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.

Sleep, Dreams and Memory - The Inspiration for Under My Skin by Lisa Unger

There’s almost always a single germ for each of my novels. A moment, a line of poetry, a news story, a piece of junk mail. What happens next is -- a bit odd. I start to hear a voice, or a couple of voices. And these voices draw me through my narrative. I don’t have an outline. I don’t know who is going to show up each day or what they are going to do. And I certainly don’t know how the book is going to end.

For UNDER MY SKIN, it wasn’t a single moment, as there often is. It was something.

Carl Jung wrote, a phrase that’s been kicking around in my head for a while:

“Between the dreams of day and night, there is not so great a difference.”

It’s a short sentence, but as with many Jungian quotes there are layers of meaning here. The dreams of day and night – what did he mean by this?

We spend an average of 229,000 hours asleep during our lifetime. That’s more time than we spend eating, working, or driving – more than a third of our lives sleeping and dreaming. Still we’re convinced that our waking life is more real than whatever it is we’re experiencing when we close our eyes at night.

Between those two worlds – the waking and the dreaming worlds – is a doorway called hypnagogia. Maybe you haven’t heard that word before, but you’ve definitely experienced it. It’s the threshold moment where we have those bizarre dreams – we’re falling, or a bear leaps out from the shadows – and we’re startled awake. This connection between the adjacent worlds of waking and dreaming has been a point of wonder for me, as are other states where perception is altered.

For example, while I was researching another of my novels CRAZY LOVE YOU, I interviewed a clinical psychiatrist about fugue states and black outs. I had always thought that black outs were the result of repressed memory, or memories that got buried so deep that you no longer have access to them.  But he said no. That black outs are ultimately a failure of cognition, that at a certain point in intoxication, we stop taking information in altogether. Addiction alters our perception of reality.

And then, of course, there’s trauma –which is most certainly a brain event, as well as a psychological and emotional one. And one I’ve explored in other novels. This too is a state where our memory, our perception might be altered. I was speaking to a former Navy Seal who works with veterans suffering from the after-effects of blast and PTSD. And he talked about the spiral some of these soldiers find themselves in – untreated PTSD, which can lead to sleep disruption, which can lead to addiction, which unravels the support system of family and friends. In this state, reality starts to unravel to devastating result.

So, it wasn’t one of these things, but all of them I think that led me to start hearing the voice of Poppy Lang. In her journey, I wanted to explore the way the psyche copes with grief and trauma, the twin demons of addiction and sleep disruption, and how our own perception and memories can be as slippery and unreliable as our dreams.

Under My Skin by Lisa Unger published by HQ on 18th October 2018

Her husband’s killer maybe closer than she thinks… It’s been a year since Poppy’s husband, Jack, was brutally murdered during his morning run. She’s trying to move on but what happened that morning is still haunting her. And now she’s sure she is being followed… Sleep deprived and secretly self-medicating, Poppy is unable to separate her dreams from reality. She feels like she’s losing her mind. But what if she’s not? What if she’s actually remembering what really happened? What if her husband wasn’t who he said he was? And what if his killer is still watching her…

A Reason to Write by Matt Johnson

I’ve spoken many times on how a form of therapy that included writing helped with my treatment for PTSD. And I’ve explained that it was a comment made by my counsellor that first planted the idea in my mind that I might write a book.

What I’ve never explained is why I agreed with the suggestion to the degree that I was sufficiently motivated to go along with the suggestion.

PC Blakelock

To explain, I need to take you back to 1985. I was a PC in those days, and had just passed the promotion examination to become a sergeant. I was posted to Tottenham and Hornsey police stations for a short period to work as an ‘acting sergeant’. I met a sergeant called David Pengelly. David introduced me to some of his community beat officers, we called them ‘homebeats’ in those days, including PCs Keith Blakelock and Richard Coombes.

I left Tottenham when my course started. As I did so, I was aware that trouble was brewing in the local area. Mobile car patrols had been stopped on certain estates and foot patrolling in those area was only being done by well-known local PCs and, even then, they were always in pairs. It seemed that the area was a powder keg just waiting to explode.

On 5th October 1985, the Broadwater Farm riots started. David Pengelly was deployed with several of his homebeat officers into the fray. They were ill-prepared, inadequately equipped and completely unaware of what they were going into.

That evening, in the darkness and confusion on an estate they were unfamiliar with, they

Police during rioting on the Broadwater Estate 

were stoned, petrol bombed and, eventually their position was over-run and they were isolated. Keith Blakelock fell to the ground and was set upon by the rioters. Armed with ridiculously inadequate wooden truncheons, PC Coombes and others attempted to rescue PC Blakelock while Sergeant Pengelly fought alone with the rioters to try and buy some time for his colleagues.

There were many other police officers at Broadwater Farm that night. They were also ill prepared for what they faced. Many were injured, all were traumatised.

In the aftermath of the riot, an enquiry team was set up and all officers who had been present were told to write statements including as much information as they could about what had happened to them, what they had seen and any evidence they could include to help bring rioters to justice.

In many cases, the statements produced by the officers were woefully inadequate. Often they said no more than “I went with my serial to an estate in Tottenham. We stood behind plastic shields while hundreds of people tried to kill us with petrol bombs, knives and rocks.”

I was given the job of obtaining better statements from these officers. It wasn’t easy. Many simply didn’t want to talk about it, let alone write a statement.

I remember one particular PC, I’ll call him Andy. Andy was in his early twenties. In the months that followed the riot, Andy steadfastly refused to write a full statement. He was interviewed by senior officers and even threatened with disciplinary action but nothing could persuade him. He had started drinking, often to excess and was regularly late turning up for work. He seemed to have an ‘attitude problem’ was insubordinate to senior officers and surly. One day, he was arrested for drink-driving. He was disciplined and sacked. Nobody missed him.

I forgot about Andy until many years later. I was undergoing counselling for PTSD and I began to realise that young Andy had been displaying similar symptoms to my own. I hadn’t recognised it. Nothing was done for them by way of counselling or post-trauma care. They were simply left to fend for themselves.

I promised myself then that I would do my level best to make amends for that failure.

But I knew I had neither the power or the influence to bring about change, to try and help bring about change. It occurred to me that whereas people might not be inclined to pick up and read a book on PTSD, they might be prepared to pick up and read a thriller.

And so … I began to write.