James Hilton - Write what you know or don’t.

One of the first nuggets of advice given to any fledgling writer is write about what you know. I remember reading and ingesting that advice and then staring nonplussed out of my window for a long time. I was probably about sixteen at the time.

“What do I know?” That question rattled around in my adolescent mind like a marble in a gerbil run. I knew a bit about martial arts (quite a lot really for a skinny kid who could hardly afford to pay for karate lessons), a hodgepodge of mythological facts and folk stories passed down from my father and not a whole lot more.

Or so I thought. I was always a bookworm and was often to be found in a quiet corner with a gritty thriller or horror novel in my hand. I read whatever was on my father’s shelf. A lot of those books were cheap paperbacks with characters like Edge, James Bond, Adam Steele, Remo Williams, Nick Carter and Conan the Barbarian.

As I got older and my writing began to take a more structured form I began to realise just how much these red-blooded tales had stuck with me. I grew up on a very working-class council estate in Carlisle in the north west of England. As one of five siblings, I was blessed in having my brothers around at all times. This also provided a constant source of debate on our favourite characters from comics, films and books.

When I reflect on my influences, themes and characters that I now explore in my own novels, I am hardly surprised to find the fiercely loyal family bond shown between my Gunn Brothers. The age-old themes too of honour, courage under fire and iron will are key themes within my stories. Ordinary people can do some extraordinary acts when called upon. This goes far beyond bullets and bar room brawls. Stubborn acts of defiance, when the odds are stacked so high that it’s just not funny, are what define us. It’s not what happens to you but how you deal with it that makes the common man or woman a hero. Every week in the news people show that they can exhibit levels of compassion, charity, friendship and bravery that take our breath.

Write what you know.

Does that mean if you work in a bank, office or supermarket, you have to set your stories there? Not if you don’t want to. Not by any stretch of the imagination. You may know those industries inside out, but you know far more than that. What about the characters? Staff, co-workers, customers and clients? That guy who wears an old-style fedora hat. That lady who walks a dog bigger than she is. The guy in your bar with no left hand. Characters in our play of life. Observe them. They can often surprise you.

I once moved seats at a bar on vacation to let a little guy sit down. He was about five foot two and looked to weigh about ten stone wet through. It turned out that he had just returned from Afghanistan and had been working only two days prior as a tunnel rat, clearing out cave systems of enemy combatants. He looked like a live action Ned Flanders and was a gentleman in his manners when ladies were in earshot. People can surprise you.

Write what you know. You probably know about friendship, loyalty, love, loss, worry and family. It is up to you how you mix those potent ingredients together. Will you write a family drama? Comedy? Thriller? A romance or an erotic tale? Life is what it’s all about. Living life is what life is all about.

The fictional lives we create can be greater that their sum parts. That’s one of the many joys of writing. Will you allow your characters redemption? Escape? Reward? Or will they suffer a darker fate, and conflict.

People, emotions, conflict. Love, conflict and redemption.

Write what you know. (And just make the rest up…it works for me.)

Pray for Death by James Hilton (Titan Books)

Celine Chavez is the closest thing to a daughter that Clay Gunn has. But now she has disappeared while vacationing in Mexico. Clay and his brother Danny must venture into the violent world of the Mexican criminal underworld to bring her home. From the bright lights of Cancun to a living nightmare in the jungles of the Yucatan, the brothers face the direst of enemies yet. One thing is for sure: if they survive, the Gunn brothers will never be the same again.

Books to Look Forward to from Titan Books

May 2017

Warlock Holmes: The Hell Hounds of the Baskervilles is by G S Denning.  The game's afoot once more as Holmes and Watson face off against Moriarty's gang, the Pinkertons, flesh-eating horses, a parliament of imps, boredom, Surrey, a disappointing butler demon, a succubus, a wicked lord, an overly-Canadian lord, a tricycle-fight to the death and the dreaded Pumpcrow. Oh, and a hell hound, one assumes.

Two Lost Boys is by L F Robertson.  Janet Moodie has spent years as a death row appeals attorney. Over-worked, underpaid, and recently widowed, she's had her fill of hopeless cases, and is determined that this will be her last. Her client is Marion 'Andy' Hardy, convicted fifteen years ago along with his brother Emory of kidnapping, rape and murder of two prostitutes, but Janet discovers a series of errors made by his previous lawyers. Andy may well be guilty of something, but what?

 

When a mint copy of the final album by Valerian England's great lost rock band of the 1960s surfaces in a charity shop, all hell breaks loose. Finding this record triggers a chain of events culminating in our hero learning the true fate of the singer Valerian, who died under equivocal circumstances just after - or was it just before? - the abduction of her two-year-old son.  The Vinyl Detective: The Run Out Grove is by Andrew Cartmel.

June 2017

A formerly rich businessman thrown out of Hong Kong when the Chinese took over from the British decides to fix his dire financial problems and take revenge on the Chinese by tunneling under Hong Kong's bank vaults and stealing all their gold, then using a doomsday device to set off a "soliton wave" that will turn the ground to sludge, causing the whole city to collapse. Only the engineer on his staff who designed the soliton wave technology (intending it for good purposes, to help with construction projects) can stop him, working together with a beautiful young environmental activist who gets caught up in one of the soliton tests and nearly killed. From the deck of a yacht near the Great Barrier Reef to Australia and Singapore and finally Hong Kong itself, it's a deadly game of cat-and-mouse as our heroes first struggle to escape the villain's clutches and then thwart his insanely destructive plan.  Forever and a Death is by Donald E Westlake

 

Fight or Die is by James Hilton.  When the Gunn brothers Danny and Clay answer a call to help old friends, they are plunged into a volatile and deadly situation. Larry and Pamela Duke own one of the most popular nightclubs in the Spanish resort town of Ultima, but a local gang known as the Locos are determined to take it. Danny and Clay are hired to protect the club, but new adversaries enter the game. Against such odds there are only two choices: fight or die...

Sherlock Holmes : The Labyrinth of Death is by James Lovegrove. London, 1895, and a widowed gentleman comes calling at 221B Baker Street. Due to his preoccupation with his grief at losing his wife, Fitzhugh Woolfson's daughter Hannah has become estranged from him, and has disappeared from the family home. Woolfson begs Sherlock Holmes to find her. Holmes and Watson soon discover that Hannah has joined a religious sect known as the Elysians - led by the charismatic Sir Philip Buchanan - which conducts secretive rituals in the countryside derived from Ancient Greek myth and religion. Hannah's friend Sophia has disappeared after becoming embroiled with the Elysians, and foul play is suspected. The companions must infiltrate the mysterious cult to discover the terrifying truth.

July 2017

A mysterious Catholic priest arrives at 221B Baker Street, only to utter the words 'if corpe' before dropping dead. Though the man's death is attributed to cholera, when news of a similar case reaches Holmes, he is convinced that the priests have been poisoned. He and Watson learn that the men were on a mission from the Vatican to investigate a miracle; but surely no miracle could lead to murder?  Sherlock Holmes: City of the Innocents is by Cavan Scott.

November 2017

Turn on the Heat is by Erle Stanley Gardner.  Return to the sizzling 1940s as Bertha Cool and Donald Lam investigate a missing woman, a desperate husband, a politician with a past, and a femme fatale with a future…assuming she doesn’t go to jail for murder! 

February 2018

A group of criminals serving time in prison dream up the perfect heist – using an escape tunnel to break out, rob two banks, and then break back into jail again, where they have the perfect alibi! But can they pull it off? Help I am Being Held a Prisoner is by Donald E Westlake.

Books to Look Forward to from Titan Books

January 2017

London, 1887. Victorian adventuress and butterfly hunter Veronica Speedwell receives an invitation to visit the Curiosity Club, a ladies-only establishment for daring and intrepid women. There she meets the mysterious Lady Sundridge, who begs her to take on an impossible task—saving society art patron Miles Ramsforth from execution. Accused of the brutal murder of his artist mistress Artemisia, Ramsforth will face the hangman’s noose if Veronica cannot find the real killer.  But Lady Sundridge is not all that she seems, and unmasking her true identity is only the first of the many secrets Veronica must uncover. Together with her natural historian colleague Stoker, Veronica races against time to find the true murderer… A Perilous Undertaking is by Deanna Raybourn.

February 2017

Snatch is by Gregory McDonald.  Whether it’s a Middle East oil crisis in the 1970s or the London Blitz during WWII, world events have a way of breeding trouble on the home front, too. That’s how Toby Rinaldi, son of a U.N. Ambassador, wound up kidnapped on his way to a California amusement park, and how Robby Burnes, orphaned son of British nobility, wound up snatched on the snowy streets of New York City. But as Robby’s famous namesake taught us, the best-laid plans don’t always work out as intended. Especially not when you’re a kidnapper in the hands of Gregory McDonald.

The Threateners is a Matt Helm novel by Donald Hamilton.  A ruthless South American drug lord has a plan to bring the United States to its knees. A group of renegade American agents has plans to smash the kingpin and his cartel, by any means necessary. Caught in the middle, Matt Helm’s got to do double duty to stop them both, and to protect a woman with information both sides would kill for…

The Killing Bay is by Chris Ould.  When a group of international activists arrive on the Faroe Islands, intent on stopping the traditional whale hunts, tensions between islanders and protestors run high. And when a woman is found murdered only hours after a violent confrontation at a whale drive, the circumstances seem purposely designed to increase animosity between the two sides. For English DI Jan Reyna and local detective Hjalti Hentze, the case quickly exposes personal connections and con icts of interest. But as they dig deeper it becomes increasingly clear that the murder has other, more sinister aspects to it. Knowing evidence is being hidden from them, neither policeman knows who to trust, or how far some people might go to defend their beliefs.

The aristocratic Charles Bromley arrives at 221B Baker Street to beg Sherlock Holmes for his help. Bromley believes that his wife is in danger, as she has refused an offer to sell the Moonstone, a fabulous diamond that has been in her family for generations but which is said to be cursed. When a jeweller is found murdered, it seems as if the Moonstone deserves its reputation. Then the diamond is stolen, and Holmes must try to unravel a mystery centuries in the making. The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Moonstone’s Curse is by Sam Siciliano.

March 2017

Private Investigator George Kocharyan is on the trail of a runaway maid, the employee of a famous TV surgeon and his beauty-queen wife. The maid is accused of stealing confidential documents, and Kocharyan’s investigation leads him to the city’s Filipino community, where he discovers the risks faced by those working far from home. Meanwhile, the discovery of a teenager’s body brings the permanently unpleasant DI Vicky Stubbing back into George’s life, and as two violent strangers cross his path also looking for the missing maid, he begins to wonder if his celebrity employers are everything they seem. The Surgeon’s Case is by E G Rodford.

Follow Me Down is by Sherri Smith.  Mia Haas has built a life for   As Mia re-evaluates their difficult, shared history and launches her own investigation into the grisly murder, she uncovers secrets that could exonerate Lucas—or seal his fate. In a small town where everyone’s history is intertwined, Mia will be forced to confront her own demons, placing her right in the killer’s crosshairs herself far from the small town where she grew up, but when she receives word that her twin brother is missing, she’s forced to return home. Once hailed as the golden boy of their community, Lucas Haas disappeared the same day the body of one of his teenage students is pulled from the river. Trying to wrap her head around the rumours of Lucas’s affair with the teen, and unable to reconcile the media’s portrayal of Lucas as a murderer with her own memories of him, Mia is desperate to find another suspect.  All the while, she wonders, if he’s innocent, why did he run?

Sherlock Holmes: A Betrayal of Blood is by Mark A Latham.  It is 1894, and the news of a Transylvanian nobleman’s death at the hands of a certain Professor Van Helsing is the talk of London.  Unsatisfied at the acquittal of the professor, Mycroft Holmes asks Sherlock to investigate what truly led to the deaths of Lucy Westenra and the mysterious aristocrat. The newspapers are full of inconsistencies and wild supernatural theories, and as Holmes digs deeper, he suspects that those hailed as heroes are not what they seem. The clues point to an innocent man framed and murdered for crimes he did not commit, and Holmes and Watson find themselves targeted at every turn, as what began as a quest to clear one man’s name reveals a conspiracy that draws them to the mountains of Transylvania and the infamous Castle Dracula.

How far would you go to provide for your child?  Adam Shaw is dying, and knows he’ll leave his disabled son with nothing. His solution? Rob a bank. It’s no surprise that things go wrong. What is surprising is that when another customer is accidentally shot, no one in the bank is in a hurry to hand Adam over to the police. There’s the manager who’s desperate to avoid an audit, the security guard with a serious grudge against the dead man, and the woman who knows exactly how bad the victim really was...  Eight people, twelve hours, one chance to cover up a murder. But it’s not just the police they have to fool. When many lives intersect, the results can be explosive. Parallel Lines is by Steven Saville.

Taking a midnight stroll along the Hudson River, Mike Hammer gets more than he bargained for: a partial corpse on an ice floe. The body is that of an ex-police captain, who spent the last years of his life as a butler to a millionaire—also now deceased.  Were both master and servant murdered? Captain Pat Chambers thinks so. But to prove it Hammer must travel to upstate New York to investigate the dead man’s family, all of whom have a motive for murder.  The Will to Kill is a Mike Hammer novel by Micky Spillane and Max Allan Collins.

April 2017

The Age of Olympus is by Gavin Scott.  Duncan Forrester’s research on an Aegean island is interrupted first by the murder of a British archaeologist, and then by the outbreak of the Greek Civil War. The worship of ancient gods may provide a clue to the murderer, but in such a tumultuous time, little is what it seems.

Fatal Music is by Peter Morfoot.  Captain Paul Darac of the Brigade Criminelle is called to a potential crime scene - an elderly woman found dead in her hot tub. At first it is thought that she died of natural causes, but a surprising link with Darac’s own life leads him to dig deeper. In doing so he uncovers disturbing proof that there may have been a motive to kill the woman, and there is no shortage of suspects. Allegiances past and present must be set aside to unravel a tale of greed, deception and treachery that spans the social spectrum. It is among the winding streets of his own neighbourhood in Nice’s old town, the Babazouk, that Darac faces his severest test yet.

May 2017

Two Lost Boys is by L F Robertson.  Janet Moodie has spent years as a death row appeals attorney. Overworked and recently widowed, she’s had her fill of hopeless cases, and is determined that this will be her last. Her client is Marion ‘Andy’ Hardy, convicted along with his brother Emory of the rape and murder of two women. The brothers were tried separately, and Emory received a life sentence, while Andy got the death penalty, labelled the ringleader despite his low IQ and Emory’s dominant personality.  Convinced that Andy’s previous lawyers have missed mitigating evidence that would have spared him the death penalty, Janet investigates Andy’s past, revealing a sordid and damaging upbringing, a series of errors on the part of his previous council, and most worrying of all, the possibility that there is far more to the Hardy family than was first thought. Andy may be guilty, but of what?

His first adventure consisted of the search for a rare record; his second begins with the discovery of one. When a mint copy of the final album by “Valerian”—England’s great lost rock band of the 1960s—surfaces in a charity shop, all hell breaks loose.  Finding this record triggers a chain of events culminating in our hero learning the true fate of the singer Valerian, who died under equivocal circumstances just after—or was it just before?— The abduction of her two-year-old son.  Along the way, the Vinyl Detective finds himself marked for death, at the wrong end of a shotgun, and unknowingly dosed with LSD as a prelude to being burned alive. And then there’s the grave robbing… But he does find out what happened to the missing child, and it wasn’t what anyone expected—or wanted—to hear.  The Vinyl Detective: The Run-Out Groove is by Andrew Cartmel

June 2017

Fight or Die is by James Hilton When the Gunn brothers Danny and Clay answer a call to help old friends, they are plunged into a volatile and potentially deadly situation. Larry and Pamela Duke own one of the most popular nightclubs in the Spanish resort town of Ultima, but a local gang known as the Locos are determined to take it for themselves. Danny and Clay are hired to protect the club, but soon new adversaries enter the game. Against such odds there are only two choices: fight or die..

The game’s afoot once more as Holmes and Watson face off against Moriarty’s gang, the Pinkertons, flesh-eating horses, a parliament of imps, boredom, Surrey, a disappointing butler demon, a succubus, a wicked lord, an overly-Canadian lord, a tricycle-fight to the death and the dreaded Pumpcrow. Oh, and a hell hound, one assumes.  Warlock Holmes: The Hell-Hound of the Baskervilles is by G S Denning

July 2017

A mysterious Catholic priest arrives at 221B Baker Street, only to utter the words ‘il corpe’ before dropping dead. Though the man’s death is attributed to cholera, when news of a similar case in Bristol reaches Holmes, he becomes convinced that the priests have been poisoned. He and Watson learn that the men were on a mission from the Vatican to investigate a miracle; it is said that the body of an eighteenth-century philanthropist and slave trader Edwyn Warwick has not decomposed. But should the Pope sanctify a man who made his fortune through slavery? And when Warwick’s body is stolen, it becomes clear that the priests’ mission has attracted the attention of a deadly conspiracy... Sherlock Holmes: Cry of the Innocents is by Cavan Scott.