Iain Maitland's Five Detective Duos

I began reading detective novels when I was 10 or 11 years old back in the early 1970s. I started, as many do, with Agatha Christie and loved the Poirot and Hastings stories. I then went on to Conan Doyle’s Holmes and Watson stories. Here are my favourite five.

5. Morse and Lewis – Colin Dexter

I read the first three books, Last Bus To Woodstock, Last Seen Wearing and The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn soon after they came out in the mid- to late- 1970s; hand-me-downs from my Grandpa who loved crime novels. For me, Morse is a great character – on the page, he’s world-weary and battered and makes mistakes following false trails. Lewis – Welsh in the early books – is a good foil.

The TV series takes Morse and Lewis in a different direction and is equally wonderful – so much so that Dexter started writing with the TV characters in his head rather than his original creations. My favourite is The Secret Of Annexe 3 with an old-school Morse and a twisty, turny plot plus some stoutly un-PC characters that might explain why it was never adapted for TV. 

4. Dalgliesh & Others

P.D. James’ detective Adam Dalgliesh ran through 13 novels with a range of partners; Martin, Masterson, Massingham and Kate Miskin. The first, Cover Her Face, in 1962. The last, The Lighthouse, in 2005. An astonishing span of time. I was introduced to these by my mum who had read them all and said that they got better and better.  My favourite two - and you’ve really got to begin at the beginning – are Cover Her Face (1962) and The Private Patient (2008). Dalgleish investigates the violent death of a maid at a manor house – shades of Christie – in Cover Your Face and, as Commander Dalgleish, returns to country house territory on the death of a patient at a cosmetic surgery clinic there. ‘Better and better’, as my mum said.

3. Harcus and Laird – Claire MacLeary

I love MacLeary’s books and have read three so far -Cross Purpose, Burnout and Runaway. These are gritty thrillers set in Aberdeen and feature the mismatched duo of Maggie Laird & Wilma Harcus. The characters are as much of a strength as the plots with Maggie and Wilma being a chalk and cheese odd couple. Lots of humour here – Big Wilma’s my favourite. Start with Cross Purpose.

2. Matthew Ryan and Eloise O’Neill - Mari Hannah

I came to The Silent Room and The Death Messenger after reading Hannah's DCI Kate Daniels series. One of the great strengths of Hannah’s work is that it is underpinned by know-how and understanding of how things work – if memory serves, she worked in the probation service and her partner was in the police force. That shows. I’ve just finished reading The Death Messenger and it’s even better than The Silent Room IMHO. I adore the premise – DVDs of crime scenes with chilling narrations of the murders there - are sent to the police. The killer is taunting the police – come and catch me. Ryan and O’Neill are on their way.

1 Hakim and Arnold – Barbara Nadel

An Act Of Kindness is the first book in this series, featuring Lee Arnold and Mumtaz Hakim who run a detective agency in London's East End. I’ve been reading these since the first one came out in 2013 through to Displaced in 2018. I’ve just pre-ordered the next one, A Time To Die, which is available this summer.

Barbara has a strong background in mental health. She was a mental health advocate for the mentally ill in a psychiatric hospital. That knowledge shines through in her work. I’ve just discovered another Nadel series, Inspector Ikmen, set in Turkey, and there are 20 of these. I’m halfway through Belshazzar's Daughter, the first, and it’s fab.

"He's back, Carrie. The Scribbler is back." DI Gayther and his rookie colleague DC Carrie have been assigned a new caseload. Or rather, an old one ... cold cases of LGBTQ+ murders dating back to the 1980s and beyond. Georgia Carrie wasn't even born when the notorious serial killer began his reign of terror across the East of England. Roger Gayther was on the force that failed to catch him and remembers every chilling detail. Now, after all these years, there's a sudden death featuring The Scribbler's tell-tale modus operandi. Can Gayther and Carrie track the murderer down and bring him to justice before the slaughter starts agaiThe Scribbler by Iain Maitland (Published by Saraband)

"He's back, Carrie. The Scribbler is back." DI Gayther and his rookie colleague DC Carrie have been assigned a new caseload. Or rather, an old one ... cold cases of LGBTQ+ murders dating back to the 1980s and beyond. Georgia Carrie wasn't even born when the notorious serial killer began his reign of terror across the East of England. Roger Gayther was on the force that failed to catch him and remembers every chilling detail. Now, after all these years, there's a sudden death featuring The Scribbler's tell-tale modus operandi. Can Gayther and Carrie track the murderer down and bring him to justice before the slaughter starts again?

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The Scribbler from Contraband Books, the crime imprint of Saraband Books, is the first Gayther and Carrie novel. If they can catch The Scribbler and bring him to justice, Gayther and Carrie will be back again in the second book in the series, The Key Man. 

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TV option for thriller writer Iain Maitland

Iain Maitland’s thriller, Mr Todd’s Reckoning (Contraband) has been optioned for TV by AbbottVision, producers of critically acclaimed TV dramas including No Offence, Exile and Hit & Miss.

Clare Hulton at Clare Hulton Literary Agency sold rights to Martin Carr, Executive Producer, for an undisclosed sum.

Mr Todd’s Reckoning, described by Geoffrey Wansell in the Daily Mail as ‘splendidly creepy’ is the story of a father and a son in a normal house in a normal street. They are slowly driving each other insane.  One of them is a psychopath…

Mr Todd’s Reckoning is the second thriller by Iain Maitland.  The Suffolk-based author began writing fiction in 2017, following the success of many non-fiction works including a ground-breaking book on mental health, Dear Michael, Love Dad.  Silver Dagger-award-winning author Barbara Nadel has praised Mr Todd’s Reckoning as 'truly scary, a fabulous dive into the mind of a classic, self-justifying psychopath.’

Martin Carr says: ‘I’m a horror nut and a huge fan of the genre so devoured Mr Todd’s Reckoning. In this crowded marketplace it’s hard to stand out but Iain Maitland has pulled off a masterstroke. Combining the ingenuity of an Agatha Christie, the horror of Rillington Place and the wit of the best of British, the story keeps you on your toes, fills you with dread and makes you laugh out loud. We can’t wait to bring it to the screen and think the audience will delight in the rollercoaster ride.’

Saraband publishing Sara Hunt says, ‘Iain Maitland has a phenomenal ability to write chilling, disturbed characters whilst keeping the reader glued to the page. In Mr Todd's Reckoning he takes us on a speeding rollercoaster ride from a suburban bungalow to somewhere very dark.’  

Iain Maitland says, ‘Being a huge fan of No Offence and Shameless, I am beyond thrilled to be working with the wonderful creative team at AbbottVision to bring Mr Todd's Reckoning to the screen.  Let the adventure begin!’

Snip, snip, snip… The background to the novel, Mr Todd’s Reckoning by Iain Maitland

The idea for Mr Todd’s Reckoning dates back to May 2015 when my eldest son Michael, who’d spent time in hospital and The Priory with depression and anorexia, came back to live in the family home. These were tough times, to put it mildly. We thought we were going to lose him at any moment.

Michael would spend ages in the kitchen each evening snip, snip, snipping away at vegetables in a wok, cutting them into a million pieces. I would sit nearby and the constant start-stop, start-stop snipping drove me mad. I couldn’t shout “Shut up for a minute” at him, as I might have done with my other two robust children, as he was in a fragile state; things were touch and go for a long time.        

I let off steam by writing what became the first scene of Mr Todd’s Reckoning – a troubled son with mental health issues and a stressed father feeling tense and edgy and having to bottle everything up – and then put it to one side whilst I wrote other books.

Dear Michael, Love Dad is a memoir telling the story of our family and Michael’s downfall. Out Of The Madhouse, co-written with Michael, tells of his days in The Priory and how he came back, slowly but surely, from the brink to become the happy person he is today. I then wrote a man-on-the run thriller, Sweet William.

When I was looking to write my next book, I came back to that snip, snip, scene and wondered if I could develop it into a novel. I had the idea of a father and son forced to live together in a tiny, cramped bungalow, unemployed, tense, feeling claustrophobic, and what might happen to them. The whole thing bubbled with possibilities. Father kills son? Son kills father? What if someone from outside then turned up – a girlfriend perhaps or maybe an old school friend?  

I started writing, as I do, with only a vague sense of where it might be going – no more than one or two pivotal events in my mind. I wrote one scene at a time, edging forwards and backwards, tweaking and adding to each scene as I went along. I had settled by then on the thought that, at some point, one would lash out at the other and kill him – not meaning to – and how he would then deal with that on different levels; emotionally, practically and so on.

I found it easy to get into the minds of my two main characters – Mr Todd Senior and Mr Todd Junior. One began as angrier version of me. The other was a twitchier version of Michael. I had lots of emotions within me because of what happened with Michael; guilt, frustration, anger etc. I had an idea of how Michael’s mind worked as I had read his diaries from The Priory.   

As with Sweet William, once I’d got inside the minds of my characters, the outline I had in my head changed significantly. For me, characters drive the story and where it’s all going to go. As I got to know my characters better, they started to become real people in my head – quite different from Michael and me – and took the story in a whole new direction towards the murder, mayhem and madness that you’ll read about in Mr Todd’s Reckoning.

Iain Maitland’s latest novel, Mr Todd’s Reckoning, is published this month by Saraband books, £8.99 paperback original    

 Behind the normal door of a normal house, in a normal street, two men are slowly driving each other insane. One of them is a psychopath. The father: Mr Todd is at his wits' end. He's been robbed of his job as a tax inspector and is now stuck at home... with him. Frustrated. Lonely. Angry. Really angry. The son: Adrian has no job, no friends. He is at home all day, obsessively chopping vegetables and tap-tap-tapping on his computer. And he's getting worse, disappearing for hours at a time, sneaking off to who-knows-where? The unholy spirit: in the safety of suburbia, one man has developed a taste for killing. And he'll kill again.

Crime fiction and mental illness

Mental illness often features in crime fiction but, to my mind, it’s not usually portrayed accurately. Some books have a madman at the heart of them but their thoughts and actions are rarely consistent with the realities of mental illness. Other books have mental illness tacked on, almost as a quirk, to make a character stand out. As often as not, these affectations come and go according to the requirements of the plot.

That’s not to say that some books, widening out into other genres, have not captured mental illness well over a sustained period of time. (Generally, someone does not ‘go mad’ overnight or, vice versa, suddenly become ‘normal’ - whatever ‘normal’ might be).  Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey come to mind as books that show the truth of mental illness and/or psychiatric disorders over time.

With my novel, Sweet William from Saraband Books, I wanted to put mental illness at the heart of the story. It’s often said that one in four people experience mental illness every year and that we all know someone who has mental health issues, even if those that pose a direct threat to others are relatively rare.  It’s all around us and in all of our lives.

It’s certainly true for me. My eldest son Michael suffered from anxiety and depression to the point where he was hospitalised and spent five months in the Priory. He’s managing his mental health well these days and we’ve written two memoirs about our experiences and we’re ambassadors for the teen mental health charity, Stem 4.

We talk regularly to people with mental health issues. These are complex and difficult matters and are widely misunderstood by the general public. Those with mental ill-health are often labelled in many derogatory ways by others – ‘self-obsessed’, ‘vain’, even as ‘con-artists’. These views reflect most on the ignorance of those holding them.

With Sweet William, the narrator, Raymond Orrey, is in a psychiatric unit, separated from his beloved, three-year old son, William. He sees himself as a decent human being and a wonderful father who loves his son more than anything else in the world. If only he can break out, find his son and run away to the South of France with him they can live together happily ever after.

The reality is that Orrey is a flawed and damaged human being with mental health issues. It is because of these issues – anger, the refusal to take medication and so on – that the story unfolds in the shocking way that it does.

Sweet William is a roller-coaster ride seen through the eyes of Raymond Orrey; his thoughts, his actions and their consequences are all viewed from inside his head. It’s a challenging and not always easy read – you’ll be rooting for little William and shouting at the narrator – but it is an accurate reflection of mental illness from the first page to the last when, finally, Orrey is confronted with the consequences of his actions.

Iain Maitland is the author of Sweet William published by Saraband Books on 16th November 2017

Life and death played out over 48 hours. A father desperate to be with his young son escapes from a secure psychiatric hospital, knowing he has just one chance for the two of them to start a new life together. His goal is to snatch the three-year-old - a diabetic who needs insulin to stay alive - and run away to France ... but first he must find the boy, evade his foster family and stay well clear of the police, already in pursuit. A real page-turner cut through with dark humour, Sweet William zeroes in on a potent mix: mental illness, a foster family under pressure, and an aggrieved father separated from his precious child.