Behind the Scenery by Paul Finch

While many of my previous crime novels have been set up and down the country, there’s always been a strong bias towards the North of England, and the Northwest in particular. 

This was always inevitable, I suspect. Not only was I born and raised there, but when I was a policeman and later, when I was a journalist, my hunting ground was Greater Manchester. I’ve never made any apologies for this because the Northwest, with its post-industrial landscape of depressed towns, derelict factories, and extensive, rubble-strewn spoil-land, makes an atmospheric backdrop for crime and thriller fiction that is almost second-to-none.

ONE EYE OPEN, though, will be very different. Because this new novel of mine is set in the border country between Essex and Suffolk, a pastoral landscape famous in the past for such practitioners of fine art as John Constable and Thomas Gainsborough, and well known today for its prosperous villages, scenic woodland walks and genial country pubs.

As settings for crime thrillers go, it’s a far cry from anywhere I’ve been previously. But there’s a story behind this.

I first became enamoured of this leafy corner of England because I have in-laws there. We’ve been visiting them more and more recently, slowly getting to know their friends and neighbours, and one summer day a couple of years ago, during a very genteel garden party, I was introduced to a chap who, like me, was a former copper. 

We chatted amiably, gradually comparing notes about the job. I confidently expected that mine would blow his out of the water. After all, rapes and murders were regular events on our patch. We’d had arson, aggravated burglaries, repeated gang violence, an armed robbery during which machine-guns were discharged. The Suffolk ex-copper’s recollections weren’t quite as lurid as mine, but he told me some fascinating tales all the same, making it quite clear that it wasn’t just poaching they had to cope with out there in the sticks. Okay, it wasn’t MIDSOMER MURDERS, but there was plenty going on behind the lovely scenery. 

Most interesting of all (certainly to me), rural Southeast England had allegedly become a retirement land for the London underworld. Apparently, this wasn’t something that even local people knew about widely. But the story was that gangland bigwigs who had been forced out of the game either through age or simply because they’d decided the time was right and didn’t fancy tangling with incoming syndicates from overseas (who by reputation were particularly deadly), had set up shop in secluded rural residences, some of them pretty extravagant, but nearly all hidden at the ends of long drives, or behind walls of privets or manicured shrubbery, where they were leading the lives of wealthy, law-abiding citizens.

I wasn’t quite sure how to take this, and my new pal was at pains to stress that it wasn’t happening everywhere, and that there’d never been a corresponding increase in local crime as most of these old lags were done with all that.

But I found the idea fascinating: that inner city crime, or the proceeds of it, could be flourishing unnoticed in England’s cosy heartlands, where the most dangerous thing that most visitors normally encounter are clumps of nettles or crumbling stone steps in idyllic country churchyards.

I checked with other guests, and while many were adamant that this wasn’t so, a couple advising that while there were lots of successful people locally, all had risen to prominence legitimately, some were more circumspect. 

It was a mixed bag of views, but by this time I’d been inspired.

I mean, is it really possible that a truly nefarious past can ever stay buried? I’d never considered organised crime as being like a village club, something you joined by paying a membership fee to and left by stopping paying. There is much mythology woven around the underworld, of course: that once you’re in, you’re in; that it never forgets; that by the nature of the beast, you are embroiled in activities from which you can never just walk away.

Whether any of this is real or not, or just a flight of imagination I’d gone on after a tipsy summer afternoon with a fellow ex-officer, I can’t say. But I knew I had the kernel of a new book.

And this one wouldn’t work so well in the smoky gloom of the North. Not when I had the garden of England as an alternative. 

A garden in which, in ONE EYE OPEN, serpents abound. 

One Eye Open by Paul Finch is published by Orion and is out now.

YOU CAN RUN
A high-speed crash leaves a man and woman clinging to life. Neither of them carries ID. Their car has fake number plates. In their luggage: a huge amount of cash. Who are they? What are they hiding? And what were they running from?
YOU CAN HIDE 
DS Lynda Hagen, once a brilliant detective, gave it all up to raise her family. But something about this case reignites a spark in her...
BUT YOU'LL ALWAYS SLEEP WITH... 
What begins as an investigation soon becomes an obsession. And it will lead her to a secret so dangerous that soon there will be nowhere left to hide.
ONE EYE OPEN