From Non-Fiction to Legal Thriller by S J Fleet

Authenticity in fiction is tricky. That has been perhaps my biggest takeaway from the transition between non-fiction polemic and legal thriller. When I first started sketching my idea for The Cut Throat Trial, I identified authenticity as my lodestar. I wanted to show readers the criminal justice system as it really is, through the eyes of the people directly involved, rather than as a Hollywood screenwriter or tabloid editor imagines it to be. There is so much truth about the human condition played out in our criminal courts each day that tacking closely to reality would, I figured, create a far more gripping story and compelling cast of characters than anything I could invent. More truth in fiction than non-fiction, and all that.

I wanted readers to be able to breathe in the sticky, airless hum of our dilapidated court buildings. To feel the gentle buzz of the robing room, as egomaniacal barristers who, moments ago, were tearing chunks out of each other in court, take off their wigs and laugh uproariously. To reach out and touch the tension that mounts as an untruthful witness is led, by a series of carefully calibrated questions, to the climax of a cross-examination in which the implausibility of their evidence is laid bare. And to be exposed to perhaps the most enticing and fascinating dimension: the complexity. Not of the law, but of the people; contrary to popular renderings, this is not a world of heroes and villains, neatly divided into opposing camps. Every facet of human life and behaviour, every outward emotion and hidden motivation, runs through the heart of the cases that come before the courts, and extracting an easily-identifiable truth is all-but-impossible. 

A better laboratory for a thrilling novel you would struggle to find. And it would be easy, surely? This, after all, is literally my life as a criminal barrister. Up to 70 hours a week. This should, I smugly told myself as I leaned back at my desk to take a swig of tepid mint tea, write itself.

Well. 

Reality swiftly, unwelcomely, kicked down the door and entered the party. Because while criminal justice is, for all of those reasons above, utterly gripping, the trial process can be – as any juror will testify – tooth-bendingly dull. Parts of that – the delay, the frustrations at the inefficiency of the system – I wanted to capture. But I absolutely didn’t intend for readers to actually feel like jurors in a waiting room, hanging around listlessly for hours just waiting for something to happen. Even inside the courtroom, even in a murder trial where everybody is pointing the finger at each other, there are elements – the legal arguments, the dense science, the playing of hours of mostly-uneventful CCTV, the hundreds of pages of documentary evidence – which are less than exhilarating. My first draft actually encompassed many of these. I opted to include transcripts, tables and charts, legal documents – every hallmark of a genuine trial. And, it’s probably fair to say, the book was in parts unreadable. Necessary as they may be in the real world, they did not, I had to concede, need trouble a reader hoping to be entertained.

The characters posed a different, but equally unhappy, problem. The temptation not simply to base characters on the people I have met, but to incorporate them fully-formed, was, in the planning stages, almost impossible to resist. But they are so real and interesting! I kept grumbling to myself as I scrubbed out another lifted line of dialogue, conscious that, as much as anything, easily recognisable characters pose a fatal risk to an anonymous author’s anonymity. Eventually, after much reworking, I managed to forge what I hope are convincing and compelling amalgams, blends of multiple people I have encountered with a liberal lashing of fantasy.  

But striking that balance has taken time. More than I, in my naivety, had appreciated. Writing about what you know is not, it turns out, easy. 

So what I am left with – what now stands as my debut foray into fiction – is, I hope, realistic and authentic, even with my concessions to artistic licence. My modified rule has become not to remorselessly replicate reality, but to allow myself anything that would not cause me, as a reader, to ruin my partner’s evening by superciliously explaining How Very Wrong This All Is. 

It's still a high bar. But I hope I have just about cleared it. If not, I’m sure I will hear about it in the robing room…

The Cut Throat Trial by S. J. Fleet aka The Secret Barrister will be published on 28 August 2025 (Picador) in hardback, ebook and audio. 

It is one of the biggest trials of the year. Three seventeen-year-old boys are accused of the brutal murder of an elderly teacher on New Year's Eve. Each boy denies it. Each points the finger at the other two. But they can’t all be innocent. The three defence barristers have only one job: to persuade the jury that their client is not guilty. But they’re up against a prosecutor who needs to win the case, no matter the cost. Because when the game is murder, the competition is deadly.

You can follow S J Fleet on X @SJFleetAuthor

 

CFP: Literatures and Laws

 

 

CFP: Literatures and Laws online one-day symposium

A one-day symposium hosted online by Bournemouth University, UK, held on 13th April 2024. 

Department of Humanities & Law, and Narrative, Culture, and Community Research Centre

‘Literatures and Laws' considers law as literature, and law in literature. The first considers how law constructs narratives to make sense of and process non-legal events and experiences. Thus personal experiences of an event or dispute with another have to be translated into their legally relevant features so that a legal narrative can be constructed. Additionally, barristers when presenting a case in court seek to build a narrative to persuade juries. The second explores how law, courtroom spaces and rhetoric, justice, and legal systems and infrastructure (and their associated politics) are represented in (or excluded from) literature.

At a time where legal frameworks and understandings are increasingly contested, it is important that we consider how storytelling enables to the law to operate and how storytelling represents law and affects our understanding of law. An important component of a successful judicial system is the general trust the public have in that system. We want to explore both legal and literary perspectives on how that trust relates to storytelling and fictionality, and how both fictional literature and law construct stories about us as participants within a legal system. 

At Bournemouth University, literature studies and law sit within the same department; inspired by this contiguity, we are inviting research and/or creative papers that explore the ways storytelling and narrative intersect within representations of law, justice, and legal systems. 

Broad themes considered within the symposium, then, may include but are certainly not limited to

• Law and literary genre, for instance papers that focus on representations and significant instances or structures of law and legality in crime and detective fiction, Gothic and historical fiction, procedurals, ecological fiction

• Inventions of law and legal systems in speculative fiction

• Courtroom drama

• Law, politics, and the state in literature

• Historical case studies

• Precedent and storytelling: Cases as links in a storytelling chain

• Lay terminology to legal terminology: Lay and legal understandings

• Genres of law: Conceptualising law as genre

• Storytelling conventions in strands of law: Criminal, civil and human rights

• Fictionality and media framing of law: Sensation, celebrity and perception

  Please submit a 200-word abstract for a 15-minute presentation and a brief biographical note to swalker@bournemouth.ac.uk no later than February 22nd 2024. You may direct general queries to the same address.

  Keynote speakers:

  Professor Hywel Dix (Bournemouth University, NCCR member)

  Hywel is interested in the relationship between culture and social and political change, especially in relation to political devolution in the 4 nations of the UK, as well as autofiction and cultural memory. Recent publications include Compatriots or Competitors: Welsh, Scottish, English and Northern Irish Writing and Brexit in Comparative Contexts (University of Wales Press, 2023). 

  Dr Caroline Derry (Open University)

  Caroline Derry joined the Open University in April 2017. She is a senior lecturer in law, teaching subjects including criminal and evidence law. Her other roles include Law School EDI Champion.  Caroline qualified as a barrister, practising in criminal defence law, and as a solicitor in a large, central London legal aid practice. She then taught for fifteen years at London Metropolitan University, where she was a senior lecturer in criminal and evidence law and gender & law, and course leader for the LLB Law. She has been a visiting lecturer in criminal law at SOAS and at Paris Descartes (Masters in Common Law).

  Symposium organisers

  Dr Rebecca Mills is Senior Lecturer in English and Communication at Bournemouth University. Her publications include work on crime and detective fiction, particularly of the interwar era. Please contact Rebecca if you have any questions about developing a literary topic for the symposium: rmills@bournemouth.ac.uk

  Dr Samuel Walker is Senior Lecturer in Law at Bournemouth University. He researches the notion of embodiment in law, and how literature explores our understanding of law and justice. Please contact Sam if you have any questions about developing a topic on law-focused topic for the symposium: swalker@bournemouth.ac.uk

  
  

  
  

Striving for Verisimilitude by James Woolf

Achieving verisimilitude in your work is the Holy Grail for Crime and Thriller writers, because as soon as the reader gets a whiff that something doesn’t stack up, doubt will begin spreading like Covid 19 on a cruise ship. 

I first became aware of the effort that some writers put in behind the scenes to achieve verisimilitude when studying Wuthering Heights for A Level. I came across a small book which told me that almost every event in the novel’s thirty-one-year timeline could be precisely dated, or at least placed within a small window of time, even though relatively few dates are mentioned. The book printed a chronology, not dissimilar to the one shown here. I was fascinated by the idea of Emily Bronte working obsessively on these details, perhaps before she even began drafting the story in her tiny handwriting. It also intrigued me that she set her book some half a century before she was born. Was she seeking greater clarity or objectivity by doing so?

When writing my debut novel, Indefensible, I also used a table document, which in this case ran to forty-five pages. My chronology sets out (in columns headed with character names) the key points in their lives, and which chapter, if any, these events appear in. My novel is also set in the past, and my chronology contains a column for news events that were talking points at the time, such as the collapse of Barings bank or the declaration by Jonathan Aitken that he will “fight the cancer of twisted journalism with the simple sword of truth”. In Indefensible, every news event referred to is precisely dated within the narrative.

I went a good deal further than chronology, however. Indefensible follows a barrister, Daniel, who defends a man charged with a grisly murder at the Old Bailey and then becomes too close to his ex-client afterwards. With their permission, I included two clerks as characters in the novel, both with their real names and acting as they would have done in their professional lives almost thirty years ago. Bill Conner was the right-hand man to the legendary barrister, George Carman QC, who successfully defended Jeremy Thorpe in his attempted murder trial. Carman is also a minor character in my book. Bill was able to provide many details about his former head of chambers, such as his close attention to the earnings of other barristers in the same set, as each barrister paid a percentage of these towards running costs. As the highest earner of them all, Carman was naturally hit with the biggest deduction – something he was never happy about.

As well as people, I tried to ensure the authenticity of all locations in the book. I even included a flat I once shared with my brother in Hackney as the site of a murder. The property is arguably identifiable, so someone may get a surprise when reading! I was very keen not to trip up on forensic matters too. My novel opens with a report that a man’s head was seen being thrown into the River Thames. Eventually, when the head surfaces, a murder investigation begins. When researching the book, I spoke to David Tadd, a forensic expert whose team worked on many high-profile cases, including identifying the Grand Hotel bomber of 1984. David offered great advice about the state of decapitated heads that have been floating in rivers for rather too long. 

Moving on to objects and day-to-day clutter, I am not gifted with a great visual memory, but wanted to ensure that the things my characters use are not described generically or seem anachronistic. My favourite example of my over-the-top attention to detail was when I researched a 1990’s handbag which is used by a court reporter who becomes involved with my protagonist. I found the perfect one on eBay and bought it for my partner. I’ve been trying to persuade her to use it at the book launch in February.

My final thought on achieving verisimilitude concerns theme. Having worked in the legal sector for over twenty years, including running the ethical hotline for barristers, you might say I turned my day job into a novel. As well as being a legal thriller, Indefensible is also a discussion about professional boundaries and what can happen when they break down. My main character, Daniel, recommends to another barrister that he should phone the Bar Council but at times in the story he should have done so himself. I like to think that had he spoken to me when I was working on the hotline, he would have received sound advice.

Indefensible by James Woolf (Bloodhound Books) Out Now.

A lawyer crosses a dangerous line with a former client and discovers that some decisions are indefensible…Daniel, a criminal barrister, is working all hours on a sensational trial, defending a client he believes is wrongfully accused of a grisly murder. Determined to keep Rod out of prison, he begins to neglect his wife—and soon suspects she’s having an affair. After Daniel triumphs in court, the bond with his newly acquitted client grows even stronger. And when Rod offers Daniel a favour that he really shouldn’t accept, things take a catastrophic turn. Daniel realises the lethal consequence of his actions and now his dream case threatens to become his worst nightmare…

James Woolf can be found on X @WoolfJames

Olly Jarvis on Using His Expertise

 

How thriller writer Olly Jarvis drew on his expertise as a criminal barrister to write his latest thriller

Like most people, I knew something about the famous characters in history and their accomplishments – from Boudica to Napoleon, Plato to Isaac Newton. All from different places in the world, and in time. What if there was a link, a common denominator that could explain their exploits? 

In my other life as a criminal defence barrister, my job is to persuade juries. To give them an interpretation of the facts that fits with my client’s case. It’s not easy, particularly when the evidence is stacked against the defendant. And of course, there is always prosecution counsel, presenting his or her own spin on the evidence. It’s not a perfect system, but the jury, in my opinion, gets it right 99.9% of the time.

There are similarities between the court process and writing a novel – can the writer persuade the reader to come on a journey through 100,000 words? When defending a trial, the case can be lost with one ill-judged question in cross-examination. With a novel, one illogical action by a character, or a clunky piece of dialogue and the author can lose the reader. This challenge goes to the heart of what I have tried to say with The Genesis Inquiry – not to persuade a jury, but the reader, of something extraordinary in our history. A whole new way of looking at the world. Something that I found more staggering, the deeper my research went. 

There are some remarkable patterns in the history of humanity, inevitably culminating in invasions and clashes of cultures, all based on some perceived difference between peoples. We still see it today.

When I was at school, I learnt about various religions, but not from the perspective of their similarities. It seems to be a human characteristic that we spend so much time focusing on the differences between us. Populations so often obsess over what they see as crucial distinctions between cultures and creeds. As I looked more deeply at ancient manuscripts and books, I learnt of so many forgotten links that join us together. The threads of history began to intertwine the further back I went. I had to unlearn what I had been taught and look at the evidence afresh, just as I would approach a new brief. 

A picture began to emerge that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I had the premise for an international thriller. Could there really be one undiscovered truth that links everything in our past, and provides the key to our future? Is there one critical place in time that set the tone for our epoch? A starting point. To my astonishment, I found such a place. I will leave it to the reader to decide if I’m right.

Who is Ella Blake?

The central characters in The Genesis Inquiry go on a life or death journey to uncover the truth about our past and ultimately, who we are and where we came from. 

The heroine, Ella Blake, is a top barrister with a PhD in history, but not the typical high-flyer one might expect. She’s battered and bruised from a long career of fighting trials. I wanted a modern-day protagonist that I recognised from my own experience of courts and robing rooms. Many criminal lawyers’ mental health is hanging by a thread. It’s only recently that the legal profession, like many other sectors, began to recognise and address issue of wellbeing. It’s not easy to manage the daily stresses and challenges of life in the courtroom.

Ella is a great lawyer who has given her life to her job, but at a cost - mental health, family relationships and more. Deeply flawed, but a good person with an innate sense of right and wrong. The dysfunctional relationship with her daughter, Lizzie, a headstrong student is another layer of conflict in the novel. 

The Genesis Inquiry is crime/mystery thriller but it’s also a story of redemption, of second chances, not just for Ella, but for all of us.

I hope you enjoy the ride…

The Genesis Inquiry by Olly Jarvis published by Hobeck Books (Out Now)

Is there one last undiscovered, great truth? A moment zero, a place in time that links all cultures and creeds? A revelation that will unite us all and change the way we see history forever. Brilliant but burnt-out barrister Ella Blake accepts an apparently simple brief: investigate the mysterious disappearance of an African American polymath from his rooms at Cambridge University. The Inquiry quickly becomes the greatest challenge of her life – solving the mystery of Genesis. Facing danger at every turn, can Ella find the answers to the riddles and clues left by the missing genius? Reunited with her estranged daughter, the Inquiry sends them on a quest across the world and through ancient texts. What is the secret that binds us all? Who is behind the dark forces that will stop at nothing to prevent the world from knowing the truth?

Olly Jarvis is a novelist and criminal defence barrister, originally from London but now based in Manchester. Drawing on his experiences he writes both fiction and non-fiction with a particular understanding of the pressures and excitement of life in the English criminal courtroom. His debut novel, Death By Dangerous was longlisted for the CWA 2016 Debut Dagger. He went on to write the acclaimed Jack Kowalski series, set in Manchester. Cut-throat Defence and Unconvicted. For more information about his books visit his website.

Olly is also the creator of The Crime Hub, a website that brings together the different mediums of crime fiction, true crime and the realities of the Criminal Justice System. Contributors include Ann Cleaves, Stephen Fry, Alfred Molina and many more. 

Based on A True Story by Kate Morgan

The words ‘based on true events’ always adds an extra frisson to dramas or films, especially those that involve that most notorious of crimes – murder.   While researching my book ‘Murder: The Biography’, I came across this collision of fact and fiction time and time again.  The recurring influence of these stories in dramas, books and films shows that our collective fascination with murder and murderers continued unabated.  It predates our contemporary obsession with true crime documentaries by several centuries.  In the Middle Ages, strolling minstrels composed and sang ‘moritats’ (‘murder ballads’) about infamous crimes.  These warbled morality tales were the earliest true crime documentaries, turning tales of murder into a macabre oral history, with a heavy dash of folklore to boot.

By the early years of the nineteenth century, the tradition of the murder ballad had evolved into depictions of grisly cases on the stage.  The 1817 murder of Mary Ashford in the countryside around Birmingham was a prime example.  Mary’s body was dredged from a pond early one spring morning; her assumed assailant Abraham Thornton was acquitted of her murder at trial and the case has never been officially solved.  Her death was the subject of inspired several stage plays, all of which leaned  heavily towards melodrama.  I didn’t have room to include the infamous Red Barn murder in the book, but in a similar vein, this 1827 shooting of Maria Marten in Suffolk inspired a cottage industry of novellas, plays and songs.  Like the Ashford case, the brutal killing of a young woman in a rural setting caught the public imagination and plenty of dramatic licence was used to fill in the gaps and translate the story to the stage.

Towards the end of the century, the burgeoning tabloid newspaper industry spotted the draw of crime stories and a new national obsession was born.  The Illustrated Police News was the go-to publication for true crime fans and I came across its lurid stories while researching cases from that era.  It’s coverage of the Whitechapel Murders in 1888 made it famous and the News’ depictions of Jack the Ripper’s victims are instantly recognisable even today.  The paper’s bloodthirsty coverage of the trial of Frederick Baker for the murder of eight year old Fanny Adams was a useful source on the case and a revealing insight into contemporary attitudes to murder and its depiction in the press.  In another mingling of fact and fiction, historian Peter Ackroyd quoted apocryphal coverage from the Illustrated Police News in his novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, to add period atmosphere to his story of a string of brutal murders in East London, inspired by the Ripper. 

In the twentieth century, our tastes for true crime became a little more nuanced and some controversial cases would cast long shadows, both in society and in pop culture as well.  The book looks in some detail at the 1950s murder convictions of Ruth Ellis, Derek Bentley and Timothy Evans; and there was no shortage of material, both factual and dramatic, to plough through on each of these cases.  All three were executed for murder with heavy question marks looming over their convictions.  Evans was wrongly scapegoated for murders at Rillington Place in London, which were actually the work of serial killer John Christie; Bentley was put to death for the murder of a policeman despite the fact that he had not fired the fatal shot; and Ellis hanged for the shooting of her abusive boyfriend outside a Hampstead pub.  The cases were all the subject of films – 10 Rillington Place, Let Him Have It and Dance with a Stranger respectively, each of which is a minor gem of British filmmaking.  The contentious executions at the heart of each case meant that hangman Albert Pierrepoint made a cameo appearance in all three of the stories, and I read plenty about the amiable executioner, who ran a pub when he wasn’t presiding over executions.  He finally got his own biopic in 2005, when he was played by Timothy Spall in the film Pierrepoint. 

With her platinum blonde hair and a Smith & Wesson clutched in her manicured hand, Ellis herself could have sprung from the pages of a noir fiction novel.  Indeed, her case caught the attention of American novelist Raymond Chandler, creator of private eye Philip Marlowe, who was in London at the time of her trial.  He was sufficiently moved by the death sentence to write to the London Evening Standard to protest at the savagery of the English courts in hanging a woman. 

With a topic as big as murder, it’s impossible to fit in every case I came across, even some of the really juicy ones.  With regret, I had to bypass the cautionary tale of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters, the lovers who were both executed for murder in 1923, after Bywaters had fatally stabbed Thompson’s husband.  I’d already decided to use the sad story of Derek Bentley to cover the tricky issue of joint enterprise posed by the case.  But the glamorous Thompson and her lodger turned lover Bywaters have inspired a wealth of crime fiction – Agatha Christie alluded to the case in a couple of books and Dorothy L. Sayers’ novel The Documents in the Case draws heavily on the murder.  More recently, the influence of the story can be seen in Sarah Waters’ The Paying Guests.

My book is very much rooted in the factual, exploring the history of the law of homicide and the real-life cases that have shaped it down the centuries.  But I found that these fictionalised accounts can tell their own stories about infamous murders and more widely, about our obsession with crime in all its forms.  After all, the scariest stories are always the ones that are true. 

Murder: The Biography by Kate Morgan (Harper Collins) Out Now

Murder: The Biography is a gruesome and utterly captivating portrait of the legal history of murder.  The stories and the people involved in the history of murder are stranger, darker and more compulsive than any crime fiction.  There's Richard Parker, the cannibalized cabin boy whose death at the hands of his hungry crewmates led the Victorian courts to decisively outlaw a defence of necessity to murder. Dr Percy Bateman, the incompetent GP whose violent disregard for his patient changed the law on manslaughter. Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in England in the 1950s, played a crucial role in changes to the law around provocation in murder cases. And Archibald Kinloch, the deranged Scottish aristocrat whose fratricidal frenzy paved the way for the defence of diminished responsibility. These, and many more, are the people - victims, killers, lawyers and judges, who unwittingly shaped the history of that most grisly and storied of laws.

 

Kate Morgan in Conversation

 

Murder: The Biography by Kate Morgan (Mudlark

Murder: The Biography is a gruesome and utterly captivating portrait of the legal history of murder. The stories and the people involved in the history of murder are stranger, darker and more compulsive than any crime fiction. There's Richard Parker, the cannibalized cabin boy whose death at the hands of his hungry crewmates led the Victorian courts to decisively outlaw a defence of necessity to murder. Dr Percy Bateman, the incompetent GP whose violent disregard for his patient changed the law on manslaughter. Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in England in the 1950s, played a crucial role in changes to the law around provocation in murder cases. And Archibald Kinloch, the deranged Scottish aristocrat whose fratricidal frenzy paved the way for the defence of diminished responsibility. These, and many more, are the people - victims, killers, lawyers and judges, who unwittingly shaped the history of that most grisly and storied of laws. 

Join lawyer and writer Kate Morgan on a dark and macabre journey as she explores the strange stories and mysterious cases that have contributed to UK murder law. The big corporate killers; the vengeful spouses; the sloppy doctors; the abused partners; the shoddy employers; each story a crime and each crime a precedent that has contributed to the law's dark, murky and, at times, shocking standing.

Contact Chiltern Bookshops for information about the event. Tickets can be bought here.

My Name is ..............

My name is Gary Bell and I’m a barrister. I haven’t always been a barrister. My life has gone through many phases. I started off as a coal miner, following in the footsteps of my father. Next I did a succession of jobs – apprentice mechanic, fork lift truck driver; bricklayer; pork pie production line worker and fireman, before getting in trouble with the police for fraud and going to prison for a spell. I was pretty useless and feral. A petty criminal and football hooligan incapable of holding down a job. My father had abandoned the family years before. My mother had sadly died of cancer. I was estranged from my siblings, sleeping rough during the last year of my teens. Into my twenties it all changed. I'd tried to be like Frank Sinatra and do it my way, but I came up short. I realised that to make anything of myself in life I needed an education. 

I went to college to do my O and A levels, then onto University to read law. After that it was bar school, pupillage, tenancy and thirty years at the bar. There are several types of barrister. My type isn’t the most lucrative, but it’s the most exciting, crime. They’ve yet to make a TV series about ‘Rumpole of the Chancery Courts’ or ‘Kavanagh Tax QC’. That’s another important bit. Only around 14% of barristers become QC’s. In crime that means you get to deal with the most serious cases, the most gruesome murders or serious frauds. I was fortunate enough to be appointed a QC in 2012. I’ve always had itchy feet. Always wanted to squeeze every last drop from this short time we spend on earth. During my life as a barrister I’ve also become a qualified pilot, was an award-winning stand-up comedian, have written for several newspapers and have a column in the Spectator, presented my own TV show on BBC 1 and now I’ve turned my hand to crime writing. 

After the success of my autobiography, ‘Animal QC’ (Animal being my football hooligan nickname and QC my current title) I was approached by a film producer friend, Pete Czernin, who put me in touch with a literary agent Eugenie Furniss. She introduced me to another agent, Rory Scarfe. Rory had a brilliant young  writer on his books, Scott Kershaw, and he suggested that Scott and I collaborate to write a crime thriller. We met and got on famously and the net result is our first book, Beyond Reasonable Doubt. The second book, County Lines, is currently being written. 

The principle character, Elliott Rook, is loosely based on me. I had wanted him to be dashing and thin, but Scott kept me grounded insisting he was shambling and fat. After thirty years at the criminal bar, being involved in cases incorporating just about every crime from shoplifting to mass murder, I’ve a wealth of material to weave into the Rook stories based on real cases. Most of the anecdotes and scenarios in the books actually happened. Only the names have changed. 

The Bar is a fantastic profession. You very rarely work in the same court from case to case and it’s brilliant walking into a random robing room and encountering old friends you’ve known and worked with for decades. It’s not like the public perception, an ancient, stuffy profession. In my life I’ve been sacked as a fireman, a bricklayer and a fork lift truck driver at Asda for having a criminal conviction and therefore being too dishonest to put out fires, lay bricks or load pallets onto lorries, but when I applied to become a barrister, having declared my conviction, the message from my Inn, the Inner Temple, was that everyone was entitled to a second chance in life. 

But there is still much to be done. The Bar is working hard on diversity, ensuring we have more BAME and socially deprived barristers. Rook’s sidekick, Zara, illustrates the struggles to become a barrister. She is a gay, dual heritage (Pakistani and English) woman from a working class Midlands’ family struggling to make her way at the bar. 

It is a struggle to become a barrister. Not only is it a struggle it’s an unequal one, particularly for those without money or connections. I had to sleep rough in Lincoln’s Inn Fields for a while in my early days as an unpaid pupil barrister. But the greater the struggle the more the sense of achievement when you overcome barriers to success. My message to anyone with a dream is simple. If it’s an uneven playing field (which it will be) and therefore much harder for you than for others, don’t moan about it, try harder. If you have the ability and determination you’ll succeed, and that success will taste much sweeter than if it was given to you on a plate. 

Beyond Reasonable Doubtby Gary Bell is published by Raven Books on 13 June.

Elliot Rook QC is one of the greatest barristers of his generation. He is also a complete fraud. Elliot Rook is the epitome of a highly successful, old Etonian QC. Or so everyone believes. In fact, he is an ex-petty criminal with a past that he has spent decades keeping secret. Until now... An unidentified young woman of Middle Eastern origin has been found murdered on the outskirts of Rook's home town. Billy Barber - a violent football hooligan and white-supremacist - is accused of her murder. Barber insists that Rook must defend him. If Rook refuses, Barber will expose him, bringing crashing to the ground the life and career that Rook has spent his life building. 

Call for Papers: Frankenstein: A Multidisciplinary Conference 2018

Thursday 14th June 2018

Northumbria University Law School and Department of Social Sciences (in collaboration with the Crime Studies Network) is pleased to announce a multidisciplinary conference to celebrate the bicentenary of the first publication of Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley.

Call for Papers:

Law and literature, criminology and humanities papers and presentations from established academics and postgraduate students are particularly welcome. Other disciplines reflecting medical, scientific, historical, political or social aspects of the novel or of its many realisations in film, other media and the performing arts are strongly encouraged.

As well as papers on Frankenstein itself and related literary works we welcome reflections on the themes of the novel, such as irresponsible uses of scientific knowledge, the creation of ‘monsters’ through emotional neglect and social stigma, and miscarriages of justice (as in the case of Shelley’s Justine Moritz).

We will also consider papers and presentations on related themes if you care to propose them.

Please send a short (150) word abstract to: bl.frankenstein.conference@northumbria.ac.uk

Closing date for submissions is 1 February 2018.