with it. In Diamond Dust, his beloved Steph is murdered at the start. ‘How could you do that?’ I am asked whenever I give a talk or meet a reader. I try to explain, but I am not forgiven. Steph was the love of his life. She understood his deepest insecurities and helped him deal with them. Earlier in her life she had made a disastrous marriage that ended in divorce. A new relationship was the last thing she wanted when this overweight, overbearing policeman made a mess of a talk he was giving on safety first to the brownie group she led. After that, he kept finding excuses to come back. In the end, she saw the positives in his personality. The turning point was the summer camp when he turned up unexpectedly with two donkeys called Bradford and Bingley. The brownies were overjoyed and Stephanie changed her mind about getting married again.

I was learning that a series can be much more than a number of artfully plotted stories linked by a main character. As the books progress, so do the lives of the people in them, the main protagonist, his family and colleagues. The killing of Steph was cruel and catastrophic. No way could the book be called cosy and predictable. How would Diamond channel his grief?

It sounds calculating, but Steph’s murder gave me the impetus to continue. In Diamond Dust, he is barred from investigating his own wife’s killing. Typically, he ignores the ban. In the books that follow, he is a changed man, mentally scarred. He recovers his bluff exterior, but we know he will never get over his loss. His good fortune is that in time two other women help him to function.

The first is Ingeborg Smith, a journalist he meets at press conferences. She isn’t good news herself. Not for Diamond, anyway. She asks penetrating questions and won’t take evasion. Highly intelligent, she is a formidable adversary. However, Diamond, too, is smart. He senses that Ingeborg secretly wishes she were behind the microphones dealing with the questions. Her ambition is to become a detective. For him, this solves the problem. He invites her to apply for a job in the police and fast-tracks her into his team, where her brilliant mind is put to positive use. Over the series, she quickly rises in the ranks. She is never officially his deputy, as Julie had been, but she can take up any role from going undercover to dealing courageously with dangerous suspects, to keeping her boss from making a fool of himself. And she takes no nonsense from the team, who understandably have their complaints about Diamond’s rough-and-ready crime-solving.  Ingeborg, the thorn in his flesh, has become his protector.

Thanks to Inge, life in the office became tolerable and engaging again. But what of his personal life? For several books in the series, he lives alone in the house he shared with Steph in Weston, her cat Raffles his only companion, a comfort, but a daily reminder of his loss. Then, in one of novels – I won’t say which – he  meets Paloma Kean, who suffers a traumatic shock through no fault of her own. Diamond is sympathetic. By degrees a friendship is formed and eventually a relationship. Paloma invites hm to move into her large house on Lyncombe Hill, where she has a successful business providing images of costume for period dramas on TV, film and the stage. Raffles approves, and the deal is done. Paloma becomes the fourth woman who understands Diamond better than he understands himself. She can never replace Steph, but she has some of Steph’s insights and often sheds light on work problems that baffle him.

In the last of the series, Against the Grain, Julie Hargreaves, retired and living in a Somerset village, contacts him out of the blue and invites him to stay, bringing Paloma and, of course, Raffles. A week in the country has no appeal, he tells Paloma. He is a townie, through and through. And he doesn’t tell her that he is uneasy about these two women from quite different stages in his life meeting for the first time. Persuaded that Julie must have a good reason, he agrees to go. A huge shock awaits him, not to mention a village murder to investigate. There I must stop. I want you to read the book and I may have given away too much already.

Four remarkable women. Between them, they span the entire series. Where would Peter Diamond have been without them?

Against the Grain by Peter Lovesey (Sphere, Little Brown Publishers)

When his former deputy, Julie, invites Detective Peter Diamond and his partner Paloma to spend a week at her home in the depths of rural Somerset, Diamond is horrified. What could be worse than seven days in the back end of nowhere with nothing to do? But it turns out that Julie has an ulterior motive. A local woman is doing time for manslaughter after a wild party ended in a tragic accident: a man suffocated in a silo of grain. Nobody in the village has much sympathy for Claudia, the unruly daughter of a wealthy local farmer. Nobody that is, except Julie, who is convinced there's more to this case than there appears and wants her former boss to investigate. And as Diamond tests his skills as an amateur sleuth, he soon discovers that the countryside isn't quite so dull as he'd anticipated . . .

Against the Grain is published by Sphere on November 14 and in America by Soho Press on December 3.

‘The MWA Grand Master brings his Peter Diamond series to a richly satisfying conclusion in Against the Grain.’ Publishers Weekly 

More information about Peter Lovesey and his books can be found on his website.

Denzil Meyrick on the changing face of reading tastes

 It’s hard to say why literary tastes change over the years. Some might say that writers, deciding what they fancy committing to paper, are the prime movers behind this. I don’t think that’s true. The tectonic plates of what is popular and what’s not is far too seismic, too ubiquitous to be the product of a whim or a mass move of the collective.

It’s clear that external forces are at work, influencing readers and writers alike.

Take WWII, for example. The most popular genre was historical fiction, mainly with a theme depicting our gallant soldiers triumphing against allcomers. This is easy to understand. There are very few left who can remember the very real horror the population faced in that conflict. For the first time, this modern war placed every man, woman, and child on the front line, thoughts of violent death or invasion never far away. No longer, was war restricted to two lines of men facing off in a muddy field, ready to slash, slice and trample in the name of everyone else.

Of course, the unfortunates who found themselves in the midst of battle have suffered for centuries. Now though, one’s demise could arrive from a clear, blue sky. Who can blame those who found peace and reassurance through the pages of a book?

Fast-forward to our own era. Yes, since that war, there have been many hard times. I lived through the ‘three-day week’, when power cuts and food shortages became the norm in this country. Add to that, the visceral impact of terrorism, threat of nuclear inhalation, natural disasters, and man’s continued inhumanity to man; well, that tiny voice of fear refused to disappear. But on the whole, in this country at least, we’ve enjoyed a prolonged period of peace, relative safety.

Enter, SARS-CoV-2, better known now as Covid.

Once again, danger came from that blue, blue sky – any sky, to be accurate. An enemy we couldn’t see wreaked havoc across the globe, no respecter of borders, political and military power, race, religion, sex, age or creed. It created unimagined horror, with too many dying far from the love and embrace of their families and friends.

I think the true impact of this disease will take decades to properly understand. Though there is something we noticed almost immediately: our collective reading habits changed. We now have the term Romantasy. It might not be in the dictionary yet, but complex, grand love stories that now take place under the level gaze of warlocks, witches and dragons, fly off the bookshelves in huge numbers. In the USA particularly, the love life of cowboys and cowgirls is now a major literary draw – yeeha!

There can be no doubt that Covid, the Cost-of-Living Crisis, and wars and rumours of wars have found those who take to the written word for entertainment rushing for escapism.

So, how does this trend affect crime fiction and thrillers?

While it’s always dangerous to generalise, there appears to be a move to something much less visceral. The vicarious thrill of consuming murder and mayhem between the pages of a book, has suddenly become a gentler experience; perhaps replete with a little humour to ease our passage through a book. The success of Richard Osman and many, many others bear witness to this. Somehow, the stress and strain of contemporary life has turned reading to its earliest days, with a rise in novels that are much closer to the golden age of crime writing, than they are the slash-and-burn realism of a few years ago.

Yes, these stories are every bit as compelling, thrilling and unputdownable, but they offer escapism without sleepless nights. Unless, of course, one is up all night trying to work out devilishly clever plot twists and turns.

My Inspector Grasby Mysteries, feature a hapless Yorkshire detective, back in the 1950s. It’s no coincidence that the indomitable Frank and boss Superintendent Arthur Juggers find themselves in a time just after that other great tumult, the Second World War. It’s almost as though it’s all gone full-circle – well, as far as I’m concerned, anyway.

Then, we have the magic of Christmas. It’s a time for tall tales told in the dark and cold. I’ve often wondered why that is. But if you close your eyes really tightly, it’s not too hard to imagine a tiny group of people, huddled round a flickering flame, telling tall tales to banish the ice-age to the back of the mind.

Some things never change.

The Christmas Stocking Murders by Denzil Meyrick (Transworld|) Out Now

A case shrouded in secrets. It’s just before Christmas, 1953. Grasby and Juggers are investigating a puzzling murder in the remote village of Uthley’s Bay. A fisherman has been found dead on the beach, with a stocking wound tight round his throat. A festive mystery for one and all. Hundreds of pairs of stockings, in neat cellophane bags, soon wash up on the shore. A blizzard cuts off Grasby and Juggers from help, and the local innkeeper is murdered. Any remaining Christmas cheer goes up in smoke as the villagers refuse to talk, leaving the two detectives chasing false leads in the snow. A winter wonderland with no escape. To make matters worse, Grasby can’t stop thinking about stockings. Why does everyone seem to be enjoying strangely high standards of hosiery, even beneath their oilskins? Who is the sinister bespectacled man snooping around their hotel? And how can they solve the murder when everyone in the village is a suspect?

More information about Denzil Meyrick and his books can be found on his website.

You can also follow him on X @ Lochlomonden and on Facebook.

             

           

Alison Bruce Interview

Ayo: - Your last book was a standalone I believe, so I wanted to know what made you want to write a standalone and now go back to writing a series.

Alison: - The last book was The Moment Before Impact and I wrote that expecting that to be the first in a new series. That was my plan. I absolutely loved the main character in it, the two main characters and I saw them as being the start of a new series. But both my agent and my publisher said no, we think it is a standalone by the way in which the story is told. It is still unfinished business, so that is something I would like to come back to later. But then I was left in a position where the publisher said that they would really like a new series, something related to the police rather than an amateur sleuth. So, I came at it from the point of view of thinking that well I did not want to do another version of the Goodhew books because that is its own thing and again, I do not feel that I am completely finished with that. So, I thought that as a starting point – do you remember Nancy Kominsky? She used to paint things and she would do a few daubs on the page and you didn't think that it is not going to turn into anything but she would gradually fill bits in and it was a bit like that so I thought that my starting sketch was to think that if I was going to go from somewhere which was the opposite to Goodhew I would be thinking of someone who doesn't love Cambridge the way in which he (Goodhew) loves Cambridge which implies somebody who has been forced to move to Cambridge for one reason or another. They do not naturally operate at the Cambridge pace or with the Cambridge mindset. So, it has a fish out of water element to some extent. Gary was new when he first joined in Cambridge Blue and that was his first murder investigation. So, I thought that I wanted it to be somebody a bit more experienced who had a bit of history in the police. I was coming from all these opposites really, a bit like a pendulum I was probably too far away at that point and so I rounded off some of those rough edges and I settled on this character Ronnie Blake, and she is new to Cambridge, she has family in Cambridge, she has reasons to stay without necessarily the enthusiasm to stay. 

Ayo: - When we were chatting earlier you were saying that there was a bit about the University It does have lots of university elements in them. What made you decide to incorporate those? I know that when everyone thinks of Cambridge they think of the university, but I would have thought that you would or might have wanted to avoid that.

Alison: - I do tend to avoid it because I write about Cambridge the way that I see Cambridge. I do work for not the University, but the other University in Cambridge and I tend to avoid that. I like to approach Cambridge from what I see and what are my experience in Cambridge is which I believe are just as valid as the University angle. It is the day-to-day Cambridge that I see. But I also have this storyline where Ronnie's sister had been living in Cambridge for a period and it was natural, and it worked very well that she had come as a student

Ayo: - One of things, I mean over the years I know that you have a BSc in Science degree with honours in Crime and Investigation, how much did that help in writing this series because when you started the Goodhew series you did not have that. Things have clearly changed over the years. Did this help?

Alison: - I took my degree really because I wanted to write, I did not always want to be going to other people. I wanted to have a better base knowledge myself. So, when I first wrote the very first Goodhew book which came out third – The Calling now The Cambridge Calling I had the murder victims in quite exposed places where the bodies had been for quite a long time. So, I got away with there not being much forensic evidence. But what I did do always from the beginning was to seek out the right people from which to ask advice. There is no way that I had the same level of expertise than any of those. But I hope that I ask more informed and more plausible questions, and I can narrow down what’s viable and what is not more quickly. What I have found from doing my degree is that some people do really make things up, and I know it is fiction but it is interesting where the line is between fact and fiction and sometimes you can read a book where you think that ten minutes of research would have helped and that is really frustrating. When I wrote the last book there was a lot in there about seatbelt injuries and I had the idea originally whether it was plausible for the person to have been put in the driver’s seat after the crash. I quickly found out that there are so many reasons why not. Seatbelt injuries, the impact, the seatbelt locking, the airbags and so forth. And then part way through writing it I read somebody else's book and the big reveal at the end was that the people had switched places after she was unconscious. I felt for all those reasons, no. And I think that the research is massively important because everybody knows that you are reading fiction but, at the same time you have got to make them believe that it is viable. But if you stretch that too far then it doesn't make sense. I do try and do groundwork.

Ayo:- Groundwork is important and as an author one of the things I wanted to find out from you as a general point is on the one hand you have people that state that they really just want to be entertained and on the other hand both you and I know that if you are writing a crime novel then a lot of social policy will come in to it. So, how do you juggle that—as in wanting to entertain and wanting to make people realise what is actually going on. 

Alison: - Okay, I compare it to a drum. You know when you have got a drum, those little screw things which must be tightened up, you must think about what all of those are for you. Obviously setting, character, plot, things like the timeline, facts. You must look for where the saggy bits are and tighten them up. But sometimes you must ditch an idea because it is a great dramatic idea, but it doesn't hold water. Obviously, it won't work and if you have seen that this is the case then you need to deal with it. I have had lovely ideas that have gone in the bin. If you are not 100 % certain that you can tighten that drum, then throw it away.

The link to the full interview on the Shots website can be found here.

Because she Looked Away by Alison Bruce (Little Brown) Out Now.

After the sudden death of her sister, devastated detective DS Ronnie Blake relocates to Cambridge to help her brother Alex raise their sister's young son, Noah. She reports for her first day but instead finds herself being questioned by a special investigations unit, nicknamed the DEAD Team. With a small group of six, led by DI Fenton, the once-successful DEAD team has a single outstanding case, Operation Byron, and the failure to resolve it threatens the unit's existence. Their most promising lead is an anonymous note linking three seemingly unconnected people: a convicted fraudster, a dead academic... and Ronnie's sister Jodie. When Ronnie is denied information about Operation Byron, she follows a lead slipped to her by Malachi, the youngest member of the team, and makes a discovery which links Operation Byron to a disturbing unsolved murder. She is rapidly drawn into an intricate web of deceit, buried secrets and tragedy and the discovery that her connection to Cambridge is far darker than she could ever have guessed.

More information about Alison Bruce and her books can be found on her website. She can also be found on X @Alison_Bruce. On Instagram @alisonbruce and on Facebook.