Tracy Maton on Writing What You Love

I began writing The Artful Anna Harris as an act of rebellion. After many false starts, two previous novels had come close but ultimately failed to find a publisher so, dripping with disappointment, I decided to have one last shot. If that didn’t work I’d shut my laptop and use it as a tray. Bizarrely, this decision was freeing. Self-censorship went out of the window. In came a delicious playfulness.

Writers are advised to ‘Write what you love’ and ‘Write what you know’ and ‘Kill your darlings,’ which is the much-quoted idea that you must cut aspects you adore if they do not serve the narrative or the character. Not overly keen on being told what to do, I adopted two out of three.

What do I love? I love The Talented Mr Ripley, coming to the book from Minghella’s wonderful 1999 film adaptation. I carried on to read many of Highsmith’s other novels, all of which feature excellent anti-heroes. Highsmith had a talent for creating often unlikeable, in many ways ordinary characters who commit heinous acts that are, in the context of the story, entirely justifiable. By offering a window into the minds of these flawed people, the sort of people you pass by every day, we are invited to collude. And colluding is all too easy. I think I’ve always enjoyed rooting for those who behave badly, from my teenage reading of Bronte’s Wuthering Heights – Heathcliffe is detestable – to Frank Cauldhame, the violent, isolated teenage narrator of Banks’ The Wasp Factory; from Tartt’s The Secret History which features a whole cast of anti-heroes to the emotionally stunted Istvan in David Szalay’s Flesh, last year’s winner of the Booker Prize. How much more interesting to side with someone you know you shouldn’t?

So, onto what do I know. I know English villages, their community spirit and their spitefulness, their hidden secrets and their open lies.

Put the two together and I give you my Ripley-esque anti-hero, Anna Harris, who is living in a suffocatingly pretty village surrounded by her boyfriend’s extended family. Everything in the garden is rosy until the vivacious Sofia arrives on the scene and unleashes what Anna tries so hard to keep at bay. As Anna shares her innermost thoughts, she invites you to take her side. I’m biased, but I don’t think that’s too much to ask. 

The book is full of darlings that I refused to kill. Choosing instead to give you Anna in all her glory, the beautiful and the ugly. As a nod to Highsmith, or maybe just for fun, I wove little vignettes from Ripley’s story. Fans will spot the references.

Despite her morally ambiguous character, I like Anna very much. I wonder who else will become a fan.

Warning: if you like justice to be done, look away.

The Artful Anna Harris by Tracy Maton (Profile Books) Out Now '

You are quite the chameleon, aren't you? You could wear anything, do anything, and yet you choose plain, plain, plain. Is it all a front for a secret life?' When the vivacious Sofia Carstairs arrives in her sleepy country village, Anna knows her life will never be the same again. Her new best friend is carefree, elegant and intoxicating. Her life doesn't revolve around church flower arrangements or Sunday lunches with the in-laws. Sofia reminds Anna of the person she used to be, before she worked so hard to fit in that she practically disappeared. But is it enough to just be Sofia's friend? Anna wonders what it would be like to be Sofia, if only for a little while. But once Anna starts pretending, she finds it easy to pretend the rules don't apply to her. How far will Anna go to get what she wants.And what will she do to those that stand in her way?

You can find Tracy Maton on Instagram @tracymatonwriter

 

C E Hulse on writing Vivian Dies Again

Writing a novel means working in a world of simultaneous opposites. It means working with unbounded creativity, at the same time as absolute discipline. It means keeping the big picture in your head, while working on tiny details; it means both having the ego to believe you have something to say, with the humility to know your work isn’t good enough. it means knowing there are too many books in the world for anyone to ever read, yet deciding to add another. 

Vivian Dies Again started with a clear agenda in mind. I was a comedy writer, but I always knew, one day, I’d write a mystery – but only if I could find a way of making it feel fresh and different, and worthy of my heroes. I am a huge fan of Golden Age mysteries, to the extent I wore out two The Complete Poirot DVD boxsets, (it was my middle-of-the-night insomnia comfort TV for a long time). I am the proud owner of a crocheted Hercule Poirot figurine.

But I wanted to do the idea justice, so I set myself a logic challenge. How could I write a Serious Mystery Novel, with all the hallmarks of a golden age mystery, but in a fresh, contemporary setting? How could I give readers the same satisfying experience (red herrings, clues, twists, clever plotting, a rewarding ending) in this age of DNA profiling and CSI techniques and surveillance cameras?

I mulled, and mulled. I landed on the idea of having narrator in a time loop, one who kept dying so had no time to investigate before going back to the start: a neat way to dodge the tech elements that could scupper a murder mystery. I decided my main character would go to a funeral, where she would be killed again and again, and need to solve her own (repeated) murder. Sorted!

Except … no, not sorted. Like a true logic puzzle, every solution created a new problem. 

Because if someone kept murdering Viv, how would she not be able to immediately identify who had killed her before?

(I got it. Her memory would reset each time she died.) 

But then how did I stop the book being repetitive? 

(By starting the book towards the end, after multiple loops had already happened.)

But then how would Viv and the reader know what had happened in previous loops?

(By bringing another character into the time loop, one who remembered and was able to bring Viv and the reader up to speed. The two would work together to piece together the clues.)

The logic of the book came together piece by piece, over several years, as I solved one problem by creating another. I planned meticulously on spreadsheets. Only when I was happy with the plot mechanics did I think about character, and only then did Viv grow from a cypher to a larger-than-life person: an infuriating antihero who is her own worst enemy, one who takes dodgy internet prescription drugs and family events, and sleeps with married men at funerals. Only then did I create Jamie, the long-suffering, sleep-deprived waiter who has been pulled into the time loop and has to help Viv.

And only then did I start writing – and I wrote the book wrong. And wrote it wrong in the next draft too. I find writing books a protracted exercise of ‘not that. How about this?’ 

Eventually I got happy enough with the book that I sent a draft to my agent. Who told me I hadn’t written a Serious Crime Novel, I’d written a comedy. 

Turns out you can’t control *every* element of writing with a spreadsheet. 

So I leaned into my fate, embracing the comedy, stuffing the book with one-liners and having fun with the kind of complex relationship dynamics that may be wryly relatable if you don’t come from a John Lewis advert family. 

I set out to write a Serious Crime Novel. It took me a long time. I failed. 

And, along the way, I created something I’m really proud of. 

And – trust me – Vivian Dies Again is much easier to read than it was to write.

Vivian Dies Again by C E Hulse (Viper Books) Out Now

Time heals all wounds. Except blunt force trauma. Vivian Slade is a cautionary tale. The wrong side of thirty, she's no longer the life and soul of the party - she's a party of one. But she's determined to turn over a new leaf, even if that means going to a family gathering where everyone hates her. Turns out, someone really hates her - enough to push her off a balcony to a very messy end. But then Vivian wakes up! Only to be murdered again. And again. Stuck in a baffling time loop, Vivian's only ally is a sleep-deprived waiter who just wants to finish his shift. Will Vivian be able to solve her own murder? Only time will tell...

More information about the author can be found on her website. She can also be found on Instagram @carolinehulse1

Photo © Nathan Cox

 

Forthcoming books from Profile Books (Including Viper)

 January 2026

Vivian Dies Again is by C E Hulse. Time heals all wounds. Except blunt force trauma. Vivian Slade is a cautionary tale. The wrong side of thirty, she's no longer the life and soul of the party - she's a party of one. But she's determined to turn over a new leaf, even if that means going to a family gathering where everyone hates her. Turns out, someone really hates her - enough to push her off a balcony to a very messy end. But then Vivian wakes up! Only to be murdered again. And again. Stuck in a baffling time loop, Vivian's only ally is a sleep-deprived waiter who just wants to finish his shift. Will Vivian be able to solve her own murder? Only time will tell...

February 2026

The Nowhere Children are expecting you... High in the mountains sits Nowhere, a verdant valley surrounded by walls of rock. People have lived at Nowhere for centuries, though never for long, and rarely happily. Its last owner was its most famous: movie star Leaf Winham, who built Nowhere House as a refuge to hide from his fame... and to hide his crimes. Only when Nowhere House went up in flames were the graves discovered, the last resting places of lost young men who would never go home. Years later, Nowhere valley has become a sanctuary for runaway children, a place where adults cannot enter. Drawn by this promise, fourteen-year-old Riley pulls her brother Oliver from his bed in the middle of the night, hoping to find a new family. But the Nowhere Children are fierce in defending their valley and their secrets. For something dark lives in the ruins of Nowhere House, something that asks a terrible price for sanctuary.. Nowhere Burning is by Catriona Ward.

Mischance Creek is by Garry Disher. A deadly drought. A broken town. It's the worst drought in a generation, and the people of Senior Constable Paul Hirschhausen's vast outback beat are suffering. Foreclosures. Failing businesses. Petty quarrels that are spiralling out of control. So when a naive tourist runs into a ditch beyond the ruins of Mischance Creek, Hirsch is relieved to step away from Tiverton. But Annika Nordrum asks for more than just roadside assistance. Her father's body was found at the bottom of a mineshaft seven years ago - his death ruled an accident - and her mother hasn't been seen since. Can Hirsch close this cold case before the town reaches breaking point?

Inspector Jian and his daughter Weiwei just want to go back to their home in China: but Jian is facing a corruption charge in his absence and risks arrest. Instead he tries to scrape a living on London's meanest streets as an illegal immigrant, reduced to hustling Mah Jiang for cash. A bleak future looks to be growing bleaker still when a triad gang blackmail him into tracking down an unlikely young robber. In No Exit Jian and Weiwei scramble between London's grimiest bedsits and its swankiest penthouses as they penetrate the glittering world of 'princelings' - the rich children of the Chinese elite, who treat the city as their playground. Locked in a desperate struggle, with no way out in sight, It will take all their wiles, as well as some lucky gambles, to come out of this latest venture alive. No Exit is by Simon Lewis.

March 2026

Intelligence is by Robert Newman. Was he about to recruit her into the secret service? She held her breath. Frogwoman, codebreaker, assassin, saboteur - whatever it was, she'd do it!  Oxford, 1938. Ida and Medora are two brilliant young philosophers at the heart of a group who gather in storied rooms to dance, drink and debate theories of right and wrong. But as the world spins towards war, theoretical questions of life and death become all too real. While her friends are called up to do intelligence work, Ida, the irrepressible Texan outsider, seeks academic distraction. Then she stumbles across secret Nazi information that could radically change the direction of the war. Can she and Medora capture the attention of the spymasters and mandarins in London on time to save lives.

'You are quite the chameleon, aren't you? You could wear anything, do anything, and yet you choose plain, plain, plain. Is it all a front for a secret life?' Anna Harris knows how to blend in, to be whoever she has to be to get by. But somehow she has ended up in a quaint, sleepy village, swallowed into the lives of her boyfriend and in-laws. She's not unhappy, but this isn't the life she remembers choosing. When vivacious Sofia Carstairs moves to the village, Anna is reminded of the freedom she once had. She used to be carefree and rebellious. But is she willing to throw away her future for some fun? Perhaps leading two lives is more enticing than one. After all, Anna's not a bad person. She just wants to try it out...The Artful Anna Harris is by Tracy Maton.

May 2026

The Hollow Boys is by Tariq Ashkanani. Two children lost. The wrong one found. It's a warm evening in September when nine-year-old Danny Yates comes back from the dead. He walks into town half-starved and silent, ten months after he and his best friend Will Keefe were presumed drowned. And when Danny does finally speak, he swears that he's not Danny. He's Will. Danny's mother is convinced that her boy has come back wrong. More than that, she thinks the town itself is now at risk from whatever dark force returned her son. Chief of Police John Deacon is more interested in how the sinister disappearance of two boys could have been written off as a tragic accident, and who was responsible. What happened to Danny to make him take on his friend's name, his personality? And does Danny's return mean there's a chance that Will is still alive?

June 2026

North Dakota, 1970s. Renee 'Cash' Blackbear, a nineteen-year old Ojibwe woman spends her days playing pool, drinking beer and driving trucks for the local wheat farmers. When the body of the Ojibwe man is found in a field just outside of time, Sheriff Wheaton – Cash's guardian and only friend – and asks for her help. For Cash has an intuitive nature , and she knows that the answers will be found on the Red Lake Reservation. But navigating local racial tensions brings its own dangers, and soon Cash isn't only searching for justice: she is fighting for her life. Murder on the Red River is by cMarcie R. Rendon.

Courtroom Theatrics by Guy Morpuss

The actor Philip Glenister (Life on Mars and Mad Dogs) advised his daughter: ‘If you want to be an actor and earn some money, become a barrister.’

With the state of legal aid, most criminal barristers would question the wisdom of that advice. It does however highlight the close links between acting and the law. Many barristers would like to make the opposite journey and be treading the boards in the West End.

A trial is rather like a play. We wear our costumes. We perform to the audience. And on a good day no one gets murdered.

That is the tag line for my new novel, A Trial in Three Acts, where the worlds of the theatre and law collide. An actress is murdered live on stage, her head chopped off with a guillotine. Suspicion falls on all cast members, but it is her ex-husband, Hollywood superstar Leo Lusk, who is charged with her murder. At his Old Bailey trial, he is defended by English barrister Charles Konig KC, and New York trial lawyer Yara Ortiz. They realise that the clues to the murder lie in the play itself, and that to save their client they need to identify the real murderer.

When, more than thirty years ago, I started out as a barrister, I thought that winning cases was about persuading the judge that you were right on the law. Over time, and particularly after I became a KC, I began to realise that the law has very little to do with the outcome of most trials. In truth barristers win cases by telling the judge a better story than the other side. Every trial is a one-off performance for an audience of one. Judges are human, and you win by showing the judge why they should want to decide in your client’s favour. To borrow from the US legal philosopher Jerome Frank, laws are merely the formal clothes in which judges dress up their decisions.

So, to be a good barrister you need to be a good actor: to be able to put on a performance, to convince the judge that you believe that your client is in the right.

Of course, there are differences between the stage and the courtroom. As barristers we cannot make things up; we have to work with the facts that we are given. And unlike theatre, there is no script. A trial is an improv performance where the underlying material is constantly changing. It is a play where your fellow ‘cast members’ (the witnesses, the judge, your own client) can suddenly start wandering off in unexpected directions or making up their own lines. I have seen trials lost with a single bad answer in cross-examination.

It was a film adaptation of an Agatha Christie play that inspired me to become a barrister: Witness for the Prosecution, starring Charles Loughton and Marlene Dietrich. I remember being transfixed by the skill with which Loughton, as the defence QC, held centre-stage in court, moulding the jury to his will. I wanted to do the same. Little did I realise that it was Loughton who was actually being manipulated by Dietrich.

An excellent new production of the play in London has blurred the lines between theatre and law. It is set as though in a courtroom, and members of the audience get to sit in the jury box and decide the fate of the accused. It is very cleverly done.

In writing A Trial in Three Acts I have tried to achieve a similar blurring of the lines between theatre and courtroom: my homage to the Queen of Crime. And like Christie, I have provided readers will all the same clues as are available to Charles Konig KC – buried, of course, amongst a multitude of red herrings. The book contains a number of scenes from the play in which the murder takes place. Study these scenes carefully, and you may spot the solution.

I will provide one further clue. Charles Konig KC solves the crime not by identifying the murderer, but by working out how the murder was carried out. Readers can do the same.

Happy hunting. Break a leg.

A Trial in Three Acts by Guy Morpuss (Viper Books) Out Now

A trial is rather like a play. We wear our costumes. We perform to the audience. And on a good day no-one gets murdered. Six nights a week the cast of the smash-hit play Daughter of the Revolution performs to a sold-out audience. A thrilling story of forbidden marriage and a secret love child, the critics say it'll run for years. That is until one night the third act ends not in applause but in death, when leading lady Alexandra Dyce is beheaded live on stage. Every cast member has a motive, but it is the dead woman's co-star - and ex-husband - Hollywood legend Leo Lusk who is charged with the crime. When defence barrister Charles Konig is brought in last minute, he knows this ought to be the case of a lifetime. But Charles would rather be on his holiday trekking up K2, and he isn't interested in celebrities, especially ones that seem to be mysteriously trying to derail their own defence. But as he and his co-counsel New York lawyer Yara Ortiz sift through the evidence, it becomes clear that clues may lie in the play itself. And that Charles's only chance of victory is to identify the real murderer...

More information about the author and his books can be found on his website.  He can also be found on 'X' @guymorpuss.

Leonora Nattrass on the Inspiration for Scarlet Town

I am lucky enough to live in a seventeenth-century farmhouse five miles from Helston in West Cornwall. Helston is a beautiful town, if presently fallen on rather hard times like many a high street up and down the land. The buildings on its four main streets are mostly listed, which means that their old architecture is still authentic, if a little shabby, and the church is set on a hill above the town amid shady old streets of immense charm and character.

When I wrote Black Drop, the first in my Laurence Jago series of historical crime mysteries set in the 1790s, it seemed natural to me to make my main character, Laurence, a farmer’s son from my adopted county of Cornwall.

Searching for a name for my main character, I idly looked back through parish records about our own house and its inhabitants, and came across a Marie, a Laurence and a Grace living here in the 1640s. Laurence duly acquired a home in the shape of our own house, a mother named Marie and a sister named Grace. And it was perhaps from these suggestive names that the idea of their being half-French first occurred to me – an idea which seemed plausible enough, given the profitable smuggling trade between Cornwall and France in the eighteenth-century.

This was an idea full of possibilities in the context of the French Revolution raging across the channel, and Laurence working for the British government newly at war with the French republic.

In Black Drop, Laurence lives amid the dust and squalor of eighteenth-century London, working as a clerk to the Foreign Office, but always pining for the peace and beauty of the Cornish countryside. In the sequel, Blue Water, he is even further away from home, aboard a Post Office mail ship bound for Philadelphia. But even here, Cornwall looms large, for Falmouth’s packet ships, manned by Cornish crews, were the means by which news and correspondence spread around the globe. 

Nevertheless, I always wanted to bring Laurence home to Cornwall, and when I discovered the story of the 1790 election in Helston (in the wonderful resource ParliamentaryHistory Online, an ongoing project funded by the Houses of Parliament) I realised it would be a perfect vehicle for Laurence’s third adventure in Scarlet Town.

The true story was preposterous – a real case of truth being stranger than fiction, which is always very satisfactory to a historical crime writer! In the Helston election of 1790, a single octogenarian voter in the town sent two MPs to Westminster. He was the last of six old freemen, whom Parliament had decreed would have the honour of returning the town’s MPs until they all died.

This old voter was firmly in the pocket of the town’s patron, the Duke of Leeds, who told him who to vote for. Riled by this seigneurial arrangement, and rightly thinking the whole situation absurd, the mayor and corporation of the town set up a rival electorate of about thirty men, and, when the general election was called, the town duly split into fierce warring supporters of each side.

Even better from my point of view was the discovery that the mayor and corporation were equally outrageous: locked in terrible family feuds, refusing to accept the results of their own internal elections of aldermen and mayor, flouncing out of meetings, and constantly suing each other in the courts. I always like a world where no one is entirely good, no one is entirely bad, and apparently straightforward moral questions are mired in ambiguity.

Moreover, eighteenth-century elections were gloriously comic affairs too, being a kind of carnival even for those who couldn’t vote – and especially entertaining since there was no such thing as a secret ballot, and every voter was obliged to announce his choice in public, to the hoots – and possible physical retribution – of his opponents. Wild, libellous accusations of wrongdoing were rife, along with obscene but very funny songs, especially if ladies chose to involve themselves in the hustings. “If for the Man of the People you’ll poll/You may tickle a Duchess’s tol de rol lol,” they sang in the Westminster election of 1784 – a song I shamelessly stole and reworded for Scarlet Town.

Moving the election to 1796 when Laurence returned to Cornwall from America – and adding Toby, the “Sapient” fortune-telling Hog, along with a juicy murder – set the stage for Laurence to begin a new adventure at home in Cornwall, among the beautiful streets which he and I know and love so well.

Scarlet Town by Leonora Nattrass is out now (Viper, £16.99)

1796. A rigged election. A town at war. A murderer at large. Disgraced former Foreign Office clerk Laurence Jago and his larger-than-life employer the journalist William Philpott have escaped America - and Philpott's near imprisonment for libel - by the skin of their teeth. They return to Laurence's hometown of Helston, Cornwall, in the hope of rest and recuperation, but instead find themselves in the middle of a tumultuous election that has the inhabitants of the town at one another's throats. Only two men may vote in this rotten borough, and when one of them dies in suspicious circumstances, Laurence is ordered to investigate on behalf of the town's patron, his old master the Duke of Leeds. But it is no easy matter, thanks to the machinations of the rival political factions, not to mention the riotous performances of Toby the Sapient Hog. Then the second elector is poisoned and suspicion turns on the town doctor, the gentle Pythagoras Jago, Laurence's own cousin. Suddenly Laurence finds himself ensnared in generations of bad blood and petty rivalries, with his cousin's fate in his hands.

Richard and Judy Autumn Book Club Books Announced

Six books, including ones by Janice Hallett, Dinah Jefferies and Greg Hurwitz, have been chosen as Richard and Judy picks for the autumn Book Club, exclusive to W H Smith.

The selection of novels has been curated by Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan and range from adventure and thriller to comedy. 

Mystery writer Hallett’s The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels (Viper) features on the list. The book, which Finnegan describes as “creepy and  complicated”, lays out a new story in the author’s “inimitable cosy style of dossiers, emails, texts and recorded phone calls".

Jefferies historical novel Night Train to Marrakech (HarperCollins) has also been picked, making this the author’s third appearance in the Richard and Judy Book Club. The book is set in 1960s Morocco, and Madeley has praised Jeffries for capturing the atmosphere of Marrakech “better than anyone else I have ever read".

This is also the third Book Club nomination for Hurwitz, whose thriller The Last Orphan (Penguin) has also been selected as a book club pick. Meanwhile, Charlotte Levin’s "heart-warming" story If I Let You Go (Mantle) is also on the autumn list, as is The Traitor (Penguin) by former crime reporter and civil servant Ava Glass and We All Want Impossible Things (Doubleday), Catherine Newman’s debut novel about love and friendship. 

The six recommendations in this series are available in W H Smith stores across the UK and online. Moreover, the Richard and Judy Book Club podcast will also be returning for another series on 28th September, providing an introduction to each of the recommended titles from the authors in conversation with Madeley and Finnegan. 

Heroine Addiction - Kate Griffin on the enduring appeal of the (very) bad girl in books

Most authors I know will admit to the obscene satisfaction derived from creating a really good villain. Unshackled from the bonds of goodness or morality, it’s often alarmingly exciting to find that the really wicked characters have a habit of creating themselves on your page or screen. They simply stroll into your head fully formed and ready for mayhem.

It’s especially shocking when that character is female.

Perhaps it’s the joy of toppling the order of things? After all, aren’t women – at heart – supposed to be empathetic, nurturing, loving and kind? Yes, they can be clever, sparky and opinionated; they can even be that most toe-curling of words ‘feisty’, but how often are they allowed to be truly, diabolically bad?

Despite years of emancipation, there’s still a whiff of sulphur about a woman who’s gone to the dark side. And there’s certainly judgement. Females who step beyond the bounds of good behaviour are regarded with more horror and even perhaps with disgust than bad men because their very existence is a threat. Whisper it, but in their rebellion against the domestic and maternal realm, wicked women are unsettling and unnatural.

It’s enraging that male villains in books frequently get to grandstand and just ‘be’ without too much sensitive exploration of their backstory, while their distaff counterparts must always have suffered terribly at some point in their past – because that’s the only way such an abomination of nature could possibly have come to be.

No writer should even look at anything on Goodreads, but it’s like Pandora’s Box. The temptation to look at reader reviews – not just of your own books – is like a Siren luring you to the crashing rocks of disappointment. Quite often I’ll love a fellow author’s wicked character, but I’ll be amazed to discover that others didn’t share my enthusiasm. All too frequently, people struggle with a book because the main female character made them feel ‘uncomfortable’, or worse they couldn’t ‘sympathise’ with her.

I don’t think Shakespeare wanted us to sympathise with Lady Macbeth, but, oh boy (or should that be ‘oh girl’?) do we remember her! 

In my new neo-Victorian Gothic novel, anti-heroine Marta is wicked to the core. There’s little point in combing through her past to find compelling reasons for her transgressive nature. She was born that way.

Rightly suspected of seducing the son of the local vicar, Marta is sent (banished more like) to Fyneshade, an ancient crumbling medieval house where she is to take up the role of governess to the owner’s motherless daughter. The usual convention of the Gothic novel sees a good girl sent to a terrible nightmarish place, but here Marta brings the darkness with her.

I hope she’s memorable in the best and worst possible ways. As Margaret Atwood rightly says: “Create a flawless character and you create an insufferable one.”

I’m here to stand up for horrible heroines who are just completely themselves. These are some of my favourites.

1. Becky Sharp: Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray. Oh Becky! How do I love thee – let me count the ways. For a start, when I first read this stupendous novel at the age of 13, I’d never come across a central female character in ‘literature’ who was so deliciously wicked.  Becky is basically a charming, clever, beautiful, talented psychopath desperate to rise in society. We know she’s ruthlessly bad to the bone but she is also utterly bewitching, and readers find themselves rooting for her despite their better natures.

2. Rebecca: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. It’s odd that the woman who is dead before the novel even starts becomes such a vividly wicked presence throughout. Although the unnamed heroine of the tale is a mouse-like ingenue, very much in the classic Gothic mode, her haunting predecessor – the former wife of Max de Winter – is the dark star around which all things revolve. Rebecca is gradually revealed as a cool, brittle and heartless seductress whose flame is lovingly tended by her former lady’s maid, Mrs Danvers. Rebecca offers the joy of two exceptional anti-heroines for the price of one.

3. Amy Dunne: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. Here we have the bad girl as the ultimate unreliable narrator. We explore the mysterious disappearance of Amy through the first-person account of her husband, Nick, and, initially, through Amy’s own diary entries. It’s clear that nothing is quite what is seems, but it’s only when the reader reaches the second half of the book that Amy’s shocking, perfectly plotted wickedness is revealed. She’s not only bad, she’s brilliant and although we may not like her, we can only admire the cool precision of her evil genius. Amazing Amy indeed.

4. Scarlett O’Hara: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. I’ll be upfront - this novel has not aged well. With its disturbingly casual racism and rose-tinted vision of America’s brutal deep Southern past it is a difficult read today, but, but… In the character of Scarlett Mitchell created an unforgettable anti-heroine and perhaps set the template for countless fascinatingly amoral, unlikeable females in books. Spoiled, vain and ruthlessly calculating, Scarlet will do anything to get what she wants. Her badness rips through the pages like the Great Fire of Atlanta. 

5. The Marquise de Merteuil: Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. I’ll hazard a guess that although they’re familiar with the film, a lot of people haven’t read this epistolary novel of 1782 - and that’s a pity as it’s quite the page-turner. I came across it at university when it was part of the ‘Development of the European Novel’ course and I immediately fell under the spell of the beautiful, cunning, jealous, spiteful and utterly deadly Marquis whose weapon of choice is sex.

6. Barbara: Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller. Oh my, this is a creepy read. The affair between attractive youngish pottery teacher Sheba and her fifteen-year-old pupil Steven is bad enough, but the predatory, obsessional interest of the aptly named Barbara Covett - the older teacher to whom Sheba confesses - is the stuff of nightmare.Barbara takes it upon herself to record the details of the affair and even uses gold stars to highlight key events. “This is not a story about me,” she says but actually the more she writes about Sheba, the more we learn about Barbara, and it’s quietly, claustrophobically horrifying.

7. Beatrice: Wideacre by Phillipa Gregory. Before the Other Boleyn Girl, there was Wideacre, the 1987 debut by Philippa Gregory, and what a sumptuously decadent and wicked brew it was. Beatrice Lacey is the daughter of the Squire of Wideacre. At five years old she falls passionately in love with her father’s estate and decides to stay there for ever. But her dreams are shattered when she learns that her brother, absent Harry, will inherit. Wilful, wicked, sexy, amoral and ravishingly untouched by anything approaching a conscience, bad beauty Beatrice will do anything to make sure she keeps Wideacre. I love her. This review from the dreaded Goodreads tells you everything you need to know: 

“I absolutely hated this book… The heroine is despicable in every possible way, yet the author clearly expects you to root for her à la Scarlett O’Hara. She commits multiple acts of murder, participates in very creepy incest, and betrays people who love her. I’m not particularly squeamish, but I do require some redeeming qualities in a protagonist if I’m to forgive them all that, and Gregory didn’t provide them.”

Fyneshade is by Kate Griffin (Viper Books) Out Now

Many would find much to fear in Fyneshade's dark and crumbling corridors, its unseen master and silent servants. But not I. For they have far more to fear from me... On the day of her beloved grandmother's funeral, Marta discovers that she is to become governess to the young daughter of Sir William Pritchard. Separated from her lover and discarded by her family, Marta has no choice but to journey to Pritchard's ancient and crumbling house, Fyneshade, in the wilds of Derbyshire.

All is not well at Fyneshade. Marta's pupil, little Grace, can be taught nothing, and Marta takes no comfort from the silent servants who will not meet her eye. More intriguing is that Sir William is mysteriously absent, and his son and heir Vaughan is forbidden to enter the house. Marta finds herself drawn to Vaughan, despite the warnings of the housekeeper that he is a danger to all around him. But Marta is no innocent to be preyed upon. Guided by the dark gift taught to her by her grandmother, she has made her own plans. And it will take more than a family riven by murderous secrets to stop her...

Forthcoming books from Profile Books (Incl Serpent's Tail and Viper Books)

 July 2023

Sanderson's Isle is by James Clarke. 1969. Thomas Speake comes to London to look for his father but finds Sanderson instead, a larger-than-life TV presenter who hosts 'midweek madness' parties where the punch is spiked with acid. There Speake meets Marnie and promises to help her find her adoptive child, who has been taken by her birth mother to live off-grid in a hippie commune in the Lake District. Forced to lie low after a violent accident, Speake joins Sanderson on a tour of the Lake District, where he's researching a book to accompany his popular TV series, Sanderson's Isle. Fascinated by local rumours about the hippies, Sanderson joins the search for their whereabouts. Amid the fierce beauty of the mountains, the cult is forming the kind of community that Speake - a drifter who belongs nowhere - is desperate to find but has been sent to betray.

Elliott has never thought of himself as a hero. Until one dark night he meets Rebecca, a scared and vulnerable young woman who needs his help. There's a man harassing her, following her; would he mind pretending to be her boyfriend, just while she walks home, to put him off? And that is that - just a favour for a stranger - until there is a knock at Elliott's door. It's the man who was following Rebecca. He claims he's her ex-boyfriend, but it's clear that he's been stalking her. He's obsessed, dangerously so. He wants Rebecca, and will do anything to have her. When Elliott eventually tries to tell him the truth, the man doesn't believe him. The only way to save himself is to get Rebecca to explain. There's just one problem: Rebecca is nowhere to be found. And now it looks like one good deed will cost Elliott everything. One Good Deed is by David Jackson.

August 2023

When hate runs deep the innocent suffer. Constable Paul Hirschausen's rural beat in the low hills of South Australia is wide. Daybreak to day's end, dirt roads and dust. Every problem that besets small towns and isolated properties, from unlicensed driving to arson. But now, just as Hirsch has begun to feel he knows the fragile communities under his care, the isolation and fear of the pandemic have warped them into something angry and unrecognisable. Hirsch is seeing stresses heightened and social divisions cracking wide open. His own tolerance under strain; people getting close to the edge. Today he's driving an international visitor around: Janne Van Sant, whose backpacker son went missing while the borders were closed. They're checking out his last photo site, his last employer. A feeling that the stories don't quite add up. Then a call comes in: a roadside fire. Nothing much - a suitcase soaked in diesel and set alight - but two noteworthy facts emerge. Janne knows more than Hirsch about forensic evidence. And the body in the suitcase is not her son's. Day's End is by Garry Disher.

I have a gift. I see people as ghosts before they die. Of course, it helps that I'm the one killing them. The night after her father's funeral, Claire meets Lucas in a bar. Lucas doesn't know it, but it's not a chance meeting. One thoughtless mistyped email has put him in the crosshairs of an extremely put-out serial killer. But before they make eye contact, before Claire lets him buy her a drink, even before she takes him home and carves him up into little pieces, something about that night is very wrong. Because someone is watching Claire. Someone who is about to discover her murderous little hobby. The thing is, it's not sensible to tangle with a part-time serial killer, even one who is distracted by attending a weekly bereavement support group and trying to get her art career off the ground. Let the games begin... You'd Look Better as a Ghost is by Joanna Wallace. 

October 2023

Secrecy came naturally to John le Carre, and there were some secrets that he fought fiercely to keep. Adam Sisman's definitive biography, published in 2015, provided a revealing portrait of this fascinating man; yet some aspects of his subject remained hidden. Nowhere was this more so than in his private life. Apparently content in his marriage, the novelist conducted a string of love affairs over five decades. To these relationships he brought much of the tradecraft that he had learned as a spy - cover stories, cut-outs and dead letter boxes. These clandestine operations brought an element of danger to his life, but they also meant deceiving those closest to him. Small wonder that betrayal became a running theme in his work. In trying to manage his biography, the novelist engaged in a succession of skirmishes with his biographer. While he could control what Sisman wrote about him in his lifetime, he accepted that the truth would eventually become known. Following his death in 2020, what had been withheld can now be revealed. The Secret Life of John le Carre by Adam Sisman reveals a hitherto-hidden perspective on the life and work of the spy-turned-author and a fascinating meditation on the complex relationship between biographer and subject. 'Now that he is dead,' Sisman writes, 'we can know him better.'

Scarlet Town is by Leonora Nattrass. A rigged election. A feuding Cornish town. A suspicious death. And a perspicacious pig. Disgraced former Foreign Office clerk Laurence Jago and his larger-than-life employer the journalist William Philpott have escaped America - and Philpott's many creditors - by the skin of their teeth. They return to Laurence's home town of Helston in Cornwall in the hope of rest and recuperation, but instead find themselves in the middle of a tumultuous election that has the inhabitants of the town at one another's throats. Only two men may vote in this rotten borough, and when one of them dies in suspicious circumstances, Laurence is ordered to investigate on behalf of the town's political patron, his old master the Duke of Leeds. Then the second elector is poisoned and suspicion turns on the town doctor, the gentle Pythagoras Jago, Laurence's own cousin. Suddenly Laurence finds himself ensnared in generations of bad blood and petty rivalries, with his cousin's fate in his hands... 

One dead Santa. A town full of suspects. Will you discover the truth? Christmas in Lower Lockwood, and the Fairway Players are busy rehearsing their festive pantomime, Jack and the Beanstalk, to raise money for the church roof appeal. But despite the season, goodwill is distinctly lacking amongst the amateur dramatics enthusiasts. Sarah-Jane is fending off threats to her new position as Chair, the fibreglass beanstalk might be full of asbestos, and a someone is intent on ruining the panto even before the curtain goes up. Of course there's also the matter of the dead body. Who could possibly have had the victim on their naughty list? Join lawyers Femi and Charlotte as they read the round robins, examine the emails and pore over the police transcripts. Will the show go on? The Christmas Appeal is by Janice Hallett.

November 2023

No Exit is by Simon Lewis. Inspector Jian and his daughter Weiwei just want to go back to their home in China: but Jian is facing a corruption charge in his absence and risks arrest. Instead he tries to scrape a living on London's meanest streets as an illegal immigrant, reduced to hustling Mah Jiang for cash. A bleak future looks to be growing bleaker still when a triad gang blackmail him into tracking down an unlikely young robber. In No Exit Jian and Weiwei scramble between London's grimiest bedsits and its swankiest penthouses as they penetrate the glittering world of 'princelings' - the rich children of the Chinese elite, who treat the city as their playground. Locked in a desperate struggle, with no way out in sight, It will take all their wiles, as well as some lucky gambles, to come out of this latest venture alive.

In a Lonely Place: Reading Men in Early Twentieth Century Crime Fiction

 

I’ve been a voracious reader of early twentieth crime fiction since childhood. Christie was my Blyton. A firm favourite of ten-year-old Natalie was ‘A Pocketful of Rye.’ I’d fallen a little in love with Lance Fortescue – his charm, his sadness – so the abject cruelty and base misogyny of poor Gladys Martin’s murder still haunts me today. There is nothing cosy about Christie. Read between each genteel line and you will see a world riddled with corruption, or to use a word both Marple and Poirot would be comfortable with – evil.

After Christie, came Sayers and another charmer. Lord Peter Wimsey quoted poetry I neither knew nor understood. His speech was affected, and he wore a monocle. However, I liked him. His cleverness, his devotion to, and passion for, Harriet Vane and his war-born vulnerabilities were all fascinating to me.

I was a good way through a Marjory Allingham reading jag when I discovered the Americans. On film, this time, and to be precise through a BBC Humphrey Bogart season. I devoured the great film noirs – The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Key Largo, In a Lonely Place – and was mesmerised by the lurking psychological shadows of war, trauma and social change expressed in both imagery and narrative. I read Hammett and Chandler voraciously. Finding the sociopathic carapace of Sam Spade and the Continental Op disturbing and wild, I preferred Philip Marlowe, that sardonic white knight with a patter in similes so impressive they’d make a writer kick a hole through a library window. Marlowe was a man a bookish girl could love.

I’d read In a Lonely Place not too long after I’d seen the Nicolas Rey film. It was a disappointment. I wanted a Byronic Dix and a tale of thwarted love. The man who said: ‘I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me’ and meant it. But the teenage me got a psychopathic, serial killer Dix. And, strangely, I would’ve sworn the novel was written in the traditional American first person, hardboiled style. It’s not. It’s in third person close. If this seems like an overly technical point, please bear with me.

I think there is a psychological theory which says we form our cultural tastes in adolescence. The type of music we enjoy, the films we love, the sports teams we support, we cherish and protect these first loves way into adulthood, dragging them about like Sebastian Flyte does Aloysius.

So, thirty years later when I began to write a Needless Alley, my love letter to the crime fiction of the period, I knew I’d write some form of noir. And I knew I needed to write from the point of view of a man. Men own the night. It’s why femme fatales do their violence by proxy. Women have partial access to the shadowy corners of noir, and the back-alley beatings, dive bars and private clubs which define noir’s (mostly) urban settings. Importantly, I wanted my detective to uncover a corruption he contributed to. But, in all honesty, I’m interested in those men I read as a young woman. The troubled men of interwar crime fiction. War-worn men, brutalised, violent or giddy, outsiders, bookish, perhaps, and in the case of the Americans, desperately lonely. They work alone. They are alone. Marlowe has no Bunter. Sam Spade would let Hastings bleed out from a gunshot to the gut.

So, let’s get technical. How does a woman write this kind of man? The answer for any writer is to learn from the best. Therefore, I revisited In a Lonely Place. The teenage me was premature in her assessment of the novel. It is what the great Megan Abbott calls, ‘a dark, cold gem of a book.’ In Steele, Dorothy B. Hughes uses third person close to enter the mind of a violent rapist and killer, but with enough distance to enable the reader to see the power of the surrounding women. The strength of Laurel and Sylvia lies in what Dix instinctively knows. They can see the true Dix. Something Brub, the LA detective and Dix’s best friend, cannot do. Hughes rejects the intrinsic self-absorption of the first person, with its powerful associated male noir gaze, to give full scope to the women in the story. 

Needless Alley doesn’t have In a Lonely Place’s icy intensity. I don’t think I have that in me. William Garrett is no hard-boiled hero, and, as much as he is complicit in the exploitation of women, he is no misogynist. He’s soft-boiled. His loneliness, and his disfunction, isn’t a protective carapace, but something he finds painful. And during the novel, something he begins to solve. I suppose I humanised the noir detective, fashioned him to suit my purpose. After all, he is mine. And as William’s inner voice says, ‘He never got the hang of men. He prefers the company of women.’

Needless Alley by Natalie Marlow (John Murray Press) Out Now

Birmingham, 1933. Private enquiry agent William Garrett, a man damaged by a dark childhood spent on Birmingham's canals, specialises in facilitating divorces for the city's male elite. With the help of his best friend - charming, out-of-work actor Ronnie Edgerton - William sets up honey traps. But photographing unsuspecting women in flagrante plagues his conscience and William heaves up his guts with remorse after every job. However, William's life changes when he accidentally meets the beautiful Clara Morton and falls in love. Little does he know she is the wife of a client - a leading fascist with a dangerous obsession. And what should have been another straightforward job turns into something far more deadly. Drenched in evocative period atmosphere and starring an unforgettable cast of characters, Needless Alley takes the reader from seedy canal-side pubs, to crumbling Warwickshire manor houses, and into the hidden spaces of Birmingham's Queer, bohemian society.

You can follow Natalie Marlow on Twitter @NatalieMarlow2

Books to look Forward to from Profile Books (Incl Viper Books)

 January 2022

A murder that no-one wants to solve... Dublin 1986. The murder of an off-duty officer in Phoenix Park should have brought down the full power of the Dublin police force. But Kieran Lynch was found in a notorious gay cruising ground, so even as the press revels in the scandal, some of the Murder Squad are reluctant to investigate. Only Detectives Vincent Swan and Gina Considine are willing to search out the difficult truth, walking the streets of nighttime Dublin to find Kieran's lovers and friends. But Gina has her own secret that means she must withhold vital evidence. When a fire rips through Temple Bar and another man is killed, she must decide what price she is willing to pay to find a murderer. The Burning Boy is by Nicola White.

The Twyford Code is by Janice Hallett. It's time to solve the murder of the century... Forty years ago, Steven Smith found a copy of a famous children's book, its margins full of strange markings and annotations. He took it to his remedial English teacher, Miss Isles, who became convinced it was the key to solving a puzzle. That a message in secret code ran through all Edith Twyford's novels. Then Miss Isles disappeared on a class field trip, and Steven's memory won't allow him to remember what happened. Now, out of prison after a long stretch, Steven decides to investigate the mystery that has haunted him for decades. Was Miss Isles murdered? Was she deluded? Or was she right about the code? And is it still in use today? Desperate to recover his memories and find out what really happened to Miss Isles, Steven revisits the people and places of his childhood. But it soon becomes clear that Edith Twyford wasn't just a writer of forgotten children's stories. The Twyford Code has great power, and he isn't the only one trying to solve it...

February 2022

Who will survive the night? A nightmare jolts Debs awake. She leaves the kids tucked up in their beds and goes downstairs. There's a man in her kitchen, holding a knife. But it's not an intruder. This is her husband Marc, the father of her children. A man she no longer recognises. Once their differences were what drew them together, what turned them on. Him, the ex-army officer from a good family. Her, the fitness instructor who grew up over a pub. But now these differences grate to the point of drawing blood. Marc screams in his sleep. And Debs hardly knows the person she's become, or why she lets him hurt her. Neither of them is completely innocent. Neither is totally guilty. Marc is taller, stronger, and more vicious, haunted by a war he can't forget. But he has no idea what Debs is capable of when her children's lives are at stake... A powerful exploration of a relationship built on passion, poisoned by secrets and violence. Nasty Little Cuts is by Tina Baker

March 2022

You can't escape the desert. You can't escape Sundial. Rob fears for her daughters. For Callie, who collects tiny bones and whispers to imaginary friends. For Annie, because she fears what Callie might do to her. Rob sees a darkness in Callie, one that reminds her of the family she left behind. She decides to take Callie back to her childhood home, to Sundial, deep in the Mojave Desert. And there she will have to make a terrible choice. Callie is afraid of her mother. Rob has begun to look at her strangely. To tell her secrets about her past that both disturb and excite her. And Callie is beginning to wonder if only one of them will leave Sundial alive. Sundial is by Catriona Ward.

April 2022

Begars Abbey is by V L Valentine. A dark house filled with darker secrets. Winter 1954, and in a dilapidated apartment in Brooklyn, Sam Cooper realises that she has nothing left. Her mother is dead, she has no prospects, and she cannot afford the rent. But as she goes through her mother's things, Sam finds a stack of hidden letters that reveal a family and an inheritance that she never knew she had, three thousand miles away in Yorkshire. Begars Abbey is a crumbling pile, inhabited only by Sam's crippled grandmother, Lady Cooper, a housekeeper and a handful of servants. Sam cannot understand why her mother kept its very existence a secret, but her diaries offer a glimpse of a young girl growing increasingly terrified. As is Sam herself. Built on the foundations of an old convent, Begars moves and sings with the biting wind. Her grandmother cannot speak, and a shadowy woman moves along the corridors at night. For there are dark places in the hidden tunnels beneath Begars. And they will not give up their secrets easily...

May 2022

Murder by the Seaside is by Cecily Gayford. It's the height of summer. As the heat shimmers on the streets and ice cream melts onto sticky fingers, tempers begin to rise and old grudges surface. From Cornish beaches to the French Riviera, it's not just a holiday that's on people's minds ... it's murder. In these ten classic stories from writers such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Cyril Hare and Margery Allingham, you'll find mayhem and mysteries aplenty. So grab the suncream and head down to the beach - if you dare.

To tell the truth? Or protect his family? Cornell is having a bad time. Kicked out of secondary school for a fight he didn't start, he finds himself in a Pupil Referral Unit. Here he makes friends with one of the Sinclair family. You don't mess with the Sinclairs, and when Ryan Sinclair demands Cornell comes with him to teach another student some respect, Ryan witnesses something that will change his life. Torn between protecting his family and himself, Cornell has one hell of a decision to make. Witness is by Alex Wheatle.

'There were good people in The Homes. But there were also some very, very bad ones...' A thousand unwanted children live in The Homes, a village of orphans in the Scottish Lowlands on the outskirts of Glasgow. Lesley was six before she learned that most children live with their parents. Now Lesley is twelve, and she and her best friend Jonesy live in Cottage 5, Jonesy the irrepressible spirit to Lesley's quiet thoughtfulness. Life is often cruel at The Homes, and suddenly it becomes much crueller. A child is found murdered. Then another. With the police unable to catch the killer, Lesley and Jonesy decides to take the matter into their own hands. But unwanted children are easy victims, and they are both in terrible danger... The Homes is by J B Mylet.

June 2022

Would you open The Box to save your daughter? Ed Truman's family is falling apart. His daughter Ally is being targeted by an alt-right incel organisation, Men Together. His house is being picketed, former clients are accusing him of sexual assault, his son won't speak to him. And then Ally disappears. Frantic, Ed suspects that Men Together have abducted her. But before he can go to the police, his DNA is found on the body of a young woman. Suddenly he's the subject of a nationwide manhunt, led by the tenacious DCI Jackie Rose. Ed finds himself on the run with Ally's friend, the enigmatic Phoenix, who claims to know where Ally is. But what is the truth? Is Ed a violent sexual predator? Or is he the victim of a ruthless conspiracy? The answers are in The Box. But not everyone who goes in, comes out alive... The Box is by Dan Malakin.