In Defence of the Slow Burn Thriller by Lizzy Barber

Lately, I’ve noticed a growing trend in the world of thrillers: they are becoming more and more like action movies. Everywhere you look, their velocity is being exulted: ‘fast-paced,’ ‘breakneck speed,’ ‘action packed’, ‘twist after twist.’

And whilst there is nothing wrong with an action thriller (and whilst I love seeing Chris Hemsworth’s biceps as much as the next person) I would like to make the case (slowly, and patiently), for the ‘slow-burn.’

So, what is a ‘slow-burn’? In a way it’s a promise. It says to the reader, ‘something is going to happen, and you don’t know what that is yet, but if you stick around you’ll find out.’ Where a fast-paced thriller focuses on a series of high-octane events to twist and turn the reader’s expectations, a slow burn relies on gradually ramping up the tension and pace until it crescendos into its denouement. 

However, whether it’s due to social media having retrained our brains to ingest bite sized videos at breakneck speed, or the more general instant gratification of an internet connected world, modern society – and arguably the modern reader - has lost its patience. We don’t want to wait for the twist. We are time poor and content rich. We want information handed to us instantaneously. We want the facts, just the facts. We want that dopamine hit now, now, now. 

But hear me out! Guys . . . breathe.

Reading doesn’t always have to be about that. Reading is an escape. A place to retreat to. To forget about the outside world. And for me, that means atmosphere. It means being immersed. I want to step inside the world of the book and be able to touch it, smell it, taste it. I want to linger on Tom Ripley’s suitcases; the softness of the leather, and the way Tom lovingly packs Dickie’s clothes in them. I want to have time to fall in love with the twins in The Secret History along with Richard; become spellbound by them without shouting ‘cut to the chase, get to Bunny!’ I want to roam on the Heath with Cathy and see the wildness energise her. 

As an author, I enjoy taking readers along for this ride. I like to lace my scenes with hints that all is not well; hints that gradually mount up until the whisper becomes a scream. A mother who constantly keeps the curtains of the house drawn (My Name is Anna), a gorgeous Tuscan setting that is perhaps a little ‘too’ perfect (Out of her Depth), the innocent children who talk sweetly of the nanny before (Nanny Wanted). It’s not necessarily that I want to dupe you or lure you into a false sense of security; it’s more that I want to raise your hackles as the story progresses; make you second guess everything and wonder what lies ahead. 

And slowness doesn’t have to forsake plot – in fact, it should never forsake the plot. I’m not talking about lengthy descriptions deployed for the sake of an author’s ego. Pleasingly pretty turns of phrases. Darlings they can’t or don’t want to kill. A slow-burn thriller should always be ‘thrilling,’ not boring. But the beauty of a slow-burn thriller is that it uses this narrative richness precisely in order to create the thrill. It is a powerful tool to ramp up tension, so that even in the quieter, slow moving moments, the reader feels an impending sense of dread. Rebecca’s second Mrs de Winter is not finding bodies stuffed in closets, but it is Du Maurier’s skill as an author that compels us to continually feel that she might. Slow burn is tantalising: it’s the calm before the storm, that moment before the jump scare where you feel unnervingly ‘safe, too safe.’ 

So, the next time you’re browsing the shelves looking for that perfect read, I urge you to consider the slow-burn. When deployed right, the final reveal should crackle and pop as powerfully as an action thriller: the journey is different, but ultimately all thrillers want to give us that rush, the adrenaline pounding through our veins as we reach the final climax. Allow yourself to linger on the details. See what hints the author is dropping, and why. 

Take time to smell the roses . . . you may find they’re tinged with blood. 

Nanny Wanted by Lizzy Barber Pan Macmillan (Out Now)

A remote Cornish mansion. The perfect couple. And the deadly secrets that bind them. When Lily finally leaves her toxic relationship, a job as a nanny at Kewney Manor seems like the perfect solution. There, she can cut herself off from her old life, and never have to see him again. The Rowes seem like a model family, and Lily falls instantly in love with her new home. But she can’t help feeling that something isn’t quite right. Why will nobody tell her about the nanny who came before her? Where does Laurie go at night? And what does Charles really want? As Lily becomes increasingly entangled in the Rowes’s lives, she realizes that the perfect family may not be all that they seem. And as much as she fears the past she is running from, perhaps the present is where the real danger lies . . .

More information about Lizzy Barber can be found on her website. You can also follow her on X @ByLizzyBarber and on Instagram @bylizzybarber

Introducing Keera Duggan by Robert Dugoni - Extract from Her Deadly Game

Keera Duggan peered across the King County courtroom to the swinging wooden door and willed her father to walk in. Leaving him to lunch alone had been a mistake. The bailiff entered from a door behind the elevated bench and commanded the few people in the courtroom to rise as Superior Court Judge Ima Patel retook her seat behind her desk, instructed the three people in the gallery to sit, and invited Officer Greg Walsh to retake the witness stand. Walsh pushed through the railing gate and made his way past the jurors. He looked official in his navy-blue uniform and utility belt. His SPD badge glistened. Walsh wore the belt at the request of the young prosecutor standing at the adjacent table. Keera used to give officers the same advice, despite the efforts of many judges to prohibit weapons in their courtrooms. 

 Patel turned her attention to Keera. “Counsel,” she said. “Will Mr. Duggan be joining us this afternoon?”

Patrick Duggan had sparred with King County prosecutors for four decades, including Ima Patel before she ascended to the bench. “Sparring” was a polite term. Patsy had routinely knocked out prosecutors, earning his nickname, the Irish Brawler, a moniker he wore as a badge of honor. The prosecuting attorney’s office felt differently. Patsy had not been opposed to hitting below the belt, throwing elbows in the clenches, and rabbit-punching out of the break. He defended his clients the way he’d won a Golden Gloves boxing tournament as a young man—any way he could. But alcohol abuse had softened Patsy’s punches and slowed his reflexes, if not yet his razor-sharp mind, and prosecutors and jurists on the King County bench knew well his binge drinking. When she’d been a prosecutor, Keera had heard colleagues in the office say, “If you want a chance to beat the Brawler, save your best witnesses for the afternoons, and hope Patsy Duggan goes on a bender.”

Clancy Doyle, apparently now Keera’s client, looked at the empty chair at counsel table with genuine concern. With good reason. Keera sat second chair at this DUI trial only at the insistence of her eldest sister, Ella, now the managing partner of Patrick Duggan & Associates. Babysitting duty. Ella had suspected Patsy to be on the brink of a binge. Damned if she hadn’t been right.

 Keera knew almost nothing about the details of Doyle’s case.

 “Counsel?” Patel asked, sounding impatient.

 Keera rose and tugged at the lapels of her black suit. “Mr. Duggan has been detained,” she said, as if her father had a dental appointment that had run long. “I’ll conduct the cross-examination of Officer Walsh.”

 Patel’s lips nearly inched into a grin. Keera clearly wasn’t fooling at least one person in the courtroom. “Proceed,” Patel said.

 Officer Walsh looked tightly wound as Keera approached. He expected a confrontation. The prosecuting attorney, also young, inched to the edge of her chair, prepared to stand and defend Walsh with objections and interruptions intended to throw Keera off her game.

They wouldn’t.

Her Deadly Game by Robert Dugoni (Thomas & Mercer) Out Now

A defense attorney is prepared to play. But is she a pawn in a master's deadly match? Keera Duggan was building a solid reputation as a Seattle prosecutor, until her romantic relationship with a senior colleague ended badly. For the competitive former chess prodigy, returning to her family's failing criminal defense law firm to work for her father is the best shot she has. With the right moves, she hopes to restore the family's reputation, her relationship with her father, and her career. Keera's chance to play in the big leagues comes when she's retained by Vince LaRussa, an investment adviser accused of murdering his wealthy wife. There's little hard evidence against him, but considering the couple's impending and potentially nasty divorce, LaRussa faces life in prison. The prosecutor is equally challenging: Miller Ambrose, Keera's former lover, who's eager to destroy her in court on her first homicide defense. As Keera and her team follow the evidence, they uncover a complicated and deadly game that's more than Keera bargained for. When shocking information turns the case upside down, Keera must decide between her duty to her client, her family's legacy, and her own future.

More information about Robert Dugoni and his work can be found on his website. You can also find him on Twitter @robertdugoni and on Facebook.

Extract From Harm by Sólveig Pálsdóttir

 ‘No!’ she burst out, her hands going to her mouth. The terror that enveloped every fibre of her was so forceful that she could barely draw breath. She stared at the man in the bed, snatched at him and shook him.

‘You can’t do this to me!’ she howled, as she fought to draw long, gasping breaths. ‘Ríkharður, my love, you weren’t supposed to die.’

She let go of him, and rocked herself back and forth in confusion. Her breathing was shallow and she was close to losing control. She told herself to focus, to take deep, long breaths, to stay in control and not to give way to panic that would leave her helpless. She had to be able to think, to do what was needed.

What was she supposed to do? Call 112 and ask for an ambulance? Or a doctor? She looked in desperation at the man in the bed. There was no doubt that he was dead, and she was sure she had heard that if someone died at home, the police would always attend. Would a caravan count as well? She was certain of it. The police would come, there would be an autopsy and the drugs in Ríkharður’s bloodstream would be identified.
Everything would point to her, since he was a doctor and of course would know better than to take that mix of drugs. How could she explain that she hadn’t meant to kill him, but had simply wanted him to fall into a deep sleep while she went out during the night? Who was going to believe that? No, she’d been down that road before, telling the truth to authority. They wouldn’t believe her any more than they had believed her back then. Nobody would take any notice of a woman with a past like hers. No, society would ostracise her. Crazy Diljá would be behind bars, or else locked away in a psychiatric ward. That dreadful place! She trembled with horror at the thought, shivering as if she were standing naked on a glacier.

Being locked in was the worst thing she could imagine. Nothing could be worse. She would lose custody, and she might never get to see María Líf ever again. That couldn’t be allowed to happen. No, not again! He mind was a whirl of thoughts, none of which she could bear to follow to a conclusion. All she knew was that she had to get away from here as soon as possible – get away and give herself space to think logically. The clothes she had worn the night before were in the wardrobe and she hurried to pull them on. She wiped her face with a towel, picked up her sports bag and jammed a baseball cap on her head. She was being stifled here – she had to get away, far from this nightmare.

Harm by Sólveig Pálsdóttir (Translated by Quentin Bates) Corylus Books (Out Now)

When wealthy doctor Ríkarður Magnússon goes to sleep in his luxurious caravan and doesn’t wake up, detectives Guðgeir Fransson and Elsa Guðrún are called to the Westman Islands to investigate what looks like murder. Suspicion immediately falls on Ríkharður’s young, beautiful and deeply troubled girlfriend – but there are no easy answers in this case as they are drawn into family feuds, disgruntled friends and colleagues, and the presence of a group of fitness-obsessed over-achievers with secrets of their own. As their investigation makes progress, Guðgeir and Elsa Guðrún are forced to confront their own preconceptions and prejudices as they uncover the sinister side of Ríkharður’s past. Harm is the third novel featuring the soft-spoken Reykjavík detective Guðgeir Fransson to appear in English. Sólveig Pálsdóttir again weaves a complex web of intrigue that plays out in the Westman Islands, remote southern Iceland and Reykjavík while asking some searching questions about things society accepts at face value – and others it is not prepared to tolerate.

‘The Talented Mr Ripley’ and ‘Out of Her Depth’ by Lizzy Barber

‘Tom envied him with a heart-breaking surge of envy and self-pity’ writes Patricia Highsmith of Dickie Greenleaf in the early chapters of The Talented Mr Ripley. Tom, a penniless upstart but excellent impersonator, has managed to worm his way into the affections of Dickie’s father, who at the start of the novel sends Tom on a reconnaissance trip to the small (fabricated) Italian town of Mongibello, where Dickie has escaped to, to try and persuade him to return to America. Only, when Tom arrives in Italy, he discovers that Dickie has no intention of returning home. And, more to the point, neither does Tom. 

I am not the first reader or author to be captivated by Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels. In Tom, she created a true antihero; an underdog and unreliable narrator we somehow still root for; and in his idol, Dickie Greenleaf, Dickie’s girlfriend Marge and a band of wealthy expats, she creates a world that we, along with Tom, love to hate. Her clean, well-measured prose shines a light on every facet of their intoxicating world and has created an enduring legacy which has seen multiple adaptations – including the recent announcement of a new Talented Mr Ripley television series starring Fleabag’s Andrew Scott in the titular role. 

Out of Her Depth is a psychological thriller about an unassuming young woman, Rachel, who receives an incredible opportunity to work at a beautiful hotel in the Florentine Hills, where she meets the magnetic but dangerous Diana and the dashing but careless Sebastian. She is drawn into their privileged circle and luxuriates in their world of glamourous parties and exotic trips…until something goes wrong. It is not a reworking of the original, but there are themes and events (not least the Romantic Italian setting) which I was keen to explore in my work. And what drew me to Tom, and indeed the most in Out of Her Depth, was exactly that initial quote: his intermixed feelings of envy and self-pity.

Rachel, like Tom Ripley, is an outsider, a voyeur. By chance, she finds herself part of this impossible new world, but although she does step inside it, she is still painfully aware of her ‘otherness,’ that she will never truly fit in. As Tom’s friendship with Dickie blooms, he emulates him: he takes on his words and phrases, he begins to dress like him, he even wants to learn to speak Italian as good as Dickie’s. Highsmith, to allude to a spoiler (and if this is a spoiler for you, I’d say stop reading this now and get the book!), takes this to the extreme: Tom murders Dickie and fully impersonates him: but even then he constantly feels that he is only a poor copy. Diana frequently makes Rachel aware of her differences – ‘you shouldn’t nod like that,’ ‘it’s bathroom, not bafroom’ – telling her what to eat, buying her the right clothes, and under her tutelage Rachel begins to reinvent herself. 

Diana, much like Dickie to Tom, sees Rachel as a pet, a fun project to work on, and Rachel, blossoming under her attention, laps it up. The book is set in past and present day, and in the present, we see Rachel’s bitterness at never fully conforming: her realisation that she will never truly match Diana: and that realisation is an ugly thing, as ugly as Tom’s murder of Dickie. 

There has been much discussion about Ripley’s sexuality – his fascination with Dickie and subsequent hatred for Marge - but regardless of what Highsmith’s intentions were (she herself remained agnostic on the subject), I think what is rife in the book is a palpable desire. Tom wants Dickie; he wants to be Dickie; he wants Dickie to want him. His feelings are intense and intoxicating. This is what I wanted to explore with Rachel and Diana: Rachel has romantic feelings for Sebastian, but the friendship she has with Diana is all encompassing. It is that heady expression of teenage female friendship that is confusing and, for Rachel, toxic: she is so intoxicated by Diana’s good parts that she cannot see anything bad. And that desire turns into an obsession that long outlasts their teenage Summer…and begins to have deadly consequences…

Out of Her Depth by Lizzy Barber (Out Now) Pan Macmillan

There are summers that will change your life. There are summers that may end it. In the lush green hills beyond Florence sits the Villa Medici-a graceful pensione surrounded by manicured gardens. Rachel, a college student from an outer London suburb, can't believe her luck in landing a summer job here. Especially when she's drawn into a circle of privileged young sophisticates, including her glamorous co-worker Diana, who promises to help Rachel win the affections of handsome, confident Sebastian. But as champagne flows and rivalries fester in the Tuscan countryside, Rachel realizes that Diana has motivations of her own. Adrift in a world of backstabbing and bed-hopping, lavish parties and easy betrayal, Rachel feels the stakes rising along with the temperatures until, one night, something snaps. Someone dies. And nothing will ever be the same...

More information about Lizzy Barber can be found on her website. You can also follow her on Twitter @ByLizzyBarber and on Instagram @bylizzybarber

‘Her Dark Things’: The Paintings at the Heart of Dark Things I Adore

 

Audra Colfax is the mysterious and captivating star painting student at the center of my debut thriller, Dark Things I Adore. She’s in her third and final year of a Boston-based MFA program in painting, working on her thesis collection, when she lures her predatory professor and thesis advisor, Max Durant, to her remote home in Maine. She’s told him that the invitation has been extended so that he may view her collection-in-progress and provide professional feedback – but they both know this is a ruse. Max is convinced Audra has invited him to her inner sanctum to consummate the long-simmering sexual tension he senses between them. But Max couldn’t be more wrong. Audra has lured the charismatic artist to Maine for much darker, much more devious reasons; indeed, every detail of their weekend away together is engineered toward one thing – revenge. 

As Audra executes her plan, guiding Max through the broken ephemera of his sordid past, Audra takes Max to her painting studio to look at her thesis paintings. Here is how Audra describes her project:

When I first started, I was working in these landscapes of the enlarged. Taking everyday items—but ones with significance to me—and blowing them up to a size that intensified their gravitas as well as their visible landscapes. The topography and emotion of things. An apple becomes an overwhelming erotic expression. A lantern becomes a harrowing stand-in for the passage of time. Meanwhile, there are these echoes—voices—within the objects themselves. Voices as objects; found objects

Here is a quick tour—without spoilers!—through the ten objects that Audra focuses on in her thesis collection “Her Dark Things,” the paintings at the center of Dark Things I Adore. The items are carefully selected by Audra to provoke Max; they are clues, they are indictments.  

1. Enamel Lantern – this lantern has given generations of women the perfect light by which to sketch.

2. Gold Dove Charm – this necklace was given as a gift from a mother to a child; it symbolized hope for the future. 

3. Black-Capped Chickadee – the Maine state bird, and a creature with the ability to rise above. 

4. Apple – fruit grown on the land of a Rockveil, Maine family, and a symbol of fertility and motherhood. 

5. Scarf – a daughter’s favorite clothing item, and a reminder hung around their necks. 

6. Flames – a scalding bonfire around which secrets were revealed. 

7. Raven – the signature imagery, haunting and bleak, of a local Rockveil artist. 

8. Birches and Boulders – signifiers of a harrowing and sacred location. 

9. Baby Blanket – the item in which the baby who had been loved and feared in equal measure was swaddled.

10. Rope – a lifeline, a last chance, a threat. 

    
    

    
    
    
    

    Dark Things I Adore by Katie Lattari (Titan Books) Out Now 

    Three campfire secrets. Two witnesses. One dead in the trees. And the woman, thirty years later, bent on making the guilty finally pay. 1988. A group of outcasts gather at a small, prestigious arts camp nestled in the Maine woods. They're the painters: bright, hopeful, teeming with potential. But secrets and dark ambitions rise like smoke from a campfire, and the truths they tell will come back to haunt them in ways more deadly than they dreamed. 2018. Esteemed art professor Max Durant arrives at his protege's remote home to view her graduate thesis collection. He knows Audra is beautiful and brilliant. He knows being invited into her private world is a rare gift. But he doesn't know that Audra has engineered every aspect of their weekend together. Every detail, every conversation. Audra has woven the perfect web. Only Audra knows what happened that summer in 1988. Max's secret, and the dark things that followed. And even though it won't be easy, Audra knows someone must pay. What comes to light, chapter by spellbinding chapter, is that one grand, grotesque act of selfishness committed by Max as a young man, followed by years of manipulating women for art, has set into motion the machinery of his own fatal undoing. A man should pay for his crimes, and no-one is more deserving of revenge than the women to whom he owes his career. He should go into this weekend far more vigilant, but he's distracted, as always, by an overwhelming desire to have his own way. But Audra, who is well aware that he's a monster, doesn't know everything that simmers beneath his surface.

    
    
    

    
    

Dear Friends: creating Ewert Grens and Piet Hoffman by Anders Roslund

 

Honestly: sometimes I convince myself that Detective Superintendent Ewert Grens is real. And has been for two decades now. Until that long and wide and heavy and fast bus that I’ve been too busy daydreaming to notice hits the brakes and I, blushing and apologizing, return to reality. 

Grens was never supposed to be a main character – but since this disturbing and sometimes lovable man keeps coming back, stubbornly, drinking all that cop coffee in the dusty corridors of the police station in Kronoberg, sleeping most nights on a brown corduroy sofa in his office, stripes long since worn away, he of course lives and stays in the centre of my books. Initially I built him around my memories of my own father – restless, but a doer, hard to get close to but still a bit charming, and living in a world where everything painted in black slowly gets brighter, lighter, when listening to songs from days when life was longer, dancing by himself by the light of the ugly and much too strong office lamp, as my father did.

Piet Hoffmann, the unwilling infiltrator and other main character, is of course my alter ego: tall, handsome, smart, strong, adventurous. But at the same time, Ewert Grens is also my alter ego: not so tall, not so handsome, not so smart, not so strong, not so adventurous. I know them both, need them both, as my stories need them, and once Roslund & Hellström's stories needed them both. 

Writing about my beloved Ewert Grens I felt something was missing: a tool that would let me tell stories about worlds this Detective Superintendent couldn’t reach in any natural or credible way (though of course still fictitiously – no matter how alive he feels to me). I sketched out a character, inspired by of a couple of my good criminal and ex-criminal friends and gave him the working name of ’Hoffmann.’ Hoffman is also struggling with two lives, a character who was able to inhabit the widened scope of action that Ewert Grens never could. Hoffmann became Piet Hoffmann, and was soon joined by his wife Zofia and his children Hugo, Rasmus and Luiza, a fictional family of four members. Piet is caught between two worlds he longs for – the safe or the thrilling, the violent or the loving – and in his heart he knows these are impossible to combine. The fact that he can't escape any of them makes this a complex and likable character that I would love to have as a friend and hate to have to depend on.

So Detective Superintendent Ewert Grens and ex-criminal and infiltrator Piet Hoffmann represent two different arenas of crime writing: the investigating crime novel and the fast paced thriller, both of which combine to make my ideal novel. And since Ewert Grens doesn't trust anyone, and since Piet Hoffmann doesn't trust anyone, we have two characters who don't trust anyone, but who would have to trust each other. In the same way, I always have had a hard time letting people into my inner circle. I've improved over the years, letting a wife and two sons and a beloved cat in, as well as a couple of good friends, and I'm very proud to include both Grens and Hoffmann among them. I mean, what could be better than three people who don't trust anyone, but who would have to trust each other?

Knock, Knock by Anders Roslund (Vintage Publishing) Out Now.

Set over three explosive days, this is compulsive, heart-pounding storytelling that will keep you on the edge of your seat. He thought she was safe. Then the past came knocking. Seventeen years ago, Inspector Ewert Grens was called to the scene of a brutal crime. A family had been murdered, with only their five-year-old daughter left behind. The girl was moved out and placed under witness protection, but while the case went cold, Grens is still haunted by the memory. When he learns that the apartment where the crime took place is now the scene of a mysterious break-in, Grens fears that someone is intent on silencing the only witness. He must race to find her...before they do.

More information about Anders Roslund can be found on his website.

Excerpt from Adler written by Lavie Tidhar

 I am pleased to host an extract from Adler written by Lavie Tidhar with art by Paul McCaffrey as part of the Adler blog tour.

Adler - Written by Lavie Tidhar, Art by Paul McCaffrey (Published by Titan Comics) Out Now

It's the League of Extraordinary Gentlewomen, as Adler teams up with a host of famous female faces from science, history and literature to defeat the greatest criminal mastermind of all time 1902. Wounded in the Boer War, Jane Eyre returns to a London transmogrified by emerging modernity. An old friend, the glamorous inventor Lady Havisham, introduces her to the American adventuress Irene Adler, and the two seek lodging together. But Adler is engaged in a brutal secret war against a mortal enemy of the British Empire: Ayesha, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, who seeks revenge against the colonisers who destroyed her country. And Jane, not unwilling, is swept up in the case.

When history taps you on the shoulder by Chris Lloyd

There was a moment when I was researching for The Unwanted Dead that stopped me in my tracks.

For me, one of the most important parts of research is walking the streets where my characters walk. I need to experience all the sights, sounds and smells that they do, the light at certain times of day, the sense of place that they take for granted and that I can’t. And even though the book is set in Paris in 1940, the city stays the same, a witness to its own past, and the streets and squares all resonate with that history. So I’d spent days losing myself in its heart. I’d wandered around the Fifth Arrondissement, where my protagonist, Eddie Giral, lives and I found his street and his apartment block. I’d walked to and from Thirty-Six, the police station where he works. I’d looked into the windows he’d have looked out of. I’d tracked down all the hotels and buildings that had been requisitioned by the Germans and where Eddie might have been summoned. I’d found the now-gentrified parts of town that would have been the unloved and ragged refuge of villains and rascals in Eddie’s day. I’d even had an unexpected moment of calm in the apiary in the Jardin du Luxembourg, which ended up as the setting to a few key scenes in the book. 

And throughout all this time, I’d come across unassuming plaques on nondescript walls, marking the place where a Resistance fighter fell or where a gun battle took place during the battle to liberate the city. I came across the building where poet Robert Desnos was living when he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 – he survived Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Flossenburg only to die of typhoid in Theresienstadt a month after the camp was liberated. Bullet holes still mark the stone around the windows and doors to ordinary homes and office blocks. Metro stations and squares are named after exceptionally brave but ordinary people murdered under the Occupation. And each one left their mark on me.

But there was one moment that truly stopped me. A small grey plaque that affected me more than any other. It was in the Pletzel, the old Jewish quarter, on the Right Bank. You walk through narrow streets before coming to a bustling road, still fairly narrow but wider than any of the others in the neighbourhood. Along the way, you’ve gone past kosher bakers and halal butchers, patisseries and delis, restaurants and takeaways. Until you come to a school. A primary school. Almost hidden inside the unobtrusive entrance, a gateway like an old mews, is the plaque. High up on the wall outside the porter’s room, it’s easy to miss. It lists the names of the children from the school who were deported to Auschwitz in 1942 and who never returned. They were all aged six, seven, eight years old. And the list of names is long. I stood and stared, rooted to the spot, as shoppers and workers hurried around me. Like a freeze-frame in a movie. It was some minutes before I could bring myself to stop reading and rereading the names and move on. I didn’t take a photo, it wouldn’t have been right.

I write stories set in this city at this time. Their prime purpose is to entertain. My character, Eddie, is irreverent and cynical, mouthy and damaged. He fights the evil he finds in his work with flippant words and a dogged tenacity. His moral compass is not always how he might have wanted it to be as a young man going away to the First World War. He gets things wrong and does wrong things. Yet underneath the grim wisecracks and mocking iconoclasm is a sense of responsibility. Towards the victims and towards the vulnerable. 

And that, I think, is what I took away from my walks around the city and on the day I saw the plaque in the primary school. The job of historical fiction, be it crime or any other genre, is to entertain, but there’s another purpose, and it took history to tap me on the shoulder to bring that home to me. There’s a responsibility in writing historical fiction. In whatever story, set in whatever period, there has to be an underlying truth and honesty. It goes beyond ensuring your tale is historically accurate and your research is as painstaking as you can make it. There’s a responsibility in using fiction to give a voice to people who lost theirs long ago. To enabling a sense of justice for the victims and the vulnerable. And that, in my case, is where Eddie comes in.

The Unwanted Dead by Chris Lloyd (Orion Publishing) Out 17 September 2020

Paris, Friday 14th June 1940. The day the Nazis march into Paris. It made headlines around the globe. Paris police detective Eddie Giral - a survivor of the last World War - watches helplessly on as his world changes forever. But there is something he still has control over. Finding whoever is responsible for the murder of four refugees. The unwanted dead, who no one wants to claim. To do so, he must tread carefully between the Occupation and the Resistance, between truth and lies, between the man he is and the man he was. All the while becoming whoever he must be to survive in this new and terrible order descending on his home.

John Lawton on What Sparked The Storyline

In which I persuade John Lawton to reveal what was the idea that sparked the storyline.

Ayo — that’s a difficult question but only a literary gonif would refuse to attempt an answer.

I have always known where my Troy character came from.

Firstly a job tending an orange grove in Spain about forty years ago — there were not many English language books around, but one of them was Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park (1981). Still unbeatable, my favourite detective story bar none. It led to a rush of Russia-set thrillers … but I wasn’t tempted. I needed an elliptical relationship to Gorky Park not a slavishly literal one.

Secondly, seeking to avoid an Eng Lit degree that might have left me drowning in Jane Austen. Marooned in a BBC costume drama, the like of which I cannot watch — ‘La, Mr D’Oily, the foxhound just farted’ — I signed up for the only undergraduate course in the UK in ‘American Literature’. Tennessee, Twain, Vonnegut, Vidal … Myra Breckinridge not Emma Woodhouse! … alas this was the sixties — the home decade of ‘bad’ behaviour. I got slung out. ‘Slung out’ is posh for rusticated.

John Lawton circa 1968

By the time I had worked my psych ticket (Thank you, Corporal Klinger) all the courses had changed and rather than revert to the drawing room and the farting hounds I opted for pre-Soviet Russian Lit, with a year’s Russian language thrown in for good measure. And I emerged steeped in axe-wielding Russian maniacs sometime in the seventies. I’m not wholly sure what the seventies were — I was looking the other way when they happened.

Out of this unholy combination — Russia X 2 — came Frederick Troy.

Joe Wilderness. 

Oh hell.

I am not a Londoner. I’m not even a southerner. London was a place I passed though without stopping. But, ’round about 1980 I was teaching in a London University college — ‘Othello and the Incredible Hulk’ and ‘Robert Browning at the Hotel California’ being my most notable lectures. You may imagine I did not last long … but I lived in Stepney. In 1980 Stepney was old London, ungentrified. The Indian settling of Brick Lane was under way, but the presence and influence of the previous wave of immigrants could still be felt — the Jews. I found the East End, the descendants of the pogrommed refugees, fascinating. I could walk into my local pub and overhear conversations in Yiddish. Also, the presence of the East End’s most notorious villains could still be felt. The Krays had been in prison about ten years at this point.

Sooner or later a Stepney kid was going to surface as the central character in a novel. That became Joe Wilderness — of no particular ethnicity, but born to a family of thieves, rogues and hookers. I housed him in what is probably the East End’s most famous street, Sidney Street, where a young(ish) Winston Churchill personally supervised an armed raid on a bunch of Russian anarchists circa 1910, and where Peter the Painter met his end, or not … depending in which version you believe.

The plot matter was ‘how to get Joe out of Sidney Street?’

I could not leave him there. I had no wish to write an East End gangster novel — quite enough of those around as it is.

Russia came to my aid once more.

Sgt.Maj Loudbutthick: “Right, you useless fuckers! You can spend the next six months square-bashin’ or you can go to Cambridge and learn Russian! Nah, wossit gonna be?”

Some choice … so they both became ‘spies’ … monitoring Russian broadcasting and communiqués.

That was Joe’s route out of the East End, my storyline — or perhaps that should be plural — a highly intelligent Cockney drafted into the RAF (the only branch of UK Armed Forces that had an IQ test for draftees), who becomes fluent in Russian, a valuable asset to MI6 … but … but inside he remains the East End rogue of his youth …. a thoroughly likeable, deeply dishonest spook who cannot get by without ‘something on the side.’

Two of my tutors in Russian Government, being too young for WW2 had been drafted into the RAF about the time of the Korean War.

My first Wilderness novel, Then We Take Berlin, sees him as a smuggler of coffee, as valuable a commodity as cigarettes in the late 1940s, from West Berlin to East Berlin. But, as a reviewer helpfully pointed out (I had not noticed) Joe never really profits, money runs though his fingers like grains of sand.

In the second, The Unfortunate Englishman, it is truckload of vintage Claret.

And in my current novel, Hammer to Fall, illegally-distilled Finnish vodka, which he smuggles into a thirsty Soviet Union, via a ‘hole-in-the-fence’ in Murmansk.

Every time I write a novel, it is an end in itself. Reviewers said of Then We Take Berlin ‘weird ending. He must be planning a sequel.’ I wasn’t. That really was where Wilderness ended.

Then, the home team … agents, publishers, girlfriends, say … ‘Well would it kill you to write a sequel?’

So, I do.

And The Unfortunate Englishman was also the last of Wilderness. One of the few happy endings I have ever written. (‘Happiness is for losers.’ F. Nietzsche 1897).

Cue home team. Repeat the process. Offer me money.

And … I was not at all sure I could write a third Wilderness. Could he not just stay happy in Hampstead with his wife and daughters?


No, he bloody well couldn’t.

What changed?

For one thing I had started isolating myself to write at the bottom of a deep valley in Southern Tuscany — a fourteenth century watermill, surrounded in mist, bollock-freezing cold and beautiful.

One of the neighbours — well, not that isolated after all — is the Finnish musician Anna-Riikka Santapukki. So, I learnt something of Finland just in the course of conversation, and pursued it in research, in particular its struggle to stay neutral during the Cold War and its thousand-mile, heavily-defended frontier with the USSR — not a country anyone would choose as a neighbour. And I learnt that in an effort to remain neutral it had, sometime in the early sixties, both kicked out the CIA and denied Russia use of military bases. This country, population under five million, had balls, and in the absence of the CIA I saw a role and a plot for Joe Wilderness. And, of course, Finland distils hooch in greater quantities than the backwoods of Kentucky. ’Nuff said.

I could not and did not leave Joe in Finland. The needs of plot called for more action … and a the next ‘big thing’ in the Cold War loomed ominous and obvious — the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.

Any more would be what I believe is termed a ‘spoiler.’ 

Hammer To Fall by John Lawton (Published by Grove Press)
It's London, the swinging sixties, and by rights MI6 spy Joe Wilderness should be having as good a time as James Bond. But alas, in the wake of an embarrassing disaster for MI6, Wilderness has been posted to remote northern Finland in a cultural exchange program to promote Britain abroad. Bored by his work, with nothing to spy on, Wilderness finds another way to make money: smuggling vodka across the border into the USSR. He strikes a deal with old KGB pal Kostya, who explains to him there is a vodka shortage in the Soviet Union - but there is something fishy about Kostya's sudden appearance in Finland and intelligence from London points to a connection to cobalt mining in the region, a critical component in the casing of an atomic bomb. Wilderness's posting is getting more interesting by the minute, but more dangerous too. Moving from the no-man's-land of Cold War Finland to the wild days of the Prague Spring, and populated by old friends (including Inspector Troy) and old enemies alike, Hammer to Fall is a gripping tale of deception and skulduggery, of art and politics, a page-turning story of the always riveting life of the British spy.