In the St Hilda's Spotlight:- Trevor Wood

 

Name:-Trevor Wood

Job:- Author and volunteer at People's Kitchen

Website:- https://trevorwoodauthor.co.uk

Twitter:- @TrevorWoodWrite

Introduction:-

Trevor Wood is the author of a trilogy of novels set in Newcastle. The first novel in the series The Man on The Street was published in 2020 and was nominated and won the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger in 2020 as well as the CrimeFest Specsavers Debut Crime Novel Award. It was also shortlisted for the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2021 and was a Theakston's New Blood Author in 2020 as well as being a Guardian Crime Book of the Year. The sequel, One Way Street was published in 2021. The final book in the trilogy Dead End Street featuring Jimmy Mullen was published in 2022

Current book? (This can either be the current book that you are reading or writing)

One of the joys of being part of the crime writing community is that I get advance copies of a lot of new books and I’m currently reading a proof of Nadine Mathieson’s The Binding Room. I loved The Jigsaw Man and am happy to report that the sequel is just as good if not better!

Favourite book

I could probably give you a different answer every day for a year. But today I’m going to say American Tabloid by James Ellroy.

Which two characters would you invite to dinner and why?

Let’s get Tilly from Mike Craven’s The Puppet Show (and all its sequels) and Duchess from Chris Whitaker’s We Begin At The End round for a chat. I think they’ll find each other fascinating. 

How do you relax?

I’m a huge music fan and love to cook so I like combining the two by sticking on some new tunes while I’m cooking up a storm in the kitchen. 

Which book do you wish you had written and why?

It would have to be Killing Floor. It’s a terrific book but it would also mean that I’d be Lee Child and that would be pretty cool

What would you say to your younger self if you were just starting out as a writer.

Wait until you’re older, you don’t know enough about anything

How would you describe your series character? 

Jimmy Mullen is a homeless veteran suffering from PTSD. He’s not an easy man to get to know but once you have you’ll find he’s fiercely loyal to his friends. If he lets you in you can be sure he’s got your back, no matter what problems that causes him. 

With Town and Country: Green Lanes to Mean Streets being the theme at St Hilda's this year, Where is your favourite town and where is your favourite country? Why have you chosen these?

It’s got to be the Toon! I fell in love with Newcastle on my first visit, over 30 years ago, and that love has never faltered in all the time I’ve lived there. It’s a warm, welcoming and vibrant city that rewards those who embrace its playful spirit ten-fold. It’s the first place I ever felt was home. 

My favourite country has to be Canada. My daughter is doing a Phd in Vancouver so we’re spending the whole summer there this year (I’m returning a few days earlier than planned specifically to come to St Hilda’s). We first went there around 20 years ago and have been returning on a fairly regular basis ever since. I love the diversity of its cities and the wide open spaces elsewhere, it’s truly spectacular.

What are you looking forward to at St Hilda's?

As always, it’s meeting my fellow crime writers and our brilliant readers. I love to make new friends and am sure I’m going to come away from St Hilda’s with a whole bunch of them.

Dead End Street by Trevor Wood. (Quercus Publishing)

A group of vigilantes are carrying out a campaign of harassment against the homeless, hounding them both verbally and physically to get them off the streets. Jimmy Mullen is approached by his friend Gadge, who wants to confront the people behind it but Jimmy has finally got his life back on track. He's working at a hostel for 18 to 25-year-olds and he's reluctant to get involved in anything dodgy.Gadge decides to go it alone but is attacked by two of the vigilantes. The police find him unconscious in an alley, covered in blood. Problem is, there's a dead body in the alley too and it's his blood that Gadge is covered in. He's also got the murder weapon in his hand.Convinced that Gadge has been set up, and feeling guilty that he didn't back him up in the first place, Jimmy returns to the streets to try and find out who's behind his friend's difficulties. Unfortunately, he's about to discover that Gadge has a lot of enemies to choose from.

Information about 2022 St Hilda's College Crime Fiction Weekend and how to book tickets can be found here.

Trevor Woods on Fathers and Daughters

My first two crime novels, The Man on the Street and One Way Street – coming to a bookshop near you on June 10th – are both heart-rending tales of the complex relationships between fathers and daughters. 

Wait. Rewind, I hear you say. I thought they were gritty thrillers set in Newcastle’s homeless community, featuring Jimmy Mullen, a PTSD-suffering, veteran living on the streets, who gets dragged into solving crimes the police aren’t interested in. Full disclosure: they’re a bit of both.

When I first started writing the book that eventually became The Man on the Street (no one but me liked my working title When a Fire Starts to Burn) I had no idea that Jimmy even had a daughter. Kate just popped up, almost fully-formed in Chapter 8, screaming for more page time. My characters have a habit of doing that, sneaky little bastards they are. My gut feeling is that Kate was jealous of another fictional young woman, Carrie, whose own relationship with Jimmy begins when she posts an appeal in the local paper to find a missing person. Yes, you’ve guessed it – her father. Jimmy thinks he saw the absent dad having a violent argument by the River Tyne that ended badly and contacts the young woman to tell her what he believes happened. 

You’d think that would be enough fathers and daughters for one book but pretty soon another pair make an appearance, then another. It’s like a down-and-dirty version of Modern Family. Even when Jimmy follows a man he thinks might be a murderer to the park, the suspect’s daughter has to make an appearance.

The young girl ran over to her dad and whispered in his ear.

‘You can ask him yourself, you know,’ he said.

The girl thought about it then shook her head. 

‘Sometimes she takes ‘Don’t talk to strangers’ a little too far,’ the dad said. ‘She wants to know what your dog’s called.’

‘Dog,’ Jimmy said. Seeing the girl’s puzzled face, he reiterated: ‘That’s his name, his name is Dog.’

Never work with children and animals. They say ‘write what you know’ but this was getting out of hand. (The amateur psychologists amongst you will be guessing that I’ve got a daughter and it’s a fair cop - just like DS Burns in the books. Boom boom.) For the record we did have a great relationship but now she’s insufferable, swanning around claiming that she’s my muse and demanding a place in the acknowledgements.

It was a relief to move away from the unexpected family dynamics of The Man on the Street and start working on the sequel, One Way Street, where Jimmy gets involved in tracking down a rogue batch of Spice that has caused the deaths of several runaway teenagers. I mean, I knew that Kate would probably elbow her way back in again and find a way to make herself useful – by starting a job in an Anti-Social Behaviour Unit for instance, but that was ok, your characters’ relationships should move on, shouldn’t they? And if it’s good enough for Harry Bosch…

At least I had the suspiciously helpful vicar Reverend Cooper and the unscrupulous and probably corrupt councillor Bob Pearson to drag things back into the dark underworld of inner-city crime. But who are those young girls living with those two potential villains, insisting they’re now vegans, dressing inappropriately and complaining about suggested curfews? Actually, those issues aren’t in the book, just in my house. It’s easy to get mixed up.

Things took a turn towards the surreal when my real life daughter, Becca, started to do things that the fictional daughter in the books had already done – starting relationships that were strangely similar to Kate’s, adopting attitudes that mirrored her fictional counterpart. Life imitating art, so to speak. Either I was developing Nostradamus-style prescience, which, judging by my disastrous Fantasy Football predictions, definitely wasn’t the case or I was being played. I strongly suspect the latter but was sorely tempted to make Kate the first female leader of the Labour Party in book 3 just in case I really had inadvertently discovered my superpower like some elderly Misfit.

The good news is that the Jimmy Mullen books have always been intended as a trilogy so this family saga has an end point. I really couldn’t see how I could credibly have a homeless protagonist tripping over bodies every year as if he lived in Midsomer - and plans for a new standalone novel are already underway. The pitch – a fifteen-year-old girl is forced to go on the run when she witnesses her father commit a shocking act of violence. Here we go again…

*For the record I’ve been asked to point out that Becca Wood is much better looking and more intelligent than Kate Mullen (She also swears more, particularly if she’s not front and centre in the aforementioned acknowledgements.)

One Way Street by Trevor Wood (Quercus Publishing) Out Now

The word on the street is that a rogue batch of Spice - the zombie drug sweeping the inner cities - is to blame, but when one of Jimmy's few close friends is caught up in the carnage, loyalty compels him to find out what's really going on. One Way Street sees the welcome return of Jimmy Mullen, the homeless, PTSD-suffering, veteran as he attempts to rebuild his life following the events in The Man on the Street. As his probation officer constantly reminds him: all he needs to do is keep out of trouble. Sadly for him, trouble seems to have a habit of tracking Jimmy down.

Crime Story February – April 2020, Alphabetti Theatre, Newcastle

A series of events for crime fiction fans will take place at Alphabetti Theatre, Newcastle this spring, bringing together people from the two very different worlds of fact and fiction.

Across the three events, celebrated writers AA Dhand, Oliver Harris, Jessica Moor, Judith O’Reilly and Mim Skinner will be paired with experts who will offer unique insight into how contemporary issues are dealt with in real life.

Experts taking part in Crime Story include three Northumbria University academics - ​Dr Nicci MacLeod, a forensic linguist, who has written on women in the criminal justice system; ​Professor Mike Rowe, a criminologist who specialises in policing culture and reforms; and​ Professor Lars Holmquist, an internationally-leading researcher in human-computer interaction.

Crime Story has taken place three times as a biennial festival, presented in partnership by New Writing North and Northumbria University's ​Institute of Humanities, with support from BBC Newcastle. A podcast inspired by Crime Story is now being developed by BBC Newcastle and is due to launch on BBC Sounds in Summer 2020.

​Katy Shaw, Professor of Contemporary Writings at Northumbria University, said: “Crime Story unites research excellence from across our university – in Literature and Creative Writing, Criminology, AI and Policing Studies – to offer innovative approaches to the ways in which writers craft the crimes of our times. The involvement of BBC Sounds means that audience members at our live events will have the opportunity to take part in something that reaches far beyond the realms of the region, and taps into global issues of crime and technology today.”

Claire Malcolm, Founding Chief Executive of New Writing North said: “It's fantastic to be building on our relationship with Northumbria University and BBC Newcastle to expand the Crime Story events in new ways and to reach new audiences with our unique perspective on the facts behind the fictions.”

The first event of this year's festival takes place this Saturday 29 February, 2pm-3pm at Alphabetti Theatre and will feature author AA Dhand, Northumbria's Professor Mike Rowe and DS Mick Paterson, a detective in Northumbria Police for 30 years, where he heads up the Complex Case Unit.  The other dates are Saturday 28 March and Saturday 25 April 2020.

The event will be chaired by Professor Katy Shaw.

For more information, a full programme and to book tickets, visit ​www.crimestory.co.uk