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.

 

Vengeance is Whose? by Paul Finch

Conventional wisdom holds that to seek revenge is one of the most self-destructive impulses in human nature. Possibly this is the reason why so many of us frequently feel a need for revenge and yet never act on it. It seems that a good proportion of society has an in-built brake with which to prevent violence. Others meanwhile resist it through plain common sense.

Because to exact vengeance – real vengeance – is a huge step to take.

Even something relatively innocuous, like retaliating to a foul on the football field, can be transformational. Not least because it may exacerbate the situation, turning a one-off slight into an ongoing feud, but mostly because it casts you, the victim, as another aggressor, denying you the moral high ground.

‘He did it to me first,’ is a flabby explanation if the other guy is lying unconscious, or worse.

And yet the urge to take revenge can be potent, especially when justice appears to be absent. And it doesn’t just have to be revenge for yourself. How do any of us feel when we hear about disgraced politicians being hounded out of office and yet continuing to lead gold-plated lifestyles, or about organised crime bosses who remain untouchable by the courts, or even petty criminals, whose offences are not victimless, being left alone by an overworked, understaffed police force? If justice has seemingly quit the field, what else is there?

‘Vengeance is mine!’ A quote attributed to God himself in Deuteronomy.

We all hope it’s true, whether we’re religiously minded or not, but we see scant evidence of it on Earth. And so, what other course is there apart from taking the law into our own hands?

This is the ethical dilemma at the heart of my new novel, ROGUE, which sees a low-ranking police detective – DS Mark Heckenburg, who some readers will already be familiar with – embark on an off-the-grid mission to avenge a whole bunch of former colleagues, 26 in total, who were mown down in a gun attack on a police party.

I won’t say any more about the synopsis, except to add that while Heck has played fast and loose with the rules before, often using trickery and coercion in his dealings with the underworld, he has never taken that final step into out-and-out criminality. But then, never before has he been cut as deeply as this.

But in truth, in a civilised society, is there any excuse for revenge? We all love an antihero. Someone who gets straight to it and deals with the matter hands-on. But would a real-life vigilante really be so reassuring? What if he decides he doesn’t like us either? What if we ourselves were to short-cut our way past the law, and then suddenly find that we have need of it too?  

Of course, I’m not the first thriller writer to analyse this complex issue. Many great crime novelists have gone there ahead of me, tackling the question of ‘revenge or justice’ from a range of different angles.

MAN ON FIRE by AJ Quinnell, aka Phil Nicholson (1980)

A former Foreign Legionnaire turned drunken bodyguard is devastated when his charge, the sparky young daughter of an Italian businessman, is kidnapped, raped and murdered. His only recourse is to wipe out the Mafia clan responsible. Atonement through violence is the message here, though it comes at a huge cost.

THE EXECUTIONERS by John D MacDonald (1957)

The army lawyer responsible for jailing a GI rapist is tormented in later years when the criminal is released and commences to harass and terrify his family. Vengeance as viewed from the victim’s perspective, normal life massively disrupted by the obsessive, malign behaviour of someone who just can’t forgive or forget.  

THE HUNTER by Richard Stark, aka Donald Westlake (1962)

A professional robber is double-crossed during a major heist and left for dead. Later learning that his share of the haul was used by a former associate to buy entry to a crime syndicate, he goes to war with the syndicate itself. Solid actioner, this one, featuring lots of immoral people violently intermingling in a grubby, immoral world. Even so, it’s a thrill a minute.

DEATH WISH by Brian Garfield (1972)

When muggers brutalise the family of a liberal-minded businessman, he buys a gun and embarks on a mission to annihilate the city’s criminal elements, becoming a cult figure as he does. A study in human darkness, the vengeance-seeker hitting random targets he’s got no personal beef with and enjoying the support of his whole community. Let’s not pretend it couldn’t happen.

A TIME TO KILL by John Grisham (1989)

When a black child is raped by white supremacists, her enraged father guns the two hoodlums down even though they’re in police custody, his legal team soon fighting an uphill battle to keep him from the gas chamber. Probably the most adult take of all, the parent’s understandable reaction squared off against the price society pays if everyone assumes the role of judge, jury and executioner, the race factor only deepening the question of discriminative justice.

ROGUE is published by Brentwood Press in both ebook and paperback on October 24.

They shot everyone. His friends, his colleagues, the woman he loved. But they made one critical mistake. They didn’t shoot him. Detective Sergeant Mark ‘Heck’ Heckenburg has a reputation for bending the rules, but when a ruthless gun attack on a North London pub leaves 26 of his closest workmates dead, he throws the rulebook away. Devastated beyond recovery, he goes rogue. But Heck himself is a suspect. Suspended from duty and watched day and night, it isn’t just a matter of eluding the surveillance net in London. When he makes his move, he becomes a fugitive, an outlaw now infamous across the whole of the UK. And yet that’s the least of his problems. Because as Heck tracks the killers north through the wintry badlands of industrial England, and from there into the mountainous wilds of Scotland, they too have made plans, and some deadly and deranged individuals are lying in wait …

More information about Paul Finch and his work can be found on his blog. You can follow him on X @paulfinchauthor and on Facebook

Extract from A Case of Matricide by Graeme Macrae Burnet

Graeme Macrae Burnet is one of the UK’s brightest literary talents. His second novel, His Bloody Project, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2016, won the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award 2016, and was shortlisted for the LA Times Book Awards 2017. His fourth novel, Case Study, was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022 and was included in the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2022. His most recent book is A Case of Matricide.

One 

Hôtel Bertillon was situated in an inconspicuous, whitewashed building at the intersection of Rue de Mulhouse and Rue Henner. Aside from a modest sign on the wall above the entrance, there was little to alert passers-by to its existence, and even this sign was in such a state of neglect that it was more likely to deter than entice potential custom. The bill of tariffs taped to the inside of the glass panel by the door was yellowed and torn. The surrounding paintwork was blistered, and bare wood was visible where it had flaked away altogether. A quantity of dry leaves had accumulated in the corner of the vestibule. 

Inside, the establishment was no more appealing. The narrow foyer was dimly lit and smelled of stale carpet. The décor was tired. 

Georges Gorski rang the brass bell on the counter. A man emerged from the office, which was partitioned from the counter by a rectangular glass panel, so that it resembled a large aquarium. He was very small and neatly dressed in grey slacks and a shirt and tie beneath a V-neck sweater. Around his shoulders was a pair of reading glasses on a chain. He had the grey pallor of a man who rarely exposed himself to sunlight. He had mentioned his name on the telephone, but Gorski had forgotten it, an increasingly regular occurrence. 

Gorski held out his ID. ‘Monsieur Bertillon?’ he said, though he knew this was not correct. 

‘Oh no,’ replied the little man. ‘I am not Bertillon. Bertillon was my wife’s name. Well, my wife’s maiden name. The hotel belonged to her parents before ... before it, eh, passed to us.’ He paused, realising perhaps that Gorski was not in need of a history of the business. ‘My name is Henri Virieu.’ 

‘Yes,’ said Gorski, as if refreshing his memory, ‘Monsieur Virieu.’ 

There was a short silence. The man’s fingers fidgeted on the counter as if playing a toy piano. His hands were bony and flecked with liver spots. 

‘You’ll probably think me a dreadful busybody,’ he said. ‘It’s just that, well, I suppose it seemed the right thing to do. In case, in case of, you know—’ 

‘In case of what?’ said Gorski. He had taken a dislike to Virieu on the telephone. He was a man who opened his mouth without having first formulated what he wanted to say. His explanation for calling had consisted of a string of meaningless half-formed phrases and fatuous aphorisms. ‘Prudence is the mother of security, as they say,’ he had wittered. 

Ineffectual. He was an ineffectual little man, and meeting him in person only confirmed the impression. 

Rather than answering Gorski’s question, Virieu lowered his voice and, with a furtive glance along the passage, invited him into the office. ‘There we can converse undisturbed,’ he said, as if he was a member of the DST.* He raised the flap on the counter and ushered Gorski into his sanctum. 

Everything was neatly arranged. Behind the desk were shelves of box files, each one clearly inscribed with the year. On the desk was a copy of L’Alsace, open at the page with the crossword, which was half-completed. There was a glass cabinet displaying a number of small trophies. 

‘From my chess career,’ said Virieu, seeing Gorski glance towards them. He unlocked the cabinet and handed one to Gorski. It declared him champion of Haut-Rhin. It was thirty years old. ‘I still play of course, but the mind, well, the mind isn’t what it used to be. One finds oneself besieged by the young. Do you play at all? Perhaps we could have a game sometime.’      

_____________________ 

* Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, the French internal security service – translator’s note 

Gorski shook his head. 

A cat was asleep on the chair in front of the desk. Virieu tickled it behind the ear and murmured some soft sounds, before shooing it onto the floor. ‘Our oldest employee,’ he said, with a little laugh. 

Gorski smiled thinly and took the cat’s seat. The glass wall afforded a panoramic view of the foyer. Virieu sat down behind the desk, then immediately leapt to his feet. 

‘Perhaps you would do me the honour, monsieur, of sharing a glass with me.’ From a filing cabinet he produced a bottle of schnapps. Gorski corrected his mode of address but did not decline the drink, which Virieu had in any case already poured. 

He resumed his seat. 

‘Your very good health, Chief Inspector,’ he said, with an ingratiating emphasis on his title. 

He knocked back his drink. Gorski did the same. Virieu refilled the glasses. It was half past nine in the morning. 

A Case of Matricide by Graeme Macrae Burnet (Saraband) Out now

Chief Inspector Gorski returns … In the unremarkable French town of Saint-Louis, a mysterious stranger stalks the streets; an elderly woman believes her son is planning to do away with her; a prominent manufacturer drops dead. Between visits to the town’s hostelries, Chief Inspector Georges Gorski ponders the connections, if any, between these events, while all the time grappling with his own domestic and existential demons.  Graeme Macrae Burnet once again pierces the respectable bourgeois façade of small-town life in this, the concluding part of his trilogy of Gorski novels. He injects a wry humour into the tiniest of details and delves into the darkest recesses of his characters’ minds, but above all provides an entertaining, profound and moving read. 

More information about his books and writing can be found on his website. You can find Graeme Macrae Burnet on Facebook. You can also follow him on X @GmacraeBurnet and on Instagram @graememacraeburnet.

Have you done your background checks?

When writing a series, it’s important to have an established backstory for your main character. Readers are investing their time and money in reading your book and it’s your protagonist that’s going to keep them coming back for more. This is especially important in a police procedural. The very best fictional police officers translate well to TV because of the authors who created them in the first place – DCI Jane Tennison (Lynda LaPlante), DI Vera Stanhope (Ann Cleeves) and DCI Morse (Colin Dexter), to name but a few. In fact, the backstory for Morse was so good that Endeavour came into being. If I’m truly honest, I preferred Endeavour to Morse but that might be because I watched it knowing what Morse would become.

DI Bernadette ‘Bernie’ Noel wasn’t the main character in my first ever book. She was a DS but her backstory was still the same – dual heritage with white mother and black father (both fifteen when she was conceived); raised white by her mother and maternal grandparents and close to her grandfather in particular; no knowledge of who her father was; joined the Met at nineteen but then a terrible event happened that forced her later to move to Wiltshire Police. Her backstory was more developed than the main character in that novel which is probably one of the reasons why she then became my protagonist.

I took all of that into my first ‘Bernie’ novel – Last Seen. Some of it was dealt with in my debut but the ‘terrible event’ has lingered in the background until now. In Rewind, the fourth book in the series, all is revealed and the literal scar that Bernie has on the left side of her abdomen is explained. I knew the story well as I’d been thinking about it for six years. It was there, ready in my head to go. But something held me back. 

When I first started writing Bernie, I was acutely aware I was a white woman writing a dual heritage one. Originally her mother was black and she was raised in a black home and community. But my writing wasn’t authentic so I asked friends who were dual heritage for advice. One said, ‘I’m not sure if I can help you. My mother’s white and I was brought up white.’ It was a lightbulb moment and Bernie’s maternal family became white. But that didn’t help me with Rewind. This time, Bernie (in the past), would be heading onto a Peckham housing estate to take part in an undercover operation that would tackle gangs and drugs in a black community. I was as ill-equipped as Bernie.

Quite by chance, I saw on the London news, a young man talking about his forthcoming memoir – That Peckham Boy. Kenny Imafidon had been both a model student and a small-time drug dealer selling cannabis. When he was falsely accused of murder, his life turned upside down. I knew I had to read this book. As I read it, I underlined parts and then added post-it notes with the headings – how to survive; don’t trust the police; how not to get caught; weapons; how best to earn money; powerful words from mum; church inside and out of prison; don’t snitch; be yourself. As I took this on board, I realised the characters were more important than the situation. We’re so used to a 2-D version being portrayed in the media, especially in the news, but Kenny’s memoir gave a 3-D insight into the realities of poverty, single parent families and gangs. From the headings above, ‘don’t trust the police’ and ‘don’t snitch’ stood out the most and a lot of them sound negative. However, hope weaves like a golden thread throughout Imafidon’s book. I chose redemption and forgiveness as my main themes for Rewind.

I watched YouTube videos about the area but I really needed to visit. Author, Anne Coates, who knows Peckham well, showed me round to get a feel for the place – sights, sounds and smells. Rye Lane was busy and colourful. The graffiti on the walls and shop shutters were more like works of art. We found a housing estate that was part of the inspiration for my fictional one, with its twenty-storey tower rising above the smaller three-storey buildings. Drawing on everything I’d learned, the plot started to come together, the characters connected with Bernie and I was ready to tell her backstory at last. I’d done my background checks.

Rewind by Joy Kluver (Marchant Press) Out Now 

When DI Bernie Noel goes back to work after maternity leave, she doesn’t expect to find a crashed car with a dead driver on her journey in. But a gruesome discovery in the boot of the car turns a road traffic accident into something more sinister and personal for the detective. It isn’t long before Bernie is forced to rewind six years and confront her failed covert operation in London. But as she relives that failure, can she survive the present danger too?

J D Kirk on Living with Jack Logan

Officially, it has been just over five years since I first met DCI Jack Logan, the main protagonist of the crime fiction series I write set in the Scottish Highlands.

In that time, as I’ve uncovered some of his many quirks and foibles, I have gradually come to realise something significant - Jack has been hanging around for a long time before then.

I am, by nature, a Very Nice Man. I’m patient. I’m polite. I will try to deescalate confrontation whenever I can. I put it down to parenting, and too many Superman comics as a kid. I was never a Boy Scout – to the best of my knowledge, they didn’t exist in the small Highland town I grew up in - but if I had been, I would have absolutely nailed it.

We all do it to some extent or other – bite our tongues, rather than say out loud what we’re really thinking. I’ve never liked making people feel bad, and, being a six-foot-four Scottish man, am always wary that I could come across as intimidating.

Jack Logan doesn’t bother worrying about these things, though. And he’s six-foot-six.

I’ve written about Jack non-stop for over half a decade now, but I realise that I’ve felt him lurking in the background for most of my adult life.

He was there when I worked in a bar in Fort William, on the day that a group of Buckie Young Farmers kicked off and almost dropped a decorative whisky cast on another customer. I chased all fifteen of them down the street, before common sense kicked in and I raced back to the pub before they realised quite how badly I was outnumbered.

That chase along the High Street, I think, was Jack Logan taking the wheel.

He’s been bubbling below the surface on other occasions, too. When I finally told a self-important manager at the call centre I worked at in my early twenties exactly what I and everyone else in the building thought of his behaviour, that was Jack.

When I explained, quite firmly, to the sketchy landlord of our even sketchier flat that, no, he wouldn’t be getting his rent this month, because one of the rotting windows had fallen out of the frame and smashed on the pavement three floors below, Jack had my back.

The older I get, and the more I write about him, the more alike we become. We’re both equally as tormented by and besotted with our dogs. We’re both a little too partial to a roll and square sausage. We both hate camper van drivers, and face similar difficulties when it comes to getting behind the wheel of a Ford Fiesta. 

We’re the same age, too, although I like to think I look younger.

On a more fundamental level, I believe we share the same moral compass. The only difference being that Jack is much more ready and willing to stab people in the eye with the pointy bit.

But, I’ve come to realise that I’m not only Jack Logan. I’m the other characters, too. 

I share DC Tyler Neish’s inability to get through a day without some sort of personal disaster. I’ve never come close to being hit by a train like he has, but I did once step off a moving bus and get wrapped around a lamp post, then hit on the back of the head by the wing mirror when I stood up.

Like DS Hamza Khaled, I’m the family tech expert, called upon regularly by older relatives to fix their broadband, or their iPads, or to explain why the TV remote isn’t working (the answer inevitably being: ‘Because that’s not the remote, it’s your phone.’)

I share DI Ben Forde’s warmth towards people, Shona Maguire’s love for a Pot Noodle, and DC Sinead Bell’s near-supernatural ability to tolerate idiots.

And, though I’m almost afraid to admit it, I’m disgraced former Det Supt Bob Hoon, too. Bob is just me, but with all the switches that control the friendly, affable parts of my personality flipped in the opposite direction, and the anger dial cranked up to eleven.

Blend all the series’ characters together - heroes and villains alike – and the resulting gloopy mess would, I think, be quite recognisable as their creator. 

Only, you know, you’d have to keep it in a jug.

As I approach fifty, I find both my patience and my ability to suffer fools rapidly dwindling. I honestly don't know if it's an age thing, or if I've just been spending too much time in Logan's company. 

Perhaps it's a bit of both - a perfect storm of middle-aged grumpiness and fictional detective influence. If it's the latter then, with no plans to stop writing the series anytime soon, I've a feeling it's going to make the next few years very interesting. Call centre managers and dodgy landlords, you have been warned... 

But then again, maybe that's not such a bad thing. After all, in a world that feels increasingly chaotic, there's something to be said for channelling your inner Jack Logan - standing up for what's right, even if it means ruffling a few feathers along the way. 

A Killer of Influencer by J D Kirk (Canelo) Out Now 

Following a convention in the Scottish Highlands, eight social media influencers vanish without a trace, leaving their followers – and families – in a state of shock, and the police clueless as to their whereabouts. And then, the livestreams begin. Broadcast live from their squalid underground cells, the young influencers are forced into a sadistic battle for survival. With each livestream, their captor pits them against each other in a twisted competition for likes. The influencer with the fewest positive reactions faces a gruesome end – live on camera. As the likes increase and the death toll rises, DCI Jack Logan and his team must traverse both the Scottish wilderness and the darkest corners of the internet to try and save the remaining captives. But how do you catch a killer who is always one click ahead?

More information about J D Kirk and his books can be found on his website. You can also find him on Facebook and on Instagram @jdkirkbooks