Lina Areklew on researching her crime novels

When friends and family start asking you about the legal system and police work, you know your research obsession has officially reached a whole new level.

When I first began writing, research was the part I found most intimidating. But also, the most exciting. I used to pore over my fellow crime writers’ books, making notes on the sections that dealt with police work, so that I could later check whether they were accurate or not. When I started writing my first novel, I realised that facts are not the most important thing in a crime novel. The average reader does not know exactly how a DNA test is carried out, or what post-mortem fluid looks like. Or perhaps they do – those who, like me, binge on true crime series and podcasts – but most people do not read crime fiction as if it were a textbook. That would drain the story of its tension.

Even so, it became something of a calling for me to try to recreate the work of police officers and forensic pathologists as accurately as possible. It helped, of course, that I already had a somewhat unhealthy fascination with emergency services long before I started writing, but taking the step of actually approaching someone and asking for an interview felt enormous. Just the thought of saying, “Hello, my name is Lina Areklew and I want to be a writer – could I interview you?” was enough to make me blush.

Through my mother, however, I was put in touch with an acquaintance of an acquaintance who worked as a police officer in Örnsköldsvik. He had been involved in the investigation of one of the most high-profile murder cases in the county’s history: a sixteen-year-old girl who disappeared after getting off the bus at the wrong stop. When she vanished, she was about the same age as I was at the time. She was later found raped and murdered in a wooded area not far from where she had disappeared. The perpetrator was convicted in the district court but acquitted on appeal. It would take more than twenty- five years before DNA technology finally caught up, allowing the case to be reopened and the man to be convicted of murder.

But I knew none of this when I walked into the police station with my dictaphone Dictaphone in hand. I had asked was expecting to be granted for half an hour to ask a few questions about what it was like to work as a murder investigator and to have a look around the station. I walked out six hours later, dizzy and overwhelmed by everything I had learned. Above all, I was more motivated than ever to write a crime novel that genuinely reflected the reality of police work.

I buried myself in research, made more contacts and kept digging. I quickly realised that many – I would say all – people who work within the justice system are immensely proud of what they do. Many want to share their experiences. With the rise of social media, communication became easier, and research evolved into new friendships.

This may sound insensitive, but one of the most memorable conversations I have ever had took place over dinner with a forensic pathologist. As we ate Carpaccio, we discussed what a person’s skin looks like after repeated stab wounds. I’m not sure the people sitting next to us in the restaurant found the conversation quite as engaging.

There have also been many occasions when research has been heavy and difficult. My main character, Fredrik Fröding, survived the horrific sinking of the MS Estonia but lost his entire family in the process. His fate is constantly present throughout my books, and it was extremely important to me to portray what happened that night – when so many people lost their lives in Sweden’s worst ferry disaster – as accurately as possible. I ordered the government accident report, devoured every book written about the catastrophe, and watched deeply disturbing dive footage from the wreck, filmed just weeks after the sinking.

I have always tried to approach that aspect of my writing with as much respect as possible. This is a wound in the Swedish collective soul, and not something one should trample on in order to create entertainment in the form of crime fiction . I believe I have succeeded in that. The inclusion of the disaster in my books has come up in discussion at many In all the appearances at writing events, and I have made where this has been discussed, no one has ever come up to me to say they felt hurt by my portrayal. Quite the opposite.

My research has taken me to some truly extraordinary places and introduced me to remarkable people. In addition to the most obvious locations – libraries and police stations – I have trudged through metre-deep snow to visit fictional murder sites, test-driven boat routes, harassed my teenage children with embarrassing questions, visited people’s homes out on island of Ulvön, toured a forensic station , gone caving, and while working on my new series, due to be released in autumn 2026, I spent a week working at a funeral home. That is something I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

My fascination with death has always meant that I feel no fear of it as a phenomenon, and it was deeply moving to meet people who, just like those within the justice system, showed such immense professional pride. I was allowed into a world where respect was one of the guiding principles. I saw the other side of the spectacular murders we writers so casually describe. I can honestly say that if I were not an author, funeral director would be the profession I would choose.

Over the years though, I have also learned a great deal about writing as a craft. As mentioned, it is impossible to portray everything exactly as it is in real life. That would be make some tedious reading. But I hope that through thorough research I have managed to depict the justice system in a way that makes the people who work within it feel genuine and human. That being said, no one is flawless. I have stumbled at times and have no doubt described both events and procedures in ways that have made some police officer somewhere clench their fists in their pockets .

Still, I can proudly say that the only time a reader has ever stopped me in the street wanting to have a serious conversation about my research was regarding the colour of the fence outside his house, as described in one of my books. I had written that it was white, when in fact it was green.

That, I can live with.

In The Dark by Lina Areklaw (Canelo Crime)

A four-year-old girl has disappeared from her home. And then more family members vanish. Detective Sofia Hjortn is in a race against time to find them as she and her colleagues desperately search a snow-covered rnskldsvik. Meanwhile, Sofia has other problems to deal with. Heavily pregnant and balancing work and a difficult relationship with her boyfriend, she is at breaking point. Can she make it to the light at the end of the tunnel?

Teresa Solana on Black Storms

“Black storms shake the sky/ Dark clouds blind our eyes…” are the opening lines of The Varsovian, a song of Polish origins the Spanish anarchist movement adopted as an anthem at the end of the nineteenth century. The novel’s title refers to the first line of this song that is entitled To the barricades in Catalan and Spanish.

At the start of the twentieth century, the Basque Country and Catalonia were the only territories in Spain that had experienced an industrial revolution that created a wealthy bourgeoise and an organized working-class. The development of the Catalan textile industry meant the workers’ movement became influential, and it was divided as it was in the rest of Europe: at a time when workers faced quasi-slave conditions in factories with long, exhausting days and wages that condemned them to extreme poverty; socialists, communists and anarchist couldn’t agree on how to achieve a better, more just society, and what should be the role of the state. 

The anarchists were prominent in workers’ struggles in Catalonia in the first decades of the twentieth century and during the Civil War (1936-1939). Many of them, like the grandfather of Norma Forester, the detective at the centre of the novel, were young idealists who rejected the Stalinist model that had triumphed in the Soviet Union and who, when war broke out, came to Spain from different parts of Europe to fight for the Republic in the International Brigades. Black Storms isn’t a historical novel, but it does focus on the open wounds of a war that ended with a dictatorship that lasted forty years and allowed a dictator to die in his bed without being tried for any of his crimes.

In July 1936, General Francisco Franco initiated a military coup with a view to overthrowing the Republican government that had been legally elected to power. The war, that Franco extended unnecessarily in order to physically exterminate the Republicans, as pointed out by historians like Paul Preston, lasted three very long years and opened the way to a dictatorship and one-party state. They were grim years, presided over by the khaki uniforms of the military and the black soutanes of priests, while the Europe that had defeated Hitler and Mussolini in the Second World War, fearful of the advance of communism, looked the other way and left the population of Spain to suffer the atrocities wrought by the fascists.

After the dictator’s death in 1975, the period known as the Transition began, based on an agreement to re-establish democracy reached by those who had been committed to the dictatorship and a good number of the parties and organisations that had fought against it. The Transition implied a peaceful transfer of power in exchange for letting the crimes of the Franco regime go unpunished; it pretended to heal a wound that has remained open ever since. In 2007, pressure from the Associations for the Victims of Francoism and the need to bring justice for all those who suffered persecution or violence during and after the civil war led to the passing of a law in Spain that is popularly known as the Law of Historical Memory, a law that at the same time helped to bring to light the crimes committed by Franco’s regime.

This is the context in which Black Storms unfolds, a novel that begins with the murder of a professor of contemporary history and specialist in the civil war. The investigation of the murder, led by a detective who happens to be the granddaughter of a man from Manchester who fought with the International Brigades and was executed in Barcelona at the end of the civil war, takes place in years when Spanish society was debating whether it would be better to forget the past and turn the page, or whether it was necessary to revisit that past, however painful that may be, in order to bring justice to the victims and call to account and name their executioners. It is a debate that remains open in a Spain, where many families are still looking for their dead in unnamed mass graves by roadsides and where streets and squares still carry the names of the fascists who murdered them. And it is a debate that is more necessary than ever in Europe at a time when the black clouds of fascism are returning to haunt the continent. “Black storms shake the sky/ Dark clouds blind our eyes…” are the opening lines of The Varsovian, a song of Polish origins the Spanish anarchist movement adopted as an anthem at the end of the nineteenth century. The novel’s title refers to the first line of this song that is entitled To the barricades in Catalan and Spanish.

At the start of the twentieth century, the Basque Country and Catalonia were the only territories in Spain that had experienced an industrial revolution that created a wealthy bourgeoise and an organized working-class. The development of the Catalan textile industry meant the workers’ movement became influential, and it was divided as it was in the rest of Europe: at a time when workers faced quasi-slave conditions in factories with long, exhausting days and wages that condemned them to extreme poverty; socialists, communists and anarchist couldn’t agree on how to achieve a better, more just society, and what should be the role of the state. 

The anarchists were prominent in workers’ struggles in Catalonia in the first decades of the twentieth century and during the Civil War (1936-1939). Many of them, like the grandfather of Norma Forester, the detective at the centre of the novel, were young idealists who rejected the Stalinist model that had triumphed in the Soviet Union and who, when war broke out, came to Spain from different parts of Europe to fight for the Republic in the International Brigades. Black Storms isn’t a historical novel, but it does focus on the open wounds of a war that ended with a dictatorship that lasted forty years and allowed a dictator to die in his bed without being tried for any of his crimes.

In July 1936, General Francisco Franco initiated a military coup with a view to overthrowing the Republican government that had been legally elected to power. The war, that Franco extended unnecessarily in order to physically exterminate the Republicans, as pointed out by historians like Paul Preston, lasted three very long years and opened the way to a dictatorship and one-party state. They were grim years, presided over by the khaki uniforms of the military and the black soutanes of priests, while the Europe that had defeated Hitler and Mussolini in the Second World War, fearful of the advance of communism, looked the other way and left the population of Spain to suffer the atrocities wrought by the fascists.

After the dictator’s death in 1975, the period known as the Transition began, based on an agreement to re-establish democracy reached by those who had been committed to the dictatorship and a good number of the parties and organisations that had fought against it. The Transition implied a peaceful transfer of power in exchange for letting the crimes of the Franco regime go unpunished; it pretended to heal a wound that has remained open ever since. In 2007, pressure from the Associations for the Victims of Francoism and the need to bring justice for all those who suffered persecution or violence during and after the civil war led to the passing of a law in Spain that is popularly known as the Law of Historical Memory, a law that at the same time helped to bring to light the crimes committed by Franco’s regime.

This is the context in which Black Storms unfolds, a novel that begins with the murder of a professor of contemporary history and specialist in the civil war. The investigation of the murder, led by a detective who happens to be the granddaughter of a man from Manchester who fought with the International Brigades and was executed in Barcelona at the end of the civil war, takes place in years when Spanish society was debating whether it would be better to forget the past and turn the page, or whether it was necessary to revisit that past, however painful that may be, in order to bring justice to the victims and call to account and name their executioners. It is a debate that remains open in a Spain, where many families are still looking for their dead in unnamed mass graves by roadsides and where streets and squares still carry the names of the fascists who murdered them. And it is a debate that is more necessary than ever in Europe at a time when the black clouds of fascism are returning to haunt the continent. “Black storms shake the sky/ Dark clouds blind our eyes…” are the opening lines of The Varsovian, a song of Polish origins the Spanish anarchist movement adopted as an anthem at the end of the nineteenth century. The novel’s title refers to the first line of this song that is entitled To the barricades in Catalan and Spanish.

At the start of the twentieth century, the Basque Country and Catalonia were the only territories in Spain that had experienced an industrial revolution that created a wealthy bourgeoise and an organized working-class. The development of the Catalan textile industry meant the workers’ movement became influential, and it was divided as it was in the rest of Europe: at a time when workers faced quasi-slave conditions in factories with long, exhausting days and wages that condemned them to extreme poverty; socialists, communists and anarchist couldn’t agree on how to achieve a better, more just society, and what should be the role of the state. 

The anarchists were prominent in workers’ struggles in Catalonia in the first decades of the twentieth century and during the Civil War (1936-1939). Many of them, like the grandfather of Norma Forester, the detective at the centre of the novel, were young idealists who rejected the Stalinist model that had triumphed in the Soviet Union and who, when war broke out, came to Spain from different parts of Europe to fight for the Republic in the International Brigades. Black Storms isn’t a historical novel, but it does focus on the open wounds of a war that ended with a dictatorship that lasted forty years and allowed a dictator to die in his bed without being tried for any of his crimes.

In July 1936, General Francisco Franco initiated a military coup with a view to overthrowing the Republican government that had been legally elected to power. The war, that Franco extended unnecessarily in order to physically exterminate the Republicans, as pointed out by historians like Paul Preston, lasted three very long years and opened the way to a dictatorship and one-party state. They were grim years, presided over by the khaki uniforms of the military and the black soutanes of priests, while the Europe that had defeated Hitler and Mussolini in the Second World War, fearful of the advance of communism, looked the other way and left the population of Spain to suffer the atrocities wrought by the fascists.

After the dictator’s death in 1975, the period known as the Transition began, based on an agreement to re-establish democracy reached by those who had been committed to the dictatorship and a good number of the parties and organisations that had fought against it. The Transition implied a peaceful transfer of power in exchange for letting the crimes of the Franco regime go unpunished; it pretended to heal a wound that has remained open ever since. In 2007, pressure from the Associations for the Victims of Francoism and the need to bring justice for all those who suffered persecution or violence during and after the civil war led to the passing of a law in Spain that is popularly known as the Law of Historical Memory, a law that at the same time helped to bring to light the crimes committed by Franco’s regime.

This is the context in which Black Storms unfolds, a novel that begins with the murder of a professor of contemporary history and specialist in the civil war. The investigation of the murder, led by a detective who happens to be the granddaughter of a man from Manchester who fought with the International Brigades and was executed in Barcelona at the end of the civil war, takes place in years when Spanish society was debating whether it would be better to forget the past and turn the page, or whether it was necessary to revisit that past, however painful that may be, in order to bring justice to the victims and call to account and name their executioners. It is a debate that remains open in a Spain, where many families are still looking for their dead in unnamed mass graves by roadsides and where streets and squares still carry the names of the fascists who murdered them. And it is a debate that is more necessary than ever in Europe at a time when the black clouds of fascism are returning to haunt the continent. 

Black Storms by Teresa Solana (Corylus Books) Out 25th October 2024

A country that doesn't acknowledge its past is destined to repeat its mistakes. Why murder a sick old man nearing retirement? An investigation into the death of a professor at the University of Barcelona seems particularly baffling for Deputy Inspector Norma Forester of the Catalan police, as word from the top confirms she's the one to lead this case. The granddaughter of an English member of the International Brigades, Norma has a colourful family life, with a forensic doctor husband, a hippy mother, a squatter daughter and an aunt, a nun in an enclosed order, who operates as a hacker from her austere convent cell. This blended family sometimes helps and often hinders Norma's investigations. It seems the spectres of the past have not yet been laid to rest, and there are people who can neither forgive nor forget the cruelties of the Spanish Civil War and all that followed.

Tom Baragwanath on small-town claustrophobia

Some years ago, I moved from a place where it felt like everyone knew me – and I, in turn, felt I knew everyone – to a place where nobody knows me. From small-town New Zealand to Paris, I exchanged bumping into mates on the walk to the supermarket for bread for a thousand incredible boulangeries where not a single soul knew my name. This sudden anonymity was bracing, and a little thrilling. But soon, I found myself craving a little small-town claustrophobia. When nobody in the street knew a thing about me, I wondered what it would be like if everybody knew everything about me.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but this germ of homesickness was ready to sprout into a book: my debut novel Paper Cage. Naturally, I gave my heroine Lorraine Henry an encyclopaedic knowledge of my rural hometown of Masterton. As a file clerk in the police station, Lorraine would know better than anyone the way stories, facts, and gossip all intertwine and coalesce to form a sense of a person: what they’re like, what they do, how far they can be trusted. As far as it’s possible to know a person, Lorraine would know them – or she would think she did. 

Lorraine would have an unerring compass when it came to navigating threats both within the community and outside of it. As the embodiment of small-town collective surveillance, Lorraine would have a sense of the unspoken things lurking between the police reports she’d been writing. Because she’d been watching; because she’d been listening. So when children from marginalised families started going missing, she’d know exactly where to look. 

But because this is small-town New Zealand, Lorraine would quickly run into the emotional miasma that builds up inside so many insular communities. Getting useful information would mean contending with decades-old grievances, obsessions, and spats. It would mean navigating the invisible web of judgement and suspicion, and pulling apart some of the secrets binding people so tight they can barely breathe. 

Working on this novel was more than just a chance to treat my own homesickness – cheaper than a plane trip home, and with a lot less paperwork given the New Zealand government’s near penitential COVID lockdown policy at the time. It was a chance to explore small-town claustrophobia from all sides, and to understand what it is about marginal or forgotten places that writers – especially writers of crime or thriller stories – just can’t seem to escape. 

From Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen to Shelley Burr’s Wake, from True Detective to Fargo, there’s something about tiny communities that lends itself to great stories. For me, it’s the sense of people being so deep in each other’s business: of living, as Lorraine puts it, “cheek-to-jowl”. In a city of millions, it’s easy to disappear into the crowd. In a town of thousands, hundreds, or even dozens, one feels constantly exposed, and constantly judged. And while it’s true that small communities can pull together in miraculous ways to face external threats, it’s just as common for these threats to pit neighbour against neighbour. 

In the vein of the Coen Brothers, I also wanted to showcase the straight-up weirdness of small-town New Zealand. Or rather, I wanted to showcase how our local flavour of weirdness can better illuminate a more universal strangeness. Is it really that odd that the Gull service station in Masterton sells its fried chicken at half-price after midnight, for example? Should it surprise anyone that fights often break out at Featherston’s Underhill Road swimming hole on the hottest days of summer? And isn’t it only natural that gangs of bored kids might spear eels in the gutters with garden forks during a once-in-a-century flood?

I never imagined that by indulging my homesickness and sharing these kinds of hyper-local details I would end up connecting with a global audience of readers. But now that Paper Cage has made its way onto bookshelves around the world, I’ve come to understand that we make sense of ourselves not through sweeping universal stories, but through small ones. 

As I walk the streets of Paris, I find myself still enjoying my mask of relative anonymity. And yet, there’s something about small-town claustrophobia that keeps drawing me back to Masterton, and back into Lorraine’s story. Or maybe it’s only by going back to those streets where my characters feel like they can’t breathe that I’m able to breathe easy.

Paper Cage by Tom Baragwanath (John Murray Press)

Masterton, New Zealand may be a small town, but its residents are certainly not united. Old resentments and the simmering tensions of race and culture divide the Maori and white inhabitants, with everyone keeping to their own patch of turf. But when local children start to go missing, vanishing between the cracks, accusations are hurled, and community relations reach boiling point. Caught in the middle is Lorraine Henry. She works as a lowly records clerk at the police station amongst towering piles of paperwork, quietly making connections and remembering things that the cops would rather not. Solving cases is not part of her job, but when her great-nephew is the next to disappear, she must put her skills to the test as she is called in to help, all before time runs out for the children.

 

 

 

Using Popular Culture in Crime Fiction by Lee Goldberg

It’s impossible to escape popular culture. Not only is it all around us, but it also shapes how we look at the world and, most of all, how we look at ourselves. It also impacts how we interact with the culture itself: the movies and TV shows we watch and the book we read. 

It’s a vicious circle. 

So, if you’re going to write crime novels, you can’t ignore popular culture. Crime fiction fans have been exposed to hundreds, if not thousands, of crime stories in books, movies and TV…and they bring that experience to your work. 

That means as an author, you not only have to service (and some would say honor) the tropes and cliches of the genre, but also subvert them in new ways. And be aware that your readers are as familiar with them as you are.

Not only that, but your characters also have to be aware of what has come before…and what popular culture grooms us to expect. Your present-day detectives have watched Inspector Morse, The Sweeney, Midsomer Murders, CSI and the ubiquitous Law & Order, too. They come into their cases with the same cultural experiences that you have…and the expectations that come along with them. I would argue that any novel that doesn’t acknowledge popular culture – TV shows, movies, songs, etc. -- is existing in some parallel universe totally unrelated to actual life. You might as well be writing fantasy.

Writer/director Quentin Tarantino has often been accused of over-indulging his love of popular culture in his movies, but I would argue he’s actually underplaying the impact TV shows and movies have on us…and on even real-life cops. No police officer wore his badge on a chain around his neck until NYPD Blue came up with it and made is cool. And now juries in courtrooms unreasonably expect to be wowed by the same forensic magic that they see on CSI and NCIS…which, as one homicide cop complained to me, are about as realistic as Star Trek (note even he uses a cultural reference to ridicule the impact of culture).

How we navigate the parallels and conflicts between our lives and popular culture has been a consistent theme in many of my novels, most notably in True Fiction and in my on-going Eve Ronin series. 

So when I wrote Calico, a mash-up of a police procedural set in present day with a traditional Western set in 1883, it would have been author malpractice not to have my characters acknowledge the similarities between what they experience and aspects of popular culture that have covered similar ground….because that’s what readers will be doing, too. 

Readers of Calico will find the novel peppered with direct references to pop culture touchstones like The X-Files, the Gilligan’s Island theme, Marty McFly, the western TV series Bonanza and the cheesy Kirk Douglas movie The Final Countdown.

I don’t see those references an indulgence or a distraction. I think they not only make the characters and story more relatable to readers, but also more realistic and authentic, even as unbelievable things are happening. In fact, it’s grounding everything in authenticity (emotionally, culturally and otherwise), that makes a reader’s suspension of disbelief possible.

Stephen King certainly understands that…look how deftly he uses popular culture to seduce us into believing his fictional reality is our own…and scaring the crap out of us. Mick Herron often refers to James Bond in his excellent Slough House novels…because his “real-life” spies have seen, and been impacted by, those movies, too…and know they don’t live up to the fictional ideal.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go off and solve some real murders. Because, as Jessica Fletcher has taught me, that’s what mystery writers do….

Calico by Lee Goldberg (Severn House) Out 23 November 2023

There's a saying in Barstow, California, a decaying city in the scorching Mojave desert . . .The Interstate here only goes in one direction: Away. But it's the only place where ex-LAPD detective Beth McDade, after a staggering fall from grace, could get another badge . . . and a shot at redemption. Over a century ago, and just a few miles further into the bleak landscape, a desperate stranger ended up in Calico, a struggling mining town, also hoping for a second chance. His fate, all those years ago, and hers today are linked when Beth investigates an old skeleton dug up in a shallow, sandy grave . . . and also tries to identity a vagrant run-over by a distracted motorhome driver during a lightning storm. Every disturbing clue she finds, every shocking discovery she makes, force Beth to confront her own troubled past . . . and a past that's not her own . . . until it all smashes together in a revelation that could change the world.

More information about Lee Goldberg and his work can be found on his website. You can also find him on X at @LeeGoldberg, on Instagram @leegoldberg007 and on FaceBook.

No Ordinary Day with Matt Johnson and John Murray.

 Author Matt Johnson in conversation with contributor John Murray to talk about how this book came about.

Matt Johnson

Matt: John, perhaps we should explain who we are first, about the campaign and how this all got started?

John: April 17th 1984, a day that will forever live in our memories. Yvonne and I were both uniform PCs at Bow Street. On that day, we were scheduled to do some routine work but were re-assigned to a demonstration outside the Libyan People’s Bureau in St James’s Square. You were driving the local traffic car, as I now know.

Matt: That’s right, and although I’d never met you at that time, I knew Yvonne quite well. Not too long before, she’d been at my house warming party with Mick Liddle, her fiancé. Matt: John, perhaps we should explain who we are first, about the campaign and how this all got started?

John: April 17th 1984, a day that will forever live in our memories. Yvonne and I were both uniform PCs at Bow Street. On that day, we were scheduled to do some routine work but were re-assigned to a demonstration outside the Libyan People’s Bureau in St James’s Square. You were driving the local traffic car, as I now know.

Matt: That’s right, and although I’d never met you at that time, I knew Yvonne quite well. Not too long before, she’d been at my house warming party with Mick Liddle, her fiancé. 

John Murray

John: Mick was on the demonstration as well, just a few yards from us. We were standing facing about fifty noisy demonstrators who were venting their anger against Colonel Gaddafi. I remember hearing a noise like fire crackers going off and then everything went silent, not a sound. Then, from the crowd somebody screamed.

Matt: When did you first realise Yvonne and many others had been shot?

John: It took a while; I mean who would ever have expected a man to open up on us with a Sterling machine gun from the first floor of the Embassy? Yvonne and I had changed position several times and it was only a moment earlier when she’d come across to me and offered to swap. The people in front of me were particularly vocal so she was doing me a favour. She was in my line of sight and I saw her go down. I thought she’d tripped over but it was only as she writhed in agony that I realised it was more serious than that. Our Sergeant, Howard Turner, helped me with her and it was then we saw the blood and her wound.

Matt: So, you knew then you’d been shot at and many people had been hit?

John: We all realised, if they opened up again we were sitting ducks. But there were injured people who needed help and, as we know, that sometimes means risking it all to do that. Together with another PC called Pete Rogers, we lifted Yvonne and carried her to Charles II Street where it was safer. And that’s where you came in. When the ambulance arrived, you were assigned to escort us to the Westminster Hospital.

Matt: Were you able to speak to Yvonne during those moments?

John: I was. She was hurting and I used a pair of scissors to cut the waistband of her skirt. There were two Libyan students with us who’d also been shot. One was really crying. Yvonne talked to him, calmed him down and reassured him. 

Matt: She realised she’d been shot?

John: By then, yes. And I promised her I would not rest until I’d helped he get the people who’d done it.

Matt: And an hour later came the awful news, that she had died?

John: Yes, and as we know, what followed was the longest siege in UK policing history. At the end of which our Government decided everyone inside, even those suspected of involvement in the murder, would be allowed to leave without being prosecuted.

Matt: Because they had diplomatic immunity?

John: They had nothing of the kind, as we now know. Some of those Libyans were killers, bombers, terrorists. They were in the UK to murder people.

Matt: And now the full story behind what happened that day is about to be told in this book. 

John: Yes, and if you don’t mind me saying, you’ve done an incredible job. This was a three dimensional jigsaw of information, some related, some apparently quite random. You’ve pieced it together with the skill of a detective.

Matt: Do you recall how the idea to write it came about?

John: The Victoria Derbyshire show had the idea to mark the anniversary of the murder with a reunion. They wanted to talk to me about what was a 36 year campaign at that time, and to bring me together with you, with Tony Long from the firearms team and with Clive Mabry, that legend amongst police officers.

Matt: Clive being the PC who sneaked into the Square late at night and under cover of darkness to recover Yvonne’s hat from the street outside the Libyan Embassy?

John: I’d never met him. We knew he existed but it was the BBC researcher who tracked him down. Ex-para. Brave as you can imagine. Rescued her hat so it could sit on her coffin for the funeral.

Matt: The coffin you personally carried into Salisbury Cathedral.

John: That’s right. I repeated my promise to her that day as well. I promised I would get the men that did it. 

Matt: Do you remember how the idea for a book came up that day?

John: I’ve read all your novels and loved them. And I remember you dedicated your very first novel to Yvonne’s memory. Clive suggested it as we talked about those books. He reckoned you could do it because you’d be able to get access to people that an ordinary writer couldn’t. And they’d talk you because of your pedigree. 

Matt: I remember I took a long time thinking about it. It was a lot of responsibility. I’d never written non-fiction before and I didn’t want to let you down, to let down Yvonne’s memory. Even once I’d started I had many doubts.

John: It was a mammoth task. We knew there was stuff in the National Archives waiting to be discovered and there was a story to be told but it grew to even more than I expected.

Matt: Amazing to think what the Government was up to in those days, supposedly in our best interests?

John: And what they’re almost certainly up to today.

Matt; So, what is your hope for the book?

John: I’m hoping people will read it and learn the truth. Over the years I’ve talked to more people than I could count who remember where they were and what they were doing on the day Yvonne was shot. This was a national tragedy not just a police tragedy. I want people to understand what drove me to do the best for my friend and to secure justice for her. I want them to know who killed Yvonne, how they did it and why. And I want them to know why our Government wanted the killers to go free. What about you, similar I’d guess?

Matt: Yes, all as you describe. But for me there’s more. I want people to learn about you and about how brave you’ve been, the personal risks you’ve taken and the dangers you’ve faced and, despite all that, you never gave up. And I want people to read how events that day shaped policing in the UK for the next forty years, and in ways they might hardly have believed. The truth, I think, will shock people but sadly, I fear it may not surprise them.

John Murray has fought for nearly 40 years to secure justice for the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher. No Ordinary Day tells the story of that fight.

No Ordinary Day: Espionage, Betrayal, Terrorism and Corruption - The Truth Behind the Murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher by Matt Johnson with John Murray (Mardle Books) Out Now.

On 17 April 1984, as police and anti-Gaddafi demonstrators gathered in the street outside the Libyan People's Bureau in London, they had no way of knowing they were about to become part of one of the greatest tragedies in British policing history. At 10.17a.m. automatic gunfire rained down on them. WPC Yvonne Fletcher was hit in the back and later died from her injuries. Twelve demonstrators were wounded. The gunmen were Libyans, both concealed behind a first-floor window of the Bureau. Two weeks later, all those present inside the Bureau, including everyone suspected of involvement in the attack, were deported from the UK. Men guilty of terrorism and murder were neither arrested nor prosecuted. As Yvonne Fletcher lay dying, her colleague and close friend PC John Murray cradled her in his arms. Before she lost consciousness, he promised her he would not rest until those responsible for her murder had been brought to justice.

Thirty-seven years would pass before John was able to fulfil that promise. Whilst writing John Murray's story, Matt Johnson identified UK government duplicity, secret service deals and how a plan to finally defeat the all-powerful National Union of Mineworkers would place the government in an invidious position when pro- and anti-Gaddafi elements brought their fight to the streets of the UK. He was able to discover why, in 1984, her killers had been allowed to go free. His extensive research also revealed how events on 17 April resulted in a 30-year government campaign to bring the police services of the UK under political control, a campaign that has driven our police service into the state of disarray we see today. The story behind what happened outside the Libyan People's Bureau is complex, shocking and revealing. Matt Johnson's compelling account pulls together a series of seemingly unconnected threads into a coherent whole, incorporating all the inter-related elements of politics, business, secret service missions and chance. For some, this will be a very uncomfortable read. For many, it may confirm what they already suspect, that we, the public, know very little of the decisions being made by our elected representatives and the actions taken by official bodies, supposedly in our best interests.

Former Police Chief Harold Breier’s Legacy on Policing in Milwaukee by Willa C. Richards

 

Much of the action in my novel, The Comfort of Monsters, takes place in the city of Milwaukee during the summer of 1991. For my protagonist, Peg McBride, this was the summer her beloved sister Dee disappeared under unnerving circumstances. But for the rest of the city, this was the summer Milwaukee police discovered serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s heinous crimes. I chose to set my novel against this grim backdrop because I was interested in exploring how cold cases go cold. Dee’s missing persons’ case is quickly subsumed by one of the largest criminal investigations in Milwaukee’s history: the arrest and prosecution of Jeffrey Dahmer. 

The discovery of Dahmer’s crimes cast Milwaukee, a relatively small, humble, working-class city into a harsh national spotlight. Between 1978-1991, the serial killer murdered seventeen men. Sixteen of these murders took place in the Milwaukee area. Dahmer preyed exclusively on young men, the vast majority of whom were men of colour. Questions swirled around the Milwaukee Police Department’s negligence. How could any respectable department have allowed such a violent killer to operate “undetected” in the city for a decade? And while these questions were certainly posed in 1991, the sensationalism of the crimes often prevented the kind of meaningful conversations required to answer them. 

As part of my research for the novel, I sought answers to some of these complicated questions. I began by diving into the history of the Milwaukee Police. It was during this process that one name popped up again and again: Milwaukee’s former police chief Harold Breier. Perhaps more than any other individual Breier’s legacy was a pivotal factor in how Milwaukee became home to the most infamous cannibal in American history. 

Harold Breier became Milwaukee’s Chief of Police in 1964. Milwaukee historian John Gurrda wrote of Breier, “as autocratic as he was incorruptible, [he] ruled...with an iron fist… and did not welcome input from community groups, politicians, or anyone else outside the force.” Longtime Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Eugene Kane said of the former chief, “[he was] a racist administrator, a borderline fascist, and the man who contributed to the segregated reputation of Milwaukee more than any other.”

From a 2022 vantage point, it’s clear Breier was a racist, a sexist, and a homophobe and his personal biases directly impacted the composition of the department. Under his direction, women were not allowed to take promotional exams and were not allowed on street patrol until 1975. Breier also routinely passed up black patrolmen for promotion to detective, assigned black officers the most undesirable shifts, and forbade them from riding in all-black squad cars or “gathering in all-black groups”. 

This internal bigotry spilled out into the department’s relationship with the communities the police claimed to serve. In 1978 at the behest of Chief Breier, the MPD launched violent raids on gay bathhouses, which resulted in dozens of arrests and street protests. Reports of patrol officers heckling or harassing bar patrons, particularly in Walker’s Point, were common. 

Brier was adamantly against the civil rights movement and the self-determination of the black community in Milwaukee. He fancied himself a local J. Edgar Hoover, performing constant surveillance of the Milwaukee NAACP Youth Council’s members, and its advisor, the civil rights activist Father James Groppi. Patrol officers were directed to harass Youth Council members and to jail them for minor offenses like littering and jaywalking. 

Under Chief Breier, Milwaukee police officers, including those on Breier’s prized Tactical Unit, (an all-white squad of officers handpicked by the Chief), murdered black Milwaukeeans and faced zero consequences. According to a U.S. Department of Justice investigation, between 1975-79 at least 22 people died in MPD custody. 

Breier always defended his officers, earning him outsized loyalty from within the department and from the powerful police union. This fostered a culture of officer invincibility.

Further, Breier was opposed to community-based policing. After his tenure, he had this to say about efforts to reform the department towards community-based policies: “There’s no substitute for strong law enforcement. First, a police officer doesn’t have the training to take care of all the social ills of the city. And second, he should be so busy maintaining law and order that he doesn’t have time for all that crap. When I was Chief we were relating to the good people, and we were relating to the other people too: we were throwing those people in the can.” 

Today, Milwaukee officials might want to write-off this period of Milwaukee’s history as unfortunate, merely cringing at Breier’s policies and his remarks. There is no doubt, though, that we should situate his reign within Milwaukee’s reputation as one of the most segregated cities in America. And it isn’t just a reputation; it’s a fact. 

This is one of the most disturbing reasons Jeffrey Dahmer moved through the criminal justice system with such ease, despite being arrested, tried, and convicted for child molestation. The Milwaukee Police, because of historic, institutionally perpetuated biases, didn’t see him as a convicted sex offender accused of unimaginable crimes. Instead, they saw his victims, the majority of whom were black and brown men, as the criminals. 

Breier’s legacy certainly extends beyond the department’s negligence in the Dahmer case and his policies continue to have real impacts on the city of Milwaukee. Though not all of this research made its way into my book, the material was crucial in shaping my thinking about the history of Milwaukee. 

The impact of the Breier doctrine helps explain not only the specific horrors of the Dahmer crimes, but also the interrelatedness and continuity of these crimes with the city’s other, historic, institutional failures. It is my sincere hope that The Comfort of Monsters showcases these failures and their interconnectedness and demonstrates the urgency of transforming our local institutions.

The Comfort of Monsters by Willa C. Richards is out now from Point Blank, original paperback £8.99.

In the summer of 1991, teen Dee McBride vanished in the city of Milwaukee. It was the summer the Journal Sentinel dubbed 'the deadliest . . . in the history of Milwaukee.' Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer's heinous crimes dominated the headlines and the disappearance of one girl was easily overlooked. 2019, nearly thirty years later, Dee's sister, Peg, is still haunted by her disappearance. Desperate to find out what happened to her, the family hire a psychic and Peg is plunged back into the past. But Peg's hazy recollections are far from easy to interpret and digging deep into her memory raises terrifying questions. How much trust can we place in our own recollections? How often are our memories altered by the very act of speaking them aloud? And what does it mean to bear witness in a world where even our own stories about what happened are inherently suspect?

More information about Willa C Richards can be found on her website. You can also find her on Instagram.

Women who fall for bad men.

 

Women who fall for bad men—Lisa Gray on the inspiration behind Lonely Hearts.

We all know about the allure of the bad boy.

From Gone With The Wind’s Rhett Butler to the original Rebel Without a Cause, James Dean, there’s nothing quite like a leather jacket and tattoos and a fast car and a bad attitude to get pulses racing and hearts pounding.

The kind of man you definitely wouldn’t want to take home to meet your mum.

Honestly? I can see the attraction. The first time I watched the movie Bridget Jones’s Diary, I definitely fancied the selfish, egotistical, two-timing Daniel Cleaver much more than nice guy Mark Darcy. Why? Because Darcy was a little too dull and safe, whereas bad boy Cleaver was sexy and fun and unpredictable.

But what happens when a fondness for bad men is about more than just a snarl and a string of rejected lovers? When the biggest turn on is someone who breaks the law, rather than just breaking hearts?

Hybristophilia is an attraction to those who commit crimes and is sometimes known as “Bonnie and Clyde syndrome.”

When Jeremy Meeks was arrested in 2014, his mugshot went viral. Dubbed ‘The World’s Hottest Felon’, women (and men) went crazy for his razor sharp cheekbones and full lips and bright blue eyes. A one-time gang member, Meeks has since carved out a successful career as a model following his release from prison and has 1.6million followers on Instagram. 

But, for some women, the fascination with those who commit crimes goes way beyond simply liking and sharing pics on social media.

Many high-profile criminals are sent fan mail while in jail in the same way Brad Pitt or Ryan Gosling receive letters from adoring fans. But these are men who are famous for being rapists and murderers, rather than making movies. Some form relationships with the women who write to them and some even marry their pen pals.

Richard Ramirez—aka ‘The Night Stalker’—was a serial killer and rapist who was sentenced to death after murdering 13 people. Doreen Lioy began writing to him shortly after his incarceration and they were married in 1996 at San Quentin.

‘The Hillside Strangler’, who terrorized Los Angeles in the late ‘70s, actually turned out to be two people—cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono. Bianchi went on to marry his pen pal Shirlee Joyce Book, while Bianchi got hitched to Christine Kizuka.

Book also reportedly tried her luck with Ted Bundy before tying the knot with Bianchi.

Bundy was another serial killer who wasn’t short of female attention or offers, despite later confessing to 30 homicides. He married Carole Ann Boon in a courtroom during the penalty phase of his trial in Florida.

It’s this phenomenon that I wanted to explore in my latest novel, Lonely Hearts—including the ‘why?’

Is it lack of self-esteem or a desire to be famous themselves that attracts women to men who are responsible for committing despicable acts? Do they actually feel ‘safer’ being in a relationship with a man who’s behind bars who can’t physically hurt them? Does the letter-writing and photo-swapping and restricted visitation all add to the fantasy and prevent the mundanity of everyday life creeping in? 

Lonely Hearts is centered around two women who both have a relationship with a famous, handsome, charismatic serial killer by the name of Travis Dean Ford. They both met him through ‘The Lonely Hearts Club,’ a pen pal service for women who want to write to men in prison. Veronica Lowe had a child with Ford and then disappeared. Jordana Ford married him before his execution and went on to become a well-known author and activist.

At the beginning of the book, Jordana is murdered in a similar way to Ford’s victims, and private investigator Jessica Shaw is hired to find the missing Veronica and her now-teenage daughter before they suffer the same fate.

It was only while watching a documentary about Bundy that I discovered he, too, fathered a child while in prison. I was intrigued by Rose Bundy. Where is she now? Does she know the truth about her father? What is known about her? The answer is very little.

In Lonely Hearts, the same questions are being asked about Mia Ford, the daughter of Veronica and Travis. In a strange twist of fate, the woman searching for Mia and her mother—Jessica Shaw—is the daughter of a murder victim and was once also a missing person herself.

Lonely Hearts by Lisa Gray (Out Now) Thomas & Mercer

A missing persons case should be pretty straightforward for private investigator Jessica Shaw. After all, it’s what she does best. But this latest case proves to be anything but straightforward. Christine Ryan is desperate to find her childhood friend Veronica Lowe. Veronica disappeared more than fifteen years ago, not long after having a child with a Death Row inmate, notorious serial killer Travis Dean Ford. When Ford’s widow, Jordana, is murdered in the same way as his victims, Christine fears Veronica and her daughter will be next. If they’re even still alive… Discovering that both Veronica and Jordana were members of the Lonely Hearts Club, a pen pal service for women who want to write to men in prison, Jessica realizes she needs to find Veronica before the killer does. But as Jessica follows the leads it begins to feel like someone is following her. Travis has been dead for years, so who is hunting the Lonely Hearts?

More information about Lisa Gray and her books can be found on her website. You can also find her on Facebook, follow her on Twitter @lisagraywriter and find her on Instagram @lisagraywriter 

CALL FOR PAPERS: Essays on Police and Policing in 21st Century Film and Television

 

The Black Lives Matter movement, the trial and conviction of Derek Chauvin calls to defund the police, and the prominence in the media of killer police such as Joseph James DeAngelo are recent manifestations of intense and even unprecedented levels of media attention on policing at interlocking points of race, inequality, social justice and political agendas. Equally, exciting cross-disciplinary engagement between fields of justice studies, criminology, cultural studies and popular culture are increasingly opening up.

Police have been the inspiration for and focus of countless film and television stories, a long-standing dramatic strain that is a fictional backdrop to the intense recent public scrutiny, and at times rejection of policing. Perceptions of the police are shaped by these long standing narrative forms of film and television that can also convey other shapers of perception, from bodycam footage to mobile phone recordings.

At this point of exceptional pressure on police conduct and the uncertain paths that policing will take in the 21st century, this collection is intended to be a topical opportunity to examine the themes of how police and policing are perceived and portrayed and these points are intended as the focal point for each contribution.

We are assembling a special collection of essays that consider addressing the intersection of police and policing with film and television in the 21st century. Possible areas include:

Genre studies and the procedural

Representations of race

Real and fictional police

Reality television

Televising trials

Police in pornographic films

Representations of police both historical and modern

Policing in dystopias

Moral and political authority

Contributions related to the United States are especially welcomed.

Advice for contributors

This edited collection is under contract.

If you are interested in contributing to this collection, we ask that you submit an abstract of up to 250 words explaining the focus and approach your proposed essay. The proposed volume is intended to be scholarly and will be peer reviewed but accessible in tone and approach. Each final contribution should be around 6000 words.

Abstracts should be emailed to marcus.harmes@usq.edu.au

Abstract submission deadline: October 15, 2021

Full paper submission deadline: March 1, 2022

About the editors

Associate Professor Marcus K Harmes has published extensively in the field of popular culture. His most recent publications include Roger Delgado: I am usually referred to as the Master (Fantom Publishing 2017) and Doctor Who and the Art of Adaptation (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015). He is the author of numerous studies on the church in modern popular culture, including book chapters in the collection Doctor Who and Race, and articles in journals including Science Fiction Film and Television, and Journal of Religion and Popular Culture. In 2018 he edited the Handbook for Springer on Postgraduate Education in Higher Education.

Meredith A Harmes teaches communication in the enabling programs at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia. Her research interests include modern British and Australian politics and popular culture in Britain and America. Her most recent publication in the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture was on race and cultural studies on American television. She holds an honours degree from the University of Queensland in political science and a Graduate Diploma of Journalism and a Masters of Public Relations from the University of Southern Queensland. She is co-editor of Postgraduate Education in Higher Education(Springer, 2018).

Dr Barbara Harmes lectures in communication at the University of Southern Queensland, with a particular focus on international students. Her doctoral research focussed on the discursive controls built around sexuality in late-nineteenth-century England. Her research interests include cultural studies, postgraduate education and religion. She has published in areas including modern Australian politics, postgraduate education, 1960s American television and her original field of Victorian literature.

On becoming a real author by Alan Johnson

 

Alan Johnson is a former MP for Kingston Upon Hull West and Hessle. His memoirs have won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Specsavers National Book Awards "Autobiography of the Year”. The titles of his four memoirs all come from the titles of songs that the Beatles have either written or performed.

When I once told a book festival audience that I wanted to write fiction some wag responded by suggesting I write my Party’s next election manifesto. I was still an MP and thick-skinned enough to withstand the gentle humour of someone who’d paid good money to hear me talk about my four volumes of memoir.

The desire I’d expressed was genuine. Apart from the fact that I’d practically exhausted all the available material, I was sick of writing about myself. My memoirs had done well but I didn’t feel entitled to consider myself a proper author until I’d done the really difficult bit; developing plot and character.

I was already enamoured with the actual process of writing. Politics doesn’t involve much in the way of creativity and it’s practitioners rarely have the luxury of seeing an idea through to fruition. Former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, when asked by a journalist to identify the greatest threat to his administration, famously answered “events dear boy, events”.

I was always buffeted by events as a politician and to an even greater extent as a trade union leader before that, which is why I so valued the almost complete control that writing gave me. I say “almost complete” because, although I was solely responsible for the way I told my story, the story itself was preordained. I could describe the characters but not invent them; follow the plot but not create it. Writing fiction is much harder but infinitely more satisfying. Suddenly I was the dictator I’d so often wished I was in my previous life (although I’d have been a benign one - obviously).

So, I wanted to write fiction but why crime fiction? I’ve devoured a lot of mysteries, particularly in my formative years. It began with a battered paperback copy of a Georgette Heyer detective story that somehow found its way into my bedroom. It wasn’t very good. Heyer’s forte was, of course, the Regency novel but the book was good enough to encourage me to further explore the genre.

Before long I was taking my precious collection of ‘Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly’ magazines to the Popular Book Shop in Shepherds Bush to swap them for a bagful of paperbacks by inter-alia Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Ngaio Marsh, Leslie Charteris and Margery Allingham.

By the time the Beatles released their twelfth single in June 1966 I really did “wanna be a Paperback Writer” (but only if I failed in my bid to be a rock star). I was a sixteen years old shelf stacker at Tesco having left school the year before. In a way school stayed with me because my brilliant English teacher, Mr Carlen had given all his pupils a list of 40 books they should read. The actual list hasn’t survived but I remember Bleak House (with the wonderful Inspector Bucket) being on it along with Rogue Male and The Moonstone. Dickens, Geoffrey Household and Wilkie Collins wrote thrillers that seemed to escape narrow categorisation. They were just good books.

It wasn’t until about five years ago that I read my first Maigret, ‘Inquest on Bouvet’, a slim, green Penguin Crime paperback which could easily have been in that Popular Book Shop selection. Published in 1963 with the price (2’6 in old money) printed on the cover, I picked it up in another second hand bookshop whilst on holiday. Like almost all Maigret books it’s more novella than novel running to just 152 pages. I read it on the beach in one day and I’ve read about five Maigret’s a year since. All 75 are newly available, reprinted and retranslated, in a wonderful initiative by Penguin/Random House. It is Georges Simenon’s creation, rather than Conan-Doyle’s that I consider to be the greatest of all fictional detectives.

I hope ‘The Late Train to Gipsy Hill’ carries at least a modicum of what I learnt from so many great crime novels (although I also hope it’s not derivative of any). I’m not hoping for the Nobel Prize that Simenon so bitterly resented failing to win. I just wanted to write a book that is as pleasurable for it’s purchasers to read as it was for me to write.’

The Late Train to Gipsy Hill by Alan Johnson is published in hardback by Wildfire Books on 2nd September 2021 

Gary Nelson has a routine for the commute to his rather dull job in the city. Each day, he watches transfixed as a beautiful woman on the train applies her make up in a ritual he now knows by heart. He's never dared to strike up a conversation . . . but maybe one day. Then one evening, on the late train to Gipsy Hill, the woman who has beguiled him for so long, invites him to take the empty seat beside her. Fiddling with her mascara, she holds up her mirror and Gary reads the words 'HELP ME' scrawled in sticky black letters on the glass. From that moment, Gary's life is turned on its head. He finds himself on the run from the Russian mafia, the FSB and even the Metropolitan Police - all because of what because this mysterious young woman may have witnessed. In the race to find out the truth, Gary discovers that there is a lot more to her than meets the eye...