People see what they want to see

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David Henty is an extraordinarily gifted artist who paints copies of paintings by well known artists, such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Monet, Modigliani, Basquiat, Lowry, Rockwell, Sickert, Picasso and many more. Is this art forgery? Not really, because David is transparent about his paintings, signing them on the back and selling them openly as copies – there is no deceit involved.

Norman Rockwell’s Saying Grace by David Henty

David was already copying pictures from books when quite a young child. He remembers a book at home which had a reproduction of Hogarth’s Gin Lane, which he copied when he was around nine or ten years old. He never thought this was unusual, and admits he thought everybody could draw.

When adolescence hit David ‘like a cricket bat to the head’ he, by his own admission, went off the rails and found himself on the wrong side of the law for some years, resulting in a short stretch in prison for forgery. It was during his time in prison that he started to paint in earnest, and discovered an enduring passion for art, which led ultimately to a new direction in life and a legitimate career as  an artist.

David’s paintings are commissioned by all kinds of organisations and individuals around the world, including film companies and television producers, interior designers and private investors. A David Henty copy has a distinct cachet, and sells for several thousand pounds. Some wealthy art investors, who can afford to own an original painting worth millions, like to buy a David Henty copy to hang on their wall, while securing the original in a vault.

Copying another artist’s work is technically extremely difficult, more difficult in some ways than painting a new work from scratch. To produce a copy that is well nigh indistinguishable from the original requires tremendous skill. David’s preparation involves in-depth research into the artist’s technique, their palette, brush strokes and pigments. But the preparation is not just technical, although that is of course essential, and of necessity meticulous and painstaking. The fact is that David cannot paint a copy of an artist’s work until he has achieved an intense, imaginative affinity with the artist’s psyche. This process involves extensive reading, prolonged viewing of the original painting (if accessible), watching documentaries, listening to radio programmes and podcasts, and so forth.  He describes the “flow state” of mind he needs to enter before he can paint, a kind of trance-like immersion in the artist he is copying, which enables him to inhabit the imagination of the artist and consequently replicate their work. If he cannot reach this “flow state” with an artist, he cannot copy their work.

Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus by David Henty

David is passionate about what he does, he is utterly obsessed with art. All he wants to do is paint, and when he can’t do that, all he wants to do is talk about art. Some might argue that copying devalues the original, but David’s remarkable paintings are a deeply-felt tribute to the artists he copies. They are works of art in their own right. However, there is no doubt that the art of copying raises all kinds of uncomfortable questions about the intrinsic value of a painting, as opposed to its market value. If art experts are hard pressed to distinguish a copy from an original, why is one of them worth millions while the other is not? Why does the (supposedly) authentic signature of an artist confer on that painting a vastly inflated market value, as opposed to its exact copy hanging beside it? Of course a prospective buyer wants to have confidence in a picture’s provenance, wants to feel that it comes with a patina of authentic history, touched by the artists’s creative genius. But is the physical picture itself intrinsically more valuable than the copy beside it, which looks exactly the same?

A room full of art

In the western cultural tradition copying is largely frowned upon as an affront to the original artist, or perhaps to a post-Romantic concept of the artist as an inspired individual of genius. In other words, if someone can replicate a Renoir, how can Renoir still be considered special?  And yet despite this disapproval among some connoisseurs, experts, and art critics, there are evidently people happy to pay for a top quality copy by an artist like David Henty, who told me that people who buy his copies value them as an authentic piece of art, with the texture and physical presence of a painting, as opposed to a machine-generated print.

We can only wonder how many alleged originals hanging in galleries around the world may not be what they are claimed to be. And yet visitors to those galleries, blissfully unaware of that possibility, will stand in admiration before great paintings and experience their beauty and power regardless. As David repeatedly says in his book Art World Underworld: ‘people see what they want to see’.

 

Pictures provided by David Henty and Rosalind Esche

 

David Henty was born in Brighton in 1958. During a short stint in prison over 30 years ago for forgery, David discovered his passion for art. He has been painting copies of famous paintings by renowned artists, and creating his own renditions of ‘undiscovered works in the style of the artist’ ever since.

 

#davidhenty #artworldunderworld #artforgery #artcrime #brightonartists #crimefiction #crimewriters #brightonauthors #peterjames #roygraceseries #pictureyoudead

Graham Bartlett talks about his second calling

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There’s a powerful sense of frustration in your book Bad For Good with cuts to the police, the merger of police authorities, and officers being stretched to the limit. In your plot that leads to vigilantism – do you think that is a real threat?

I definitely think it’s a real threat. I think the police are being not only cut to dangerous levels, but also the expectation is being spread too thin, so they’re forever dealing with mental health, they’re dealing with basically non police issues, and because they’re 24/7 they’re the service of first and last resort. I’ve not seen vigilantism on the scale that I portray in Bad for Good, it was supposed to be something that could happen in the future, it is a work of fiction, but I can honestly see that if things don’t start to improve the public will just get fed up with calling the police and they’re not turning up, or not turning up quickly enough, or not having the resources to do a thorough job, and just think “You know what? We’re going to take it into our own hands. We know who’s making our life a misery on this estate so we’ll send a couple of big boys around and sort them out”. I think that’s a very real possibility, and it’s obviously hugely scary.

It’s very frightening in the book, but you can understand why people might turn to private security firms instead of waiting for hours for the over-stretched police to turn up because they haven’t got the resources to cope with demand.

They haven’t, and if you speak to them they are literally run ragged, they’re not sitting around waiting for work. They’re not getting a meal break, they’re rarely off on time, they’re being run from pillar to post every day, every night.

How many police officers down are they?

I think it’s about 20%, something like that, which is a huge number to cut. Sussex Police was 3000, so 20% would bring it down to what, 2400? I had 600 police officers in Brighton and Hove, so that’s 600 police officers you’ve removed, so basically, across Sussex, you’ve removed the entire police complement of Brighton and Hove. But of course what you also do, and this goes back to an earlier question, you lose a lot of experience. You can’t make police officers redundant because they’re not employees, it’s kind of antiquated, they hold an office, they’re not employees, so you can’t make them redundant, there’s no way to do that. What you can do is you can make them retire when they reach retirement age and so a lot of people were forced to retire when they might not otherwise have retired. And a lot of experienced people chose to leave as well because they just thought “Do you know what, I just can’t do this anymore.” So you lost all the experience and then you have the [government saying] “We’re going to invest millions of pounds in new police officers.” Well, first of all, all you’re doing is bringing it somewhere close to the numbers there were before (but not when the cuts started) and secondly, you’re bringing in new people, so you’re bringing in people that you’re going to need to vet, train, deploy, develop and then eventually promote. If you think you’re getting rid of people that are inspectors or chief inspectors, that will take years to replace those properly, and all of the air bubbles that that causes through the system, it takes 15 years to do that.

The merging of police authorities means they have fewer resources between them, doesn’t it?

Yes, but I think there are some benefits of that. You have a system where you’ve got 43 police forces across the UK, including the Met and the City of London, the two London forces. On each of those forces, with the exception of those two, you have a police and crime commissioner, which is an elected person who replaced police authorities, you have a chief constable, you have a group of chief officers, you have a director of finance, director of HR for each of those forces. Now some of those forces are huge, really, really busy, and probably warrant all of that. And you have other forces of 1000 police officers, tiny forces that still have that same infrastructure, so I think there is some benefit in structurally merging and creating some rationalisation at those higher levels, but not at the expense of the operational levels.

In the book you have an officer driving from Kent to Sussex who won’t get where he’s needed for a couple of hours.

Well that again is looking into the future. Surrey and Sussex share their Major Crime Team, which is where we first meet Jo. In the book she’s head of Major Crime for Surrey and Sussex, so I stretched it and added Kent and  Hampshire.

You could have an officer who lives in Dover and they pick up a murder in the New Forest, that’s still on their patch, and it’s going to take them most of the day to get there. If you have an officer who’s living in Woking or Guildford who’s got to get to Hastings, that’s still a long way, so there are issues with merging operational units, but I think there are opportunities to make savings to reinvest at the operational level.

What made you want to make your detective a woman?

It was stupidity ’cause it was so hard! It was so hard to write, but I wanted to. Obviously I’ve done the role that Jo is doing, not quite the same circumstances, but I had done that role and people know that I’ve done that role. I’ve been the divisional commander here, so I didn’t want people to think “Oh, this is just autobiographical. He’s just using it as a cathartic exercise”.

But also I did actually want to explore something about how it was different for women both in terms of what they go through, but also what they offer, because I’m what you would think was out of central casting of a senior police officer. I’m a white, middle aged, straight, middle class bloke. So I know what it’s like to do this job, I did it for four years, but I don’t know what it’s like to do it as a woman. So when I was writing Jo I wanted to explore a lot of that, but I also wanted to give her greater depth and I think there’s more opportunity to do that with women. I think you’re able to show their strengths better, I think you can authentically show their emotive response better because they do tend to be more honest with their emotions than blokes.

There’s a scene where she’s being vilified in the press after a press conference and her husband Darren, who’s a journalist, is going “Look, it’s still headlines” and she’s going “No, they all think I’m useless” and she’s able to say that kind of thing.

I had a really, really useful person help me on this who’s a woman called Di Roskilly, who was the divisional commander for East Sussex after I’d gone. She’s a wonderful, wonderful human being, she’s just amazing. She read it and I thought she’d say “Just do this here, tweak that there” but her reply to me was “I think we need a Zoom call” so I’m thinking “Oh my God! I’ve been called to the head teacher’s office!” So we have this Zoom call and essentially what she was saying is that you’ve got most of the external pressures just about right, you kind of understand that it was harder for me than it would have been for you, and there are challenges around child care that you probably didn’t have, even though we both did it when we had young children. It’s easier for me to do a Darren and wander off and do my job than it was for her, even though her husband is a fantastic bloke, he’s a police officer, really nice bloke. But she said “What you haven’t touched on at all is the internal pressures, the guilt”. A lot of the impostor syndrome that Jo suffers from came from Di – you know, she’s thinking, “Somehow I’ve managed to find my way into this role, but I’m not ready for it.” Jo says to Gary “People think you should have got the job, and maybe they’re right“ or something like that. That’s the sort of thing that she’d be feeling, almost like “Have I been put in this role for tokenism rather than because of ability?” and so I was delighted that Di guided me on that because I wanted to get that depth, because it’s a continuing story and I wanted to mine that even deeper in the second book. You can develop that and I just think it’s interesting. When I decided to write that character as a woman I made a pact with myself to do it as well as possible and to really open my eyes and understand.

What made you decide to write in the first place? Have you always wanted to write?

No, no!

Did that happen because you were helping other authors?

Yeah, it’s Peter James’s fault, it’s down to him, I blame him! So what happened was in my last year or so in the police the chief constable and deputy chief constable were very keen on the divisional commanders blogging, everyone was into blogging, Twitter had just come out, they wanted to get a bit of a social media presence and people blogging. So we were all up for that, it’s a good idea, a good way of getting your thoughts down, getting your voice out there, so I wrote a few blogs and published them.

You sent those to Peter, didn’t you?

I sent them to Peter. I really enjoyed it, and one of them the Argus picked up and they said “Do you mind if we use this as a page 8?” which is their guest page, or it was at the time. It was about running towards danger rather than away, and it was all connected with an off duty Essex officer who got killed because there was a knife man in his street, and everyone else is running away and he’s running towards it, and I wrote a few hundred words on why someone would do that, why the police do that, and why you find yourself in the middle of something where you think “God how did I get here? I’m in danger!” So I said to the Argus “By all means if you want to publish it, yeah, but I don’t want you to edit anything out of it because there’s a lot of meaning in there, but if you want to improve the writing, the English or whatever, crack on” and they said “No, no, it’s absolutely fine as it is.” So I thought “Oh, maybe I could write some articles or whatever when I leave the police” so I sent it to Peter and Peter said “Actually, you’ve got quite a good style, it’s not commercial yet, but you could really work with it” and then a couple of months later he came up to me and said “I’ve been chatting to my agent and publisher, would you write a non fiction [book] with me?” So it took off from there. So I started it and it was a struggle to start, I really, really struggled to find my voice, to get a rhythm going and all of that. But once I got into it, I absolutely loved it and now it feels like a sort of second calling really, you know? It’s all I think about day in, day out, which annoys my wife ’cause I should be thinking about the shopping and the gardening and stuff like that.

And you’re just thinking!

Yeah, musing!

So Peter encouraged you and worked with you and spotted your talent, but how long had you been working with him before you got to that point?

Probably a couple of years, three years.

And how did that happen?

Well he already had a relationship with Sussex Police through Dave Gaylor, and when Dave left other people took on the mantle, and because of the job I was doing, and he based his books in Brighton, it was very much a case of, doing the role I did, the chief wanting us to kind of facilitate Peter. Peter’s a lovely, lovely fellow and really easy to get along with, so we just became friends really.

I’d guide him on certain things, and we let him go and spend some time with particular units if we felt it was appropriate. So we just became friends really, but I didn’t start officially advising him until I left the police and started to read his books through in draft form. And from that, once we published Death Comes Knocking, the crime writing community got to hear about how I worked with Peter and then they all came to me and asked me to do the same for them. And it’s been like a full time job ever since.

So you’ve got a big client base now?

Yeah, it really is.

Do you still advise him or have you handed him over to someone who’s still in the police?

No, I still advise him. Dave does a lot of the development work with him because they’ve been doing it for years, but I’ll pick up particular things, I’ll go through all his manuscripts twice and just check them for authenticity. We’re always talking, we were talking the other day about plot and character and that sort of thing, always on the phone to one another. But one of the things that I’m really, really conscious of is that I have been gone for a while now, so I do have to make sure that my knowledge is up to date.

I keep in touch with a lot of current officers, a lot of recently retired officers, and actually doing the work keeps you up to date because if someone asks you a question you think “Oh, I think I know what happens there” and then you go and research it and you find that actually it’s changed a little bit.

So an example of that is when I was in the police, one of the discipline outcomes up until about 1996 included reduction in rank, so if you were a sergeant or above you could be demoted. That then went in 1996, and it actually came back at the end of 2020. I don’t know why I checked it, somebody asked me “can you be demoted as a police officer?’ so I must have got a whisper or something, ’cause I went and researched and I think about a month before, the law had changed and you could again, after all that time. So actually doing the advising and being assiduous in my own research on behalf of other people, helps me keep up to date.

Has it been a big culture shock moving from the culture of the police to the literary world of publishers and authors and literary agents? 

Yes it has. Obviously in the police you’re surrounded by people all the time, and you’re kind of bouncing off people and you’re getting feedback, even if it’s subtle feedback, from people about your own performance. So if you were in the middle of doing something like running a big policing [operation] or a big protest or something like that, and you said you wanted to do something and you voiced that, and you’ve got someone next to you you trust and they’re going “Oh”, immediately you think “maybe that’s wrong.” If you’re writing a book, you don’t get any feedback until you send it to your agent, if you’re lucky enough to have an agent!

I need to be careful about saying this but basically in the police people are very responsive, so whatever rank I was, if I sent an email to you and said “are you able to do this for me?” you’d reply back yes or no, you’d tell me straightaway. Or if you were my boss and said “Graham, we need you to come in at 6:00 tomorrow morning, really sorry if that’s awkward, but need you in” I’ll be in at 6:00 tomorrow morning. In the publishing world the urgency to respond to needy authors like me is not quite as great as I’d expect. It’s not bad, I mean, I’ve got great publishers, they are very good, but it is a culture shock. And at the end of the day what I’m doing is not life and death, and sometimes in the police it can be.

Sometimes I say to David Headley, my agent, “Should we chase this up?” and he’s “No, it’s fine, it’s fine, just don’t worry about it, this is quite normal”. And then you speak to other authors and they go “No it’s fine, don’t worry, that’s just how it all works.” So there’s a bit of that, and it’s a bit of getting used to lone working.

What a different world you’re in!

It is, it’s really different. I did feel that the police was a calling and it was a calling, as I said, there was no plan B. And I feel I’ve had a second calling now, and if anything my only frustration at the moment is that I don’t have enough time to write, I’d love to write more.

Are you writing the next Jo Howe book?

I’m writing the next but one, so the second one is already written, it’s just waiting for copy edits to come back from the publishers, it comes out next year, and then hopefully if this one [Bad For Good] sells well, and the next one, hopefully they’ll offer me another contract and I’ll be able to write some more. I’ve started writing the third one, so I’m getting ahead of the game.

So you knew it was going to be a series when you started?

Yeah, I don’t know how long. It’s interesting because I was at this event last night, there were two authors that have got very long series, Mark Billingham and Tim Weaver, and both of them were saying “We thought three or four books and that would be it”. I think Tim’s on about 12 or 13, Mark’s on about 21 in the series!

If they’re still enjoying it, that’s fine, isn’t it?

Yeah, they still go through the “I’m gonna get found out, I haven’t got another story in me” but they just recognise that as part of the process. But they write a fresh, and often a better, book every time. And they do still enjoy it, and they do write the odd standalone in between just to keep themselves fresh.

That’s what amazes me about Peter James’s books. When I asked him about this, he explained how he keeps it fresh for himself by learning new things. He loves to learn about something, such as art forgery, do a lot of research and then write a book, and that keeps him going. His books never dip in quality.

No, no. He’s obviously got a great set of characters there and people invest in characters. You know you can have the best story in the world, but if they don’t care about your characters they’re not going to read it. So Peter’s got fabulous characters that he keeps deep and nuanced, and you can have empathy with all of them. You know the art forgery one that’s coming out, it’s just inspired. He’s about three or four books ahead, in terms of what’s in his head.

Why did you retire when you did, did you have to go after 30 years?

I’d done 30 years. So about a year before I was due to leave, Sussex Police brought in this kind of enforced retirement, ’cause it’s the only way they could get officer numbers down, because it was at the beginning of the cuts, so they were requiring people to retire when they reached pensionable age.

A sort of side story here, it was my job as a divisional commander to serve the notices on the people who were having to retire, and most of them didn’t want to go. I had tears in the office and everything. One of the people that I had to serve a notice to was that officer I was talking about earlier that got the Queen’s Police Medal, so she got the Queen’s Police Medal one week, and in the next week she’s in my office getting served the papers that she had to leave, that was awful.

I didn’t want to go at that point, I thought “No, I want to stay on. I’m still quite young, I’ve got lots to give still” but as the months went on I thought “Yeah ok, I’ve got my head round it now and I’ll find something.”

About six months before I was due to retire they announced that in two months’ time they were going to stop this thing, it was a regulation called A19.

What year was that?

This was in 2012. So everyone was saying to me “Oh, that’s great, they’ve ditched A19 in Sussex, now you don’t have to go” and I said “Do you know what? My head’s gone, now my head is out the door, I’m left, I’ve made that decision and I can’t rethink it, that I’m going to stay for another four or five years, or whatever.” So I didn’t have to go, but the circumstances kind of pushed me in that direction. Then I took my own decision to leave when I did.

Did you already have this other career in mind, perhaps?

No, no, I don’t think I’ve ever thought this has been a career until about three years ago. I mean, I was doing a lot of safeguarding work when I left, I was chairing safeguarding boards, I was undertaking safeguarding reviews. I still do some of that, so still very much in the criminal justice world. But then the writing and the advising started to take over and it’s almost full time now. It’s mainly advising but a lot of writing as well, I’m trying to bring it to 50/50, that’s my aim. With a bit of time for myself in there too.

You’ve had a really good, strong family life, haven’t you? You talk about that in one of your books, that that was such a help, because a lot of police marriages suffer from the stress and strain of the work.

Yeah, I’ve been very lucky, we’ve been married 30 years, we’ve got 25 year old triplets, they’re just an absolute blessing, they’ve grown into such wonderful young men and young woman, just so proud of them.

As far as possible I’ve tried to put my family first. I think the more senior you are, although I was a sergeant when we had the children, so I wasn’t very senior then, but the more senior you are, the more you can engineer your diary a little bit better. I don’t think I ever missed a birthday. I always made sure I took leave on the birthday, I only had one birthday to worry about in a year! I went to as many school things as I possibly could, sometimes I couldn’t. But I think by trying to work it out that you can, it’s surprising how much time you can give to your family.

I was able to come home and talk about things that had happened, but I also didn’t allow it to kind of consume family life. Sometimes things completely overcome you. You’ve read Death Comes Knocking about the cot death, that’s an example that completely devastated me. But I tried to have this view that my family’s my family, they were a good release for me but at the end of the day they needed me as a dad and as a husband more than they needed me as somebody to counsel. And one of my sons is in the police now, he’s a police officer in mid Sussex.

Carrying on the family tradition?

Yeah, he’s loving it. He’s been in just over two years but he moans like a veteran, he’s fabulous!

Is that part of the deal?

Oh God yeah. I hear myself through him so much, I used to sound like that!

 

 

GRAHAM BARTLETT was a police officer for thirty years and is now a bestselling writer. He rose to become chief superintendent of the Brighton and Hove force as well as its police commander. He entered the Sunday Times Top Ten with his first non-fiction book, Death Comes Knocking – Policing Roy Grace’s Brighton in 2016. He followed that up in 2020 with another non-fiction book, Babes in the Wood, the harrowing 32-year fight to bring a double child killer to justice. Both these books he co-wrote with international best seller, Peter James.
As well as writing, Bartlett is a police procedural and crime advisor helping scores of authors and TV writers (including Mark Billingham, Elly Griffiths, Anthony Horowitz, Ruth Ware, Claire McGowan and Dorothy Koomson) achieve authenticity in their drama.

 

#crimefiction #crimewriters #detectivefiction #brightonauthors #grahambartlett #badforgood #policeprocedural #peterjames #roygraceseries

Graham Bartlett, bestselling author and advisor to crime writers, talks about his police career

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I thought we could start with your police career, Graham. Could you tell me why you wanted to join the police?

All I ever wanted to do was join the police, my uncle was in the old Brighton Borough Police and it came from him really. He used to come round to our house, he was traffic police, and he used to go dashing off when the radio went out, it was exciting so it just kind of grew from there, and my dad was a volunteer police officer. There was never a plan B really, and I think that worried my parents because you know, same with any job, you’re not necessarily going to get the first job you go for. I said to them, “Well, if I don’t get into Sussex Police, there’s 42 other forces that I can try and I will”. And I was lucky, I got into Sussex.

It sounds a bit clichéd, but I just wanted to work where I could help people, where I could make a difference. I didn’t fancy the idea of being in an office, although that’s obviously where I ended up when I got more senior. So, it was a worthwhile career to embark on, I was only 18 so I had no life experience at all and that was a bit of a challenge, but I soon learnt it!

So you learned on the job and went on training courses as well?

So locally our initial training was at Ashford in Kent, that was the regional training centre. So we went there for 10 weeks’ residential, home at weekends, then you come back to your force, do a couple of weeks just understanding the local procedures and then you’re on to your police division. I was at Bognor Regis first of all, 18 and a half, wet behind the ears, out with a tutor constable. I wasn’t allowed out on my own until I was 19, so I had a very long tutorship.

That’s young! You could come up against anything.

Well, that’s right, but you do have to learn on your feet really. You go on courses throughout your probation and throughout your whole career, but you do have to learn from how you do things. I was no size, I was very young and I was often walking the streets on Saturday night in Bognor, knowing that my backup was quite some way away, and I knew straightaway that I was never going to fight my way out of any situation, so I had to develop a kind of gift of the gab, and just learn to use humour and very fast lips to get myself out of trouble!

And did that work?

Yeah it did, I never got assaulted in those days. In fact it wasn’t until two years later when I came down to Brighton that I actually got assaulted and that wasn’t that serious. I got abuse, people used to chant “Does your mum know you’re out?” and things like that as I was walking down the street, but I kind of laughed it off, I couldn’t do anything else really. There was no point in me turning around and facing off a gang of 25 year olds, so I’d just laugh it off and say “well, I’ll phone  her when I get to the next phone box and let her know”!

Did you ever feel anxious or were you quite confident?

I did have anxiety at times. I think you’d be a bit strange if you were going into a violent situation, or a shop’s been broken into and you’re going in to try and see if anyone’s still in there, if you didn’t feel a little bit of fear, but you just have to go through that, really, you have to work through that. I remember my tutor constable saying to me that “people call the police ’cause there’s no one else left to call. So if we don’t do it who else is going to?” So you’ve got to step up, and that was how I ran my career and how I taught other officers as well as I went through.

I’ve read that you went up through every rank during your career.

I was every rank in Brighton and Hove. So Brighton and Hove has officers from police constable to chief superintendent, and most people that arrived at the chief superintendent rank hadn’t fulfilled every rank in Brighton and Hove. I sort of darted in and out occasionally, but I served every rank in Brighton and Hove in some capacity.

What was your favourite rank? What did you enjoy doing most?

I think enjoyment-wise probably detective sergeant, that’s a great rank because you’ve got just enough seniority, it’s the second tier, so you’ve got enough seniority to pick and choose a little bit of what you’re going to do, but also you’re low enough down the ranks to actually go out and do it. Once you get to inspector, certainly chief inspector, you’re more or less office bound. It’s not all admin, but you’re running big investigations, I describe it as you’re like a project manager, really, particularly if you’re a Senior Investigating Officer on a murder, you’re project managing so many strands to investigate that murder you don’t get out, but detective sergeant was a great job, I loved it. And I worked with some brilliant people in Brighton and Hove at that rank.

So you don’t get out at all once you reach a certain level, or can you? This comes up in Peter James’s Roy Grace books doesn’t it, that Grace still likes to get out and be in the thick of it.

Yes, and detective superintendents don’t normally go out, but it’s within their gift to go out if they want some fresh air or they want a bit of excitement, and Peter’s built his whole series on the fact that Grace does that. In my book, Bad for Good, Jo Howe does that once or twice, which is kind of the norm really. But you don’t get out very often, but the pressures and the variety come in different forms. So if there was a massive protest closing down Brighton and Hove, or a dynamic firearms incident or something like that, I’d probably be in charge of that, but from the police station, because that’s the best place for me to command from.

Some people prefer to stay in response their whole career, don’t they, because they like the variety and the excitement?

Yes, and it’s a very noble ambition to do that, you know. A lot of people say to me “they’ve been a constable for 20 years, they can’t be very good” but it’s quite the contrary, it’s because they are very good at it, and they enjoy it, and they could be role models for people coming through. We had an officer here in Brighton, she joined I think slightly before me, and she did 30 years 24/7 response and never did anything else. And in the end we put her up for a Queen’s Police Medal, and she was in the honours list one year because of her dedication to frontline response. She was a role model, particularly for women coming through, dealing with all of the pressures there were particularly around in the ’80s and ’90s, she was great for that.

Can you think of some of the major changes you experienced in your career, good and bad?

The forensics have just changed beyond all recognition. DNA hadn’t even been discovered as an investigative tool when I joined the police in ‘83, you had fingerprints and blood grouping and that was it really, so that was huge. And technology in surveillance, surveillance used to be sticking people behind somebody and following them around. There’s a bit of that now, but most of it is technical because of phones, CCTV, all kinds of data sources, you’ve got telematics in your car, all those sorts of things. So technology has made things not easier so much, but certainly it’s given greater opportunities to be able to catch people.

I think the negatives – I could talk about the police numbers and the cuts – but I think there is a lack of respect for the police now, and it’s not just the police that suffer. I think some people seem to think that because they know a little bit about a profession, be that being a police officer, a journalist, a politician, that they’re entitled to portray that they know everything, so criticism comes much quicker. There’s not much empathy for the police nowadays. I was talking to somebody the other day, who was making quite a difficult arrest in a shopping centre and they managed to get the chap restrained in the end, and he said that he was just surrounded by people on their phones taking video of it, no one coming to help. I certainly remember in my young days, not just me because I looked like a kid, but with other people as well, you’d quite often get members of the public coming in and just helping you hold someone while you got the handcuffs on.

Why do you think that is? Is this a general sort of malaise about authority, or is it because of high profile cases in the media about the Met?

Yes, I think there’s a lot of that. I think people have lost a lot of respect for the police because of some of the dreadful things that individual officers have done, and in some cases, cultures within particular forces. So there’s not that unconditional respect that there used to be. But the way these things are reported leads people to believe that that is the norm, and I genuinely don’t think it’s like that.

People do talk as if the whole of the police force is bad in some way because of individuals like those at Charing Cross. But there are thousands of police officers, clearly they’re not all going to be like that.

No, they’re not. When I was here in Brighton and Hove I had about six hundred officers on my division and I think about three or four hundred civilians, and I was proud of every single one of them, I really was. And the odd one or two that erred, I remember people coming to us, to myself as commander (it’s a big thing to come to me, even though I’m quite a warm and friendly person, I hope!) and they would make a complaint about a fellow officer who they thought had used excessive force, or who was cheating the system in some way. Police officers despise officers that are corrupt or violent, or bullies, as much as the public do, and will do everything to root them out.

It’s a shame then, isn’t it, that this is the public image of the police at the moment? What do you think can be done about it?

I think it’s down to policing to show that it’s not that, and actually in the main it never was that. Everybody joins the police at least to do good, to be fair and to be equitable and to treat people well. Some people veer from that at some stage, but very few. So it’s up to the police, I think, to show that they’ve changed, and certainly some of the things that are going on in London at the moment, you have to question how long that can take, how long those opinions will take to change and how much proof needs to happen. I think it’s seismic.

I heard the Secret Barrister say on his radio broadcast that all the police he’d ever met and worked with were decent, good people trying to do their best in a difficult job. 

I’d agree with that. I’ve met some incompetent police officers in my time, and I’ve met one or two that have let themselves down because they’ve been lazy or distracted and therefore dropped the ball. I’ve met one or two who were violent, but they’ve all been dealt with. I mean they’re found out quite quickly, but by their peers, not by people like me, their peers will find them out, because with the majority, the overwhelming culture in the police is hard work, courage and standing in between good and evil.

People must be reluctant though to grass up their colleagues, aren’t they? The police is quite a family, quite a cohesive culture.

You’d think that but my experience is no, they’re not, they’re not reluctant at all. There is this kind of myth that professional standards departments are hated because they chase down corrupt officers. You know that there’s nothing officers detest more than somebody that is corrupt or lazy or uses too much force or whatever.

Because it gives everyone a bad name, doesn’t it?

It does, yes. I’ve been on the streets when there’ve been scandals elsewhere in the force and it comes straight back to you, you know “you’re all the same”. I know that when Wayne Cousins was identified as being Sarah Everard’s killer police officers were getting vilified on the streets, and actually the judge in that trial said that it was one of the most thorough and tenacious investigations (I can’t remember if those were the exact words) that he’d ever seen. And it was the Met that caught him, the Met caught one of their own.

And yet people talk about it as if that’s a cultural norm, but the reason it’s such a shock is that it isn’t the norm, surely?

No, it definitely isn’t the norm. There were some stupid people that don’t deserve to be in the organisation who got involved in WhatsApp chats around it, and there are police officers in prison now for taking photos of dead bodies and sharing them. That is stupid, it’s criminal and it can’t be tolerated. But you know, I’ve never met anyone who’s done that. I’ve never met anyone who’s met anyone who’s done that. It is rare.

Has the culture changed a lot since you were in the police, or are you saying it didn’t really need to change that much?

No, no, I think it has changed in a lot of ways. I think in the early ’80s, certainly the force was a lot less tolerant of diversity at that time. I can almost picture now every woman officer that was at Bognor, I can’t picture every man officer, but there were so few women I can picture them now nearly 40 years on. We had no officers of colour there at all, none, no out gay officers, be they male or female, certainly no transgender or gender neutral people at all that were out, so that was really, really tricky for people that were part of those demographics. Until the Police and Criminal Evidence Act came in in 1986 the police was less accountable, so what went on in interview rooms wasn’t really seen too much. But I served three years in that pre-period and I didn’t see anyone being beaten up or thrown in a cell for days or anything like that. It must have happened because that’s one of the reasons why the Act came in, but it wasn’t prolific, certainly in my experience it wasn’t prolific.

What do you say to people on the street ,after some awful case, who say you are all the same?

Well, if they are prepared to hang around and have a conversation with you, which often they’re not, then I would try and speak to them and say “look, do you really think that we aren’t as repulsed as you are by this, do you really think that we support those officers, do you really think that this is something that the police service wants within its ranks?” But whether they listen or not, quite often in this day and age people are very quick to make their minds up and not change them.

There’s been a lot of noise in the media about how people are screened to get into the police after the Sarah Everard case and those awful incidents at Charing Cross. Is there a problem with screening, or is it just that now and then someone will go bad?

I don’t think there’s a huge issue with the vetting of people coming into the service. Only 5% of people that apply actually get in, it’s very few, 5% that start the application, because there are various kinds of trapdoors throughout it, and the first one is around your values and beliefs. It’s multi choice questions around values and beliefs, and you can’t hide in those ones, they’re not obvious.

You couldn’t lie your way through them and convince everybody?

You get about 60 questions and the algorithm would find you out. Then those that do get in, a proportion of those don’t get through their first two years, not a huge proportion because the police want to keep them. But I think there’s a lot of that at that early end, a lot of vetting and a lot of scrutiny for the first two years, and I think the cultures that we see reported in places like Charing Cross, develop over a long period of time. It’s having the systems and the abilities, and the right people to be able to spot when things are starting to get out of hand, and that’s a leadership issue, there’s no question about that. That’s down to sergeants, inspectors, everybody of rank, plus experienced constables, to go “hang on a minute, we don’t talk like that here, that’s not how we behave here.” And that takes courage and it also takes support. So if you’ve got a sergeant who’s brave enough to do that, yet their inspector is out drinking with the lads later on that day, it leaves you a bit vulnerable.

What’s your attitude to graduate entrance? Do you think it’s a good thing to have different routes into the police?

Yes, definitely a good idea to have different routes in. I think the police recruited from the same pool before, you know ex-military and kids really when I joined, and obviously I fell into the latter.

I’m not a big fan of people having to be graduates to come in, or even having to do a degree to get through their probation, which is what they have to do at the moment, because some people just aren’t suited to academic study. I’ve worked with some incredible people that really struggled to get through even their basic probationary courses. I was at Bognor, as I said, and down there you had people who were at the Royal Military Police barracks in Chichester, a lot of people out of the navy in Portsmouth, a lot of them lived in the Chichester area and around there, and they joined the police and worked with me in Bognor. They were fabulous police officers but not academic in any way, so I think you need a mix.

I’m not a big fan of direct entry at senior rank. I think that is something which is going to cause some big issues going forward.

How does that work?

Well, you can join as a superintendent, or you can join as an inspector, with no background in policing. The people that I’ve met who’ve gone in that route are lovely people, clever people, they’re bright and they bring a different perspective, but my worry is, when I was in senior command roles, I would sit there sometimes  – it can be quite a lonely place to be – drawing on every ounce of my 30 years’ experience that went before, knowing what it’s like.

If you’ve got a group of six officers trying to stop a mob invading Brighton Town Hall because they want to disrupt the council meeting, I’ve been there, I know what that feels like, so I know the impact of the decisions that I’m making at a strategic level, and how that’s going to affect the people that are actually standing there taking the bricks. So I’m not a big fan, but what I am a big fan of is very early talent spotting. Let’s start to identify the bright and the best as they come in and accelerate them through the system, expose them to all of the experiences and the challenges that they’re going to need when they are operating at that high level. But not just parachute them in, I just worry about the officers themselves, and I worry about the public in those situations.

How long has it been the case that people with no policing experience whatsoever can enter at high level ranks?

About eight years, it was just after I left that that came in. I was very vocal on local radio about that, which is interesting, because the then Chief Constable Giles York was very vocal in favour of it, and he’s actually a friend of mine, so we agreed to differ on that!

Do you have any feelings about the criminal justice system being broken, as people say, and about the prison system? I’m thinking of Bob Heaton in your book, who is so shocked at what he sees in prison that he doesn’t want to work for the police anymore.

That’s right, he decides that he’s not going to subject people to these bullies, and some of the bullies aren’t always on the wrong side of the door. I think the theoretical model of our criminal justice system is very good in terms of the onus is on the prosecution to prove beyond doubt that the defendant is guilty. There are some obligations on the defence to flag up what their defence is likely to be, and there’s disclosure obligations both ways. I think the bureaucracy of it designs in justice denied for people. I think particularly now when you’ve got such a backlog because of Covid, that you’re not going to get somebody to trial for a year at least.

That’s terrible.

It is terrible. And in a lot of those cases you’ve got innocent people on remand in prison who may be acquitted. And if they are acquitted, they’ll just be told “you’re free to go” and there’s no comeback for them.

I think prison is a good place to protect the public, so putting violent people in there, putting sexual offenders in there, because I think the public do need protection. I think as a mode of punishment and rehabilitation it just doesn’t work. When you look at people who are imprisoned for non violent offences, for offences against justice in some cases, for contempt of court or something like that, I’m not saying they shouldn’t be punished, but is that really a place for somebody like that, for fraudsters, white collar criminals? You put them in prison for five years, what’s that actually doing? The way to hurt fraudsters is to go after their money, go after their assets, that’s what’s really going to hurt them. It’s just a very expensive kind of warehouse, really, and more often than not people that go in come out worse.

And we have more, don’t we, in prison than most countries in Europe?

Certainly in Europe I believe, yes, but we tend to use it with impunity and for no good reason.

So you’re fairly jaded about any rehabilitation that could take place in prisons, you don’t believe it works?

No, I don’t think it works. I think you have to have quite a long sentence to even get on the first rung of rehabilitation in prison. Short sentences don’t work. If you’re a drug addict and you commit a theft or robbery, and you get six months, you’re getting no rehabilitation in there. You’re probably going to get your hands on more drugs in there than you could out, and you’re going to come out without a job, without a home, without money, possibly without a family and with a raging drug habit, and there’s one place you’re going and that’s back again, and it’s just crazy. I get very agitated about it!

And they just get shoved out the door, and that’s it, there’s no support at all?

Well, they have probation. If they’ve been sentenced to a year they come out on licence, but under a year they come out at the halfway point and they get post-sentence supervision. It’s not on licence, it’s basically keeping an eye on them, they don’t really do anything much other than to make sure they’re not offending and they’re living where they’re supposed to live, they can’t, they’re as underfunded as everybody else.

How can drugs be so prevalent in prison?

Well, there are so many ways of getting drugs in. Prison officers themselves will tell you, despite they have these chairs that visitors sit on that they’re supposed to X-ray and find drugs or phones or whatever, it even gets in there. There’s talk of prison officers bringing it in. There’s spice, which is synthetic cannabis, can be liquefied and then what happens sometimes is that somebody will make a kid’s drawing and send it in, as if “oh look, your little boy’s done you a nice painting” and actually the paint is infused with spice. Some prisons photocopy those or anything that comes in like that, they just photocopy it and give the inmate the photocopy. They’re so imaginative! The one thing that prisoners have got is time to think.

And what about corruption? Do you think that’s not as rife as TV dramas like to portray?

I don’t think it is as rife. I mean there is corruption as there is in local government, national government, because it’s human beings, but my experience is that corruption is on an individual basis rather than on an endemic basis. There have been examples of big squads that have been held corrupt in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but I think it’s more the individual, and certainly the corrupt officers that I know of that have been dismissed and sent to prison have been working very much on their own, and it’s been, I say low level, no corruption is low level, but no one is buying big manor houses in the country or driving Rolls Royces, it’s almost, well, it is quite pathetic really. The worst kind of corruption is mishandling of evidence and fitting people up, and there’s quite a lot of safeguards around that now, but that’s always a worry for me, the innocent going to prison.

What’s the most memorable case you worked on? 

I worked on the Russell Bishop case, which I’ve written about [in Babes in the Wood], but another one which always stuck with me was, and I wrote about this in Death Comes Knocking, a chap who ran a pizza shop in Hove, he ran it with his partner, they were a lovely couple, really unassuming. After locking up one night, as they got home she got out the car to go and unlock the door and he parked the car and then he got jumped and then taken away in his car by two people and beaten almost to death, left blind, very nearly died and that was all for a couple of hundred quid. They wanted his safe keys so they went back to the shop and emptied the safe, but didn’t know he’d done the banking on the Friday instead of the Monday, so there was hardly any money in there.

I actually met him, I went to see him when I was writing Death Comes Knocking, they were still living in the same flat, still together, just an amazing sense of humour and humility and just getting on with life.

I remember when we were sitting in court, there’s a process called “warrant of further detention” – when you want to keep people in custody longer than 36 hours, you have to go to court and a magistrate has to grant that, so we were behind the prosecutor and we had old style Nokia phones in those days, and I was literally waiting for somebody to text me to say he’d died, and that we were changing the investigation to a murder, so I could brief the prosecutor, but he didn’t die, thank goodness. One of the people who did it had no previous convictions at all, and the other one only had a couple for burglary. It stuck with me for a long time.

Yes, I got that impression, I read your books and also watched that documentary Peter James did about the “Babes in the Wood” case – so many police officers say how things haunt them for their whole lives, that they never forget certain crimes.

Yes, certainly the “Babes in the Wood” one lives with everybody who was involved in that, which was interesting when I wrote the book with Peter, because I couldn’t speak to everybody, and so many people wrote to me afterwards saying “you should’ve spoken to me, I was the scene guard here, I’d’ve had something to tell you.” You know, everyone’s got a story about it, and sometimes you just have to go “yeah, but I only had ninety odd thousand words, that’s all I had to tell the story” –  it could’ve gone on for ever otherwise!

Did you ever get jaded and cynical? Do you think it’s inevitable after years and years in the police seeing the worst of human nature?

I don’t think I got jaded, I think not much surprised me after a while. Some of the things people do, or the lengths they go to to scam each other or hurt each other, not a lot really surprised me. I’m not saying I’ve heard it all before, but it’s just like “Oh, that’s what they’re doing now, is it?” So you do get a bit like that.

But certainly the way I was trained, and tutored and brought up really, was that you always try to put the victim and the family at the centre of everything, so you know you can’t afford to be dismissive about anything, even where you know it was bad on bad crime, you know, where somebody attacks a rival criminal or something like that, at the end of the day, they’re still someone’s son, daughter, brother, partner, whatever, and you try and think about the impact on the family as much as you do on the individual.

You’re seeing the worst of human nature most of the time, aren’t you? It must be quite hard to keep all of that in mind, but the families aren’t responsible, are they?

No, though sometimes the families are problematic as well, but they still hurt. If you’ve got to go tell someone that their son or daughter has been murdered or died in a horrific car crash by someone driving in a ridiculous manner, however much they might hate the police and been on the wrong side of the law they still cry, and they still want you not to be telling them that, they’ll still live with that moment. Sometimes I dwell on it, sometimes I think of all the death messages I’ve given, and I know that every one of those people will always remember me knocking on the door and what I told them. They’ll never forget that police officer’s knock, whether they be holier than thou or somebody who spent half their life in prison, they will cry, they will hurt.

Did you dread doing that? Was that one of the worst things you had to do?

Yes, it was horrible. You walk up to somebody’s house and sometimes you’d see them like a silhouette behind a curtain, or moving around, or the curtain might be open and you see them watching the telly or having a cup of tea or a drink or something, and you think “I’m just about to devastate your life and you don’t know that yet. You’re sitting there, life is rosy, and I’m just about to crush you with what I’m going to have to tell you.”

And reactions could vary hugely. I’ve been attacked for giving that message before. They’re not attacking me, they don’t want me to say what I’m saying, they don’t want to believe it, so you don’t take it personally or anything like that, but I’ve been attacked. And sometimes I sat there for hours and hours and hours ’cause they’ve not wanted me to go, and I’ve not felt that I could go. Sometimes you think is that professional, to just keep staying there? I just think that I’d owe it to someone. I never got criticised for it, but you know that while you’re sitting there you’re not answering the other jobs that are coming over the radio. But I think you’ve just got to do what you’re doing the best way that you can.

I remember my old boss here Malcolm Bacon, a detective inspector, dealt with a child death, and the police and the prosecution couldn’t prove whether it was the mum or the dad that did it. One of them did it, one of them was guilty of murder and one of them wasn’t guilty of murder, but might be guilty of lots of other things, so they both got acquitted because you’ve got to prove it beyond reasonable doubt against each one. And he got the law changed, he just made it his life’s ambition to lobby government and to get the law changed. We were very lucky because Lord Bassam, who was one of the Home Office ministers, was ex-leader of the Brighton Council, so Malcolm used him to start this debate going and they created an offence of Causing or Allowing the Death of a Child, which carries a significant custodial sentence, so cases where both parents don’t say anything, people are being convicted of that now, and that’s all down to Malcolm Bacon. That came out of one case where he just felt this huge injustice for this child that had died, and made it his life’s ambition to stop that from happening again.

Have you ever had a case where you knew someone was guilty and they got off and it was terribly frustrating?

The obvious one is Russell Bishop, that’s the obvious one. I’ve had serious assaults and burglaries, where people have got off and you just have to brush yourself down, really. It’s quite hard to adopt the mindset that your job is to get it to court. There are so many checks and balances before you get it to court. The CPS  [Crown Prosecution Service] have to approve the charge first of all, and then they have to continually review it so that they’re satisfied there’s sufficient evidence. If it gets to trial the judge has to agree that there’s sufficient evidence for it to continue. When the prosecution case is finished, if the defence ask them, the judge can determine whether or not there is a case to answer, whether the prosecution has done enough. So if you get to the point where the jury are walking back in, you’ve actually done all you can, there’s nothing really more to do, so you can’t dwell on it. But it does hurt, again for the victims, it does hurt, and particularly when you’re trying to explain to the victims that it’s not about belief, particularly if it’s a personal crime like a rape or something like that, it’s not that the jury didn’t believe you, it’s just that they couldn’t be sure, and it’s only that element of doubt, because not guilty doesn’t mean innocent. In Scotland they have not proven, which is our equivalent of not guilty. If you’re found innocent in Scotland you’re innocent, here not guilty is not innocent. You hear people on the court steps sometimes claiming “I’ve been found innocent by the jury” – well you haven’t, you’ve been found not guilty.

That’s a really interesting distinction, which I think most of us don’t understand.

Yes, the standard of proof is mountainous, and if you don’t reach the summit of not guilty it doesn’t mean you’re not a climber, doesn’t mean you’re not brilliant, but you’ve only got to have the defence be able to sow a seed of doubt in the jury’s mind. And sometimes if the judge is insisting on a unanimous verdict, then the defence has only got to seed that in one of the juror’s minds and you’ll at best get a hung jury.

Going back to the Bishop case, it’s interesting that eventually, because of improvements and progress in forensics, he was finally found guilty years later.

Yeah, that’s right. The law changed first, that’s the first thing, which meant that in serious cases, like murder and rape and robbery and kidnap, if there was significant new evidence the Court of Appeal could quash the acquittal and order a retrial. That’s only been in place since 2005, so that happened. Science then caught up and meant that the minute forensic samples that were gathered in 1986 were re-examined. It was DNA within the tapings. So they taped Karen’s skin, they’re looking for fibres and hair and stuff like that, but in doing that (they don’t realise it because it’s 1986) they’re also taping skin particles off there, and in those skin particles was Russell Bishop’s DNA, and the first part of the prosecution case was to prove that there’s no way that Russell Bishop had any opportunity to touch Karen Hadaway’s naked arm legally. He’d seen her during the course of the day, when she’d been wearing a jumper, didn’t touch her, was stood away from her, so there was no way other than during the murder that his DNA could have ended up on her skin. That trial was in 2018 and I think that evidence came through in 2015/2016 so a long, long time after the murders.

Prior to that, there’d been a problem with a window of time for the murders, hadn’t there?

Yes, that was the prosecution’s fault really. Nowadays the prosecution don’t really tie themselves down to times unless they can be certain. But it used to be the convention that everyone wanted the time of death, they’d go to the pathologist and pathologists were more inclined in those days to bow to that pressure, so “oh yeah, you know, between 6.30 and 7.00” but nowadays you ask a pathologist the time of death, and they’ll say, “well, it’s between the time they were last seen and when they were found dead”. That’s how they frame it.

So that was nothing to do with the police and their evidence, was it?

No, no, in fact police had gathered evidence which discounted that time of death, because they had a witness who knew the girls who was waving to them at quarter to seven.

So why wasn’t that taken more into account then?

Well that’s something that we ask in the book, why? Because you’re backing yourselves into a corner and the prosecution counsel did that, with the CPS. As far as I’m aware, and I’ve spoken to the senior investigating officers, no one picked up on it until it was too late. A lot of people criticised the judge in that case, and I think there are some questions about the judge, but at the end of the day, the judge has to direct the jury based on the case that the prosecution presents, and the prosecution presented the case that the girls were dead by 6.30, so the judge can only present that to the jury because that’s what the prosecution case is, notwithstanding that there was somebody who saw them at quarter to seven.

So the police provide all their evidence and hand it over to the prosecution?

Yes, they work with the police, but at the end of the day, the barrister, the leading counsel, will decide how he or she is going to conduct the case, and that’s how they decided to do it.

 

To be continued …

 

GRAHAM BARTLETT was a police officer for thirty years and is now a bestselling writer. He rose to become chief superintendent of the Brighton and Hove force as well as its police commander. He entered the Sunday Times Top Ten with his first non-fiction book, Death Comes Knocking – Policing Roy Grace’s Brighton in 2016. He followed that up in 2020 with another non-fiction book, Babes in the Wood, the harrowing 32-year fight to bring a double child killer to justice. Both these books he co-wrote with international best seller, Peter James.
As well as writing, Bartlett is a police procedural and crime advisor helping scores of authors and TV writers (including Mark Billingham, Elly Griffiths, Anthony Horowitz, Ruth Ware, Claire McGowan and Dorothy Koomson) achieve authenticity in their drama.

 

 

#crimefiction #crimewriters #detectivefiction #brightonauthors #grahambartlett #policeprocedural

Elly Griffiths talks about life under lockdown in her latest Ruth Galloway book The Locked Room

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Spoiler Alert: if you haven’t read The Locked Room yet this interview contains information about some plot developments.

 

Why did you decide to set the book in lockdown?

Well, I thought long and hard about it, and I think it’s a decision that lots of writers are going to have to take, particularly writers who write contemporary fiction, serious fiction. The book before was The Night Hawks, which ended in December 2019, so I knew that I was going to have to make a decision with this book.

And of course, because I write a book a year, I didn’t have long to think about it, and I had few options really. One of them was to set it in 2019, in which Covid and lockdown didn’t happen, and I’m sure lots of people will take that route, and that’s perfectly valid to my mind. Or I could have set everything in the last few weeks of 2019, made everything happen in those few weeks, but it’s a really tight timeline, and that would only be putting it off, wouldn’t it? I would have to come there eventually and so in the end I decided to go for doing Covid and lockdown.

Maybe if I was writing as a debut novelist I might not have gone that way, but having written a book about Ruth every year for the last 14 years, I thought that people might want to know what happened to her and the cast of characters during lockdown. I remember reading something about the Spanish flu’ outbreak, that there are hardly any contemporary fictional accounts of it. It would be a shame if there were no contemporary crime fiction that included Covid, I’m sure there will be people who do, and people who don’t. I guess a nasty little “writer-y” bit of my brain also thought, well, it’s quite a good opportunity really, because I’ve always wanted to write a locked room mystery, and here we are in a locked world.

Was it a device for you to explore Ruth and Nelson living together while Michelle is away in Blackpool, locked down with George at her mother’s?

Yes, definitely. I would never have planned to have that in this book if I’d thought about it, but yes, it was. I wanted to look at the way that lockdown changed lots of things. Lots of people were locked down with partners that they’d just met for example, or people had adult children locked down with their partner. Suddenly there was that sort of strange dynamic, dynamics changed didn’t they? And I did think it would be an opportunity to get Ruth and Nelson together in a real but in an unreal way, in that strange liminal zone, that strange in-between time. I suppose those people living in unusual setups did rethink their relationships, and it did make me rethink Nelson and Ruth a little bit, which was quite interesting. I’m writing the next book now, and even in my own mind I’m not quite sure how it’s going to play out, but I think it gave them a chance to live together and see what that was like.

Up until this book their coming together has always been at times of crisis and intense experience, hasn’t it? But here you show them in a domestic setup doing very ordinary things.

It’s domesticity squared, isn’t it? Because there’s nothing else going on during lockdown, so they couldn’t even go to the cinema or a restaurant, they had to be at home, prey to Ruth’s cooking, which isn’t up to Michelle’s, trying to entertain Kate, who is obviously locked down with them, saying “I’m bored”.

It’s touching that Kate accepts that Nelson’s there, as if it’s completely normal.

It did feel quite right to me that she might think that. There were things that she was questioning, but maybe not that, that he would suddenly just be there. And I even ask will Ruth’s cat Flint get on with Nelson’s dog, Bruno? Yet once they’ve shredded her suffragette cushions they’re the best of friends!

Flint’s reaction to Nelson tells us everything about Nelson’s supremacy over other potential partners for Ruth.

Flint is jealous of Nelson, you know how some cats seem to be able to shed hair on demand? Flint will only go to Nelson to shed hair on him, whereas he quite likes Frank, because I imagine Frank was quite respectful, quite a cat-like man in the way that Nelson’s a dog-like man, and he probably gave Flint his personal space. He likes Cathbad, but I think he’s a bit wary of him because Cathbad feels they have a psychic connection. He really just likes Ruth and Kate. But yes, he’s not mad keen on Nelson, and Nelson gets to give a few asides as to Ruth’s mad cat, and Ruth’s new neighbour Zoe, who has a beautiful Maine Coone cat, which Nelson is not convinced is a cat at all.

I thought their private reflections on their time together were interesting. Nelson adapted easily to a very different home life and was content, whereas Ruth, despite moments of “pure happiness,” struggled more to compromise.

I think that’s really true. Ruth hasn’t really lived with anyone for a long time, she briefly lived with her boyfriend Peter when she first bought the house, and Peter does come into this book a little way, as do memories of when they first bought the house. I think Peter says to her something like you never really wanted me there and she really didn’t, she was quite happy when it was just her and her cats, and then with Kate, so I think that’s definitely true. Nelson is quite adaptable in a way, and he does like the fact that Ruth leaves the Guardian on the table for a week and doesn’t move it, he finds it restful. And he likes watching Kate and Ruth together and seeing their interactions.

He likes seeing them laugh together, even when they’re laughing at him.

Yes, he doesn’t mind that at all, and he likes spending more time with Kate. I did try to bring in the funny bits, like neither wanting the other one to see them wearing their grungy dressing gowns and fluffy slippers. But they both have those, and I think that tells you in a way that they are quite dissimilar, but also quite similar, and I hope this book gave a chance to explore that.

When I realised they were going to spend a Saturday together it gave me a task – what would they do? What would it be like with such a chance? As I say, it’s the 14th book about them and they have never been able to do those things, so it’s fun for me to write about them. The thing about lockdown was it made us really appreciate those moments.

But I absolutely wanted to show in the book how lockdown was for key workers and for people who were locked down with people they shouldn’t be with. And for students as well, that was really uppermost in my mind because my kids were students, they were  postgraduates so that was a little bit different for them, but it would be awful to be a first or second year I think. Universities did just suddenly shut down and not everyone had their lovely cosy Mum and Dad to go home to. I did do some research into it, I’ve got a very good friend who’s a Dean at a university and she was very helpful. She actually gave me the little thing that I put in the book, that when she first had to sit in on her colleagues’ Zoom sessions she had to tell them to put away the empty bottles in the background, and stop their cats climbing on their shoulders!

I teach creative writing and and I was teaching via Zoom and it was hard. The only really fun bit was you could put people into breakout rooms. I eventually learned how to do this, you can just press a button and they will divide up into groups. Even when you teach very clever adults as I do, and you say to people “divide into groups” they’re all saying “Can I be with Sam?/I want to go the loo/Have I got time to get a coffee?” but with Zoom you can just press a button and they go! And then when you want them back in place again whoosh! they come back, that was wonderful!

There’s quite a bit in the books about people not having anything in common but yet the relationships work despite being quite unexpected. Ruth and Nelson, Cathbad and Judy, Clough and Cassandra –  they’re all rather unlikely couples.

I hadn’t really thought of it that way, but it’s true actually, they are all unlikely couples. And sometimes that does work, doesn’t it? And actually maybe the worst thing would be to be with someone exactly like yourself. My partner and I aren’t that similar, I mean, he’s an archaeologist (maybe we’re Ruth and Nelson!), he’s an atheist, neither of which I am, and it works.

I can’t help but feel sorry for Frank. He’s a lovely person, there’s nothing wrong with him, he’s really kind, they shared interests and academic work, but Ruth couldn’t commit to him.

No, there’s nothing wrong with Peter or Max or Frank. My daughter is a big fan of Max, she says “what was wrong with Max?” Nothing was.

But Ruth knows in her heart, however nice other people are, that she’s in love with Nelson.

I think that’s true. You almost feel a bit frustrated with your characters, but I thought that at one point, the way to get her over Nelson would be to give her another man, so I created Frank and I made him as nice as I could, I said he was very good looking (he looks like George Clooney), everyone says he’s very clever. He’s a charming American, as I’ve found a lot of Americans to be very, very charming and erudite. And when she does live with him for a bit, he’s very respectful, he’s a good stepfather for Kate.

Yes, Kate likes him and even Flint likes him. But he’s just not Nelson.

There’s a little bit in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love where she talks about Uncle Matthew and she says something like furiously as we sometimes hated Uncle Matthew there was something wrong with any man who wasn’t like him. And I think that’s the thing with Ruth and Nelson, there’s something wrong with every man who’s not like him. He’s not the man she would ever imagine spending any time with, but there he is. He’s not academic, he’s a very clever man, but he certainly would never call himself academic at all.

He probably doesn’t read and he never can remember about the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.

Yes exactly, those things really annoy her! She does keep telling him that all humans have a certain amount of Neanderthal DNA and that he has more than most.

She’s quite easily annoyed! She gets annoyed with him because he calls their daughter Katie.

Yes she is. I think for her there’s something about it as a diminutive that probably says something about his feelings towards women.

But that isn’t fair, the way Nelson treats women is absolutely fine.

It’s not fair, and in fact his women police officers will say that, annoying as he is, as most bosses are, they have to admit that he’s not a sexist dinosaur, he has promoted them and he does listen to them. He has occasional moments when he wants to say “thanks love” to Judy but he restrains himself. I think for somebody who’s as territorial as Nelson is, and family minded, in many ways he thinks of his team as a family, and so because of that he’s proud of them, he’s not a jealous person at all. When Clough does well and Judy does well, he’s really proud of them, so I think that those are the good sides of Nelson.

We get a glimpse in this book of Nelson’s feelings in a way we haven’t before. He admits to Judy that he loves Ruth and that sometimes he feels it’s killing him. 

Yes, I think it has been, I think it has really taken its toll on Nelson. He’s the sort of person who does internalise things and does feel them quite strongly.

He really cares about everyone involved, doesn’t he?

Yes, he does. I think he thinks it’s impossible. I think at the end of The Night Hawks when he has the chat with his mum, that might have given him some idea that there is a way to do this well.

That conversation with his mother was such a surprise, and would have astonished Ruth.

Yes, Ruth has met Maureen and I think she sees her as this great defender of the family, which she is in some ways, but she does understand. And you know Maureen has never admitted it but Nelson is her favourite, she adores him and she wants him to be happy.

She does tell him that what he did was wrong, but she understands it’s complicated.

Yes, it’s complicated when you write things, but we do see in life don’t we, that sometimes if there’s enough love things do sort themselves out.

The two mothers, Jean and Maureen, have been quite prominent in recent books with their own past experiences and secrets.

Yes, and of course five years after Ruth’s mother dies her dad has married Gloria, which was a shock at first, but Ruth’s very glad now he has got company during lockdown, and Gloria’s family are rallying round. But even when Ruth’s mum is dead she still has surprises, Ruth is still able to learn about her and get closer to her.

Such as the letter that she wrote to Zoe, which reveals her pride in Ruth, when Ruth had always felt that her mother disapproved of her.

Yes, exactly. And her mum used two exclamation marks when talking about Ruth’s achievements, which moved Ruth so much.

Your portrayal of the three main men in the cast, Cathbad, Clough and Nelson, is warm and affectionate, each of them in his own way very protective of his family, wanting everyone together and safe.

You know it could have gone either way really with Clough when I first invented him, because he was kind of a cliché view of a Neanderthal stomping about, but he has changed and one of the things I wanted to write about was his friendship with Judy, they are really good friends and when she needs him, he’s there.

When he’s trying to encourage her about Cathbad he says “you know I’m always right” – something which at one time would have made Judy feel an actual physical rage, but now she just wants to hug him.

Yes, and she’s not allowed to because of social distancing! It’s very hard to write about lockdown in lots of ways, and it was hard to live, wasn’t it? You weren’t allowed to touch people or hug them. You always had to remember about people being distanced.

I’m not sure how realistic it would be that Clough had actually heard that there would be a vaccine, but he tells Judy that he’d heard somebody at Cambridge (he works in Cambridge now) who said there was an Oxford vaccine, and how that was quite a lot for a Cambridge man to admit! I wanted to give them that little bit of hope, because of course in March 2020, we didn’t know there’d be a vaccine.

Before you started writing the book, had you decided that one of the characters would get Covid?

Well, I did think somebody had to get it. I think it would be almost insulting to people for there not to be somebody who got it. I’d forgotten how early it was in lockdown that Boris Johnson got it, it was really early, in that April. I’m not a fan of Boris Johnson but it was shocking, wasn’t it? You felt sorry for him, you hoped he was going to be all right. We realised anyone could get it, and that was frightening, so I wanted that feeling in the book, so somebody did have to get it. And perhaps Cathbad was unlikely because everyone keeps saying how fit he is, but he’s a little bit older than the other characters, so maybe slightly more vulnerable. Those were hard things to write but I did feel they needed to be there.

We get a lot more of Judy in this book.

Yes. I wanted to explore the way that neighbours were quite an important theme. Ruth gets a new neighbour Zoe, who’s an enigmatic character in the book. Judy knows that she has not made the effort to get to know her neighbours. There was a tiny little joke, I don’t even know that anyone got it, that she continually gets their next door neighbour’s name wrong, I think she calls him Fred all the way through, but actually he’s Barney, and I had in my head that she might just have had the Flintstones in her mind and got the wrong one! She hasn’t bothered to learn their names but Cathbad has, and when Cathbad is taken ill, her neighbours really do rally round her from a distance, they bake cakes and give support.

That makes sense as Cathbad is the homemaker, so he’s more involved in the community whereas she’s out to work early and back late.

Yes, that’s right. And Ruth says several times that Cathbad’s spirituality as a Druid is one thing, but the other thing is he just loves a party. He loves people, he loves a party, especially if there’s a bonfire involved, so actually he’s very sociable. He runs these yoga classes and he’s very involved in the community, loves taking the kids to and from school. Ruth is one of those people who dreads the school gates.

Judy is too.

Judy is too, exactly. I think there’s a scene in one of the other books where Judy and Ruth meet at the school gates and they’re at a distance, whereas you can imagine Cathbad is right in there chatting with everyone.

It struck me that Ruth’s friendships have been shifting, that she’s now leaning more towards Judy and Cathbad, and at times in the book refers to them as her best friends in Norfolk. She’s almost moving more towards the police world in her friendships, rather than the academic world, she’s even quite fond of Clough.

I think that’s really fair to say, possibly because there is just a simple thing in that her child Kate gets on better with their children than she does with Shona’s slightly, let’s say, difficult Louis. I think we all find that we drift towards people whose values and family setup just sort of merges with us.

I think she sees them as more trustworthy than Shona, who let her down badly earlier in the series. Ruth has tried to overcome a distrust of Shona, because she felt that she didn’t have any other friends in Norfolk.

Yes, I think possibly she might think back and see that she did have more friends than she thought. She was always going to be a person who has a few close friends rather than a whole mass of acquaintances. I think it’s in only the third book The House at Sea’s End where Ruth goes to Judy’s hen night, which she absolutely hates, and I think Judy hates it too, really. From that moment she is drawn closer to Judy.

Why have you introduced a sister for Ruth? And with Simon in this book more, will you develop the dynamic between the three siblings?

Yes I will. I’m really interested in writing about that. When Ruth initially finds that her mother had a secret, I did kind of know it would be an illegitimate child and wanted to write about the fact that Ruth has this neighbour who she feels drawn to, and actually there’s something about her which she says slightly reminds her of her mother. I tried to put those little clues in, like they meet at a slimming club, and they both struggle with their weight, as did their Mum. And they both hopefully learn to love themselves a bit more by the end of the book.

But yes, I really want to write about that – I’ve got two sisters, I’m interested in family relationships and in the book that I’m writing now Nelson is thinking about sisters. He has two older sisters, Maeve and Grainne, and of course he has two daughters who are sisters, and they have a much younger sister in Kate. There’s one book, I think it’s The Lantern Men, that ends with Kate running on the beach with her two older sisters, who are about 17 and 18 years older than her. My good friend Lesley Thomson said “that’s you and your sisters” because my sisters are 15 or 16 years older than me, and I said “no it’s not!” but then I thought it absolutely is! You know how somebody sees something you don’t, and obviously we’re full sisters, so it’s very different. I certainly feel I’d be able to write about Kate’s feelings about having much older sisters, they just seemed like wonderful people. Of course they can be annoying like all sisters, but also I absolutely hero-worshipped them.

Well Kate just adores Laura, doesn’t she?

Yeah, she does adore Laura I think. I’m going to have to bring Rebecca in a bit more, she’s been a bit out on a limb, but she lives in Brighton and was locked down with her fairly new boyfriend and that relationship.

She played really well with Kate when she did meet her.

Yes she did. I think Laura is very nurturing and very serious, she’s a teacher and she finds it quite hard in this book, I really felt for teachers during lockdown. I think Rebecca is a bit more impetuous.  

With all these relationships Ruth keeps saying it’s very complicated, especially because not only does Kate adore Laura, but Ruth is very fond of her as well.

Yes it is. Ruth cares about her as well and it is complicated. There’s Cathbad’s blended family with the two children he has with Judy and his older daughter Maddie from a previous relationship. I think Maddie slightly comes into her own in this because she does really support Judy, being a great big sister.

There’s a lot about nice people getting hurt in the books, people like Frank and Michelle. I suspect most readers would like Ruth and Nelson to be together at last, but also worry about Michelle.

Well I’m certainly fond of Michelle, and I want to give her agency, she’s not just the victim in this. I think she’s behaved really well, she’s probably behaved the best of all of them really, give or take a little bit of indiscretion along the way, but generally she’s behaved really well. So I’m sorting that all out in the new book now.

Is it going to be the last one?

It’s going to be the last for a bit. I’m going to have a little break from writing them, but I’m not going to go forever. However, I think we’re saying that’s the end for now. But there will be a book 15 which is The Last Remains – I guess there’s a clue in the title! There will be  a sort of resolution to all the issues we’ve been talking about.

There will be some tough bits. I think there will be a lot of Cathbad and a lot of Judy in the book, and some new opportunities are going to appear for Ruth and for Nelson, and it’s whether they take them. Just one small thing I can probably give away is that it’s been so shocking to see archaeology departments closing, and that’s going to threaten Ruth. But with that threat comes another opportunity.

So you’re going to take a break from the Norfolk books, and you’ve got a new book coming out featuring Harbinder Kaur again. Is that the direction you want to go in at the moment?

I might go in a totally new direction. So this is part three, it’s called Bleeding Heart Yard and is set in London. Harbinder’s just been promoted and she joins the Met. The case is a very high profile one, but I think this is also going to be the last Harbinder book, although I might write a book about the other characters in The Postscript Murders, I did have so much fun with them, I would like to write about them, so they might come into a book, but in a way I feel like I’m nearing the end of that series. Maybe not quite at the end of the Brighton Mysteries, there’ll be another one I think next year, maybe a few more of those, but I think I might try and come out with a new series. And I’ve just published the fourth Justice book and that might be the last Justice book. But there may be new things coming. And along the way one of the things I’m also going to do is to write the book of Ruth’s Norfolk, with some lovely illustrations of Norfolk, telling the story behind some of the places in the series.

 

 

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Peter James

Peter James talks about his mate Roy Grace, Super Recognisers and playing with time

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I want to start by asking you what is it like to live with Roy Grace for 17 years plus? Is he more than words on a page to you?

Well actually there are two Roy Graces. Well, there are now three of course, with John Simm. There’s the former Detective Chief Superintendent David Gaylor, who I modelled Grace on, not physically but career wise. We’ve worked together really closely on every book. We have a kind of ritual, we always meet at the same table in a pub outside Henfield, when I’m planning the books, and I kind of run stuff through him, and then I have my fictitious Roy Grace who I consider like a mate. You know, every time I start a new book I say “Hi Roy, how’re you doing? Hi Norman, who have you pissed off this month?” He’s always been like a real character, almost like a mate to me, and now we’ve got John Simm who looks so much like the Roy Grace of my imagination when I created him, so when John’s name was put forward by ITV, I thought “Perfect!”

I’ve actually just started the next Roy Grace, the 19th. I finished the 18th, which won’t be out till next September because we’re moving publication of the hard back to the autumn. I’ve started the 19th, and I’ve got John Simm so much in my head now (as I also have Richie Campbell as Glenn Branson, he is so like the fictitious Glenn that I modelled on a real cop I met back in the late 80s, Glenn Douglas) – so I’ve got those two real life people. I find it quite helpful because I’ve got to know them, John and I have become mates, Richie too, and I know their mannerisms. It’s really interesting having real life human faces to think about when I’m writing.

Do you feel under pressure with a long running series to keep your readers interested?

It’s a real problem, but in a way it’s a good problem, I guess. When I was a kid I was an avid reader, and a lot of the authors that I loved wrote loads of books, like Alistair MacLean. It seemed to me that the more successful they got the fatter the books got, and the less exciting, almost as if either they got lazy, or their editors got too nervous to say anything, or they got too arrogant to listen to their editors. So I decided right back then that if I was ever lucky enough to have any kind of success, the one thing I would try to do would be to raise the bar with each book. So every time I deliver a book and someone says “Oh yeah, that was my favourite of yours” I think “S***! How am I gonna write the next one?!”

How do you raise the bar? 

First I try always to take a subject that fascinates me, that I want to learn about. I think good writing should examine the issues of the world we’re in, or entertain, but be fresh. The one I’ve just finished is about the world of art forgery. One of the world’s top art forgers, David Henty, lives in Saltdean. He’s been just brilliant. He’s in the book very thinly veiled as himself, totally at his own volition. It’s been fascinating to learn about that world.

The book’s about a couple who go to a car boot sale on a Sunday and buy a picture for £20 because they like the frame. It’s a horrible picture, it’s a bad portrait of an old lady. They get it home but they leave it in the sunlight, and some of the surface paint melts and they realise there’s something underneath. They take it to an Antiques Roadshow and the expert there says, “Well, this looks to me like a long lost Fragonard from 1770. If it’s genuine, it’s going to be worth millions.”

I’ve delved into the world of art forgery and you know, Dave Henty told me, and it’s in the book, exactly how he could fake a Fragonard so that even the top Fragonard expert couldn’t tell the difference, or pretty much any other Old Master. There are all kinds of clever tricks you know, things like buying an old canvas from the period, an old church canvas from France – you can pick them up for three or four thousand quid – old icons or a Madonna and Child. Start with that, so you’ve got the original canvas if anybody checks it. So I try really hard in the books to take something that I’m interested in and learning about, and try to be authentic. I had a lot of fun with that.

Now I’m writing about the world of puppy smuggling and illegal puppy farming, which during lockdown became a bigger business for a lot of the gangs than drugs. If you ordered a blue French bulldog “That’s £25,000 to you, lady”!

David Henty is in the book Death Comes Knocking that you co-wrote with Graham Bartlett of the Sussex Police, about policing Brighton, isn’t he?

Yes, he is, and you know what I loved about that? It was that Dave Henty had started life as a forger, he was quite good at drawing, but had a fatal flaw, as in the book, which was he couldn’t spell. Anyway, he bought a house in Wykeham Terrace just up from the Clock Tower and he’d got this massive operation with five of them there, printing and binding. They were raking it in, they had orders for 3000 forged passports at £1000 a pop for Hong Kong people trying to get out, he was minting passports, but Britannic Majesty was spelt wrong! And then his front door’s kicked in and it’s Graham Bartlett and four other coppers, and he’s inside for five years.

Graham contacted him when we were writing the book. He said to Graham “Come and have lunch and bring Peter” so we went to the house at Saltdean. The last time he’d seen Graham was when he kicked his front door in and completely f***** up his life, but he said “Great to see you again, come on in!” The other guy forging the passports with Henty was Cliff Wakefield, so Graham asked about him and Henty said, “Well, he’s in Belmarsh now, he’s gonna call us at 2 o’clock to say hi.” I mean, that’s real old-school cops and villains!

Do you think it’s also the case that the unfolding Roy Grace story moves the series forward, because his personal story is so compelling that readers come back each time to find out what’s going to happen to him next?

Yes, it’s like I accidentally created an ongoing soap opera! But I like that. Without wanting to give away any spoilers I think occasionally, to keep the series fresh, what I have to do is sometimes kill a major character, because if readers believe that nobody is ever going to come to any harm, they’re not ever going to feel scared for somebody when they’re in peril, they’re going to think “Oh, it’ll be all right.”

It is something I’ve learned over the years, that there’s a kind of boundary that you can’t cross. I had a cat scalded in one of my early novels way back before I wrote Grace and it really upset cat lovers. I mean, you could pour boiling water over a baby and nobody would care, but harm an animal and everyone is up in arms. There’s a fine line between showing brutality because you’re trying to portray just how horrible a villain is, and doing something almost for just the pleasure of writing something gross. I’ve tried over the years to really tone that down. I don’t want people having a horrific time reading one of the books, but I want them to understand that there are horrible people out in the world who do horrible things.

I do think that part of the joy of reading crime fiction is that it gives us a vicarious sense of danger and thrill. But in this dark and uncertain world, it gives us the knowledge that at the end Roy Grace, or whoever the hero or heroine is, will have locked up the bad guys, at least most of them, and restored some kind of order so that as you close the book, having finished it, you’re thinking “Yeah, actually the world’s not too bad”.

Do you think that reading crime fiction is a safe way to explore fears and dangers, knowing you’re going to be safe at the end because it’s not you who’s at risk?

That’s a factor, definitely, I do think that’s the case. I have a terror of heights, so for example when I’m writing I might have Roy hanging over Beachy Head – I let him do that for me, that way I get the buzz without the terror! I think we read crime fiction for a number of reasons. I think what you’ve just identified is very much one of them. I think another is that at a different level we love being thrilled – the first thing somebody says to a new baby is “boo!” That is something deep rooted in us, we do enjoy it.

But I think at a much deeper level good crime fiction also taps into the way we are genetically programmed to survive. If you’re driving and you see a bad car accident on the other side of the motorway, everybody slows down. I don’t think people slow down because they’re ghouls, I think people slow down to think “What happened there? What can I learn from that?” almost subconsciously, to make sure they never get in that position. And I think it’s exactly the same with a crime novel, we read about somebody getting murdered, and subconsciously you’re thinking, “What can I learn from that? How can I make sure I never get in that position, or my loved ones never get in that position?” So I think that is going on too, at a very deep level.

When you’re writing the books, do you plot meticulously and know the ending before you start writing?

No. Every writer has a different way, but for me what works is a combination of plotting and surprise. I take the view that if I don’t surprise myself, I won’t surprise my readers, but at the same time I need to have a basic structure. So the way I plan a book is that I always know the ending I want to get to, but it might change when I get to it, if I think of something better or another twist that I can add to turn on the agony for my readers! I plan about the first hundred pages in quite a lot of detail, so I know where that’s going. I know some of the key high points of the story, so I know roughly where I want to get to, but I love it when at round about page 100, the book starts to take on a life of its own, when the characters are all established, and then quite often I introduce something I hadn’t planned.

To give an example, I think it was in Not Dead Enough, which is the third Roy Grace, I was with the police in Brighton and we were driving inland from the seafront on the London Road – I’m going back to about 2004/5. There was a row of rather beat-up looking camper vans all parked along there and I said to the officer “Do you know, I’ve seen those there day after day for weeks. If I parked there for an hour, I’d be ticketed and after four I’d be towed.” And he said “They’re all basically small time drug runners, we let them stay there because we can keep an eye on them”. So these were the bottom end of the drugs trade, they’re the ones that the big dealers use to distribute the drugs on the streets. That fascinated me, I thought “What would one of those people be like? What kind of a human being?” Then I went with some surveillance officers and we watched the place, and there was this one character who became quite significant in Not Dead Enough called Skunk, he just popped into my head at about page 100. I hadn’t had any intention of creating this character and he suddenly became quite a significant part in the book. I love it when something spontaneous like that happens.

Do you always know with more major characters how their story will unfold, like Sandy for example, or Bruno, or even Cassian Pewe?

With Sandy, what happened was I was asked by my publishers back in 2002 if I would consider trying to create a new detective character. I had a two book deal and I thought I might do something different. I thought there is a classic cliché of the detective with a broken marriage and a drink problem, and the reality is, in today’s police force, no cop with a drink problem’s going to last 24 hours. I thought that what good detectives do is solve puzzles, and that it would be interesting to create a character who had a personal puzzle of his own that he could not solve, and that’s why Roy has got this wife who’s been missing for nine years. I thought “I’ll introduce the mystery in book one and I’ll get the explanation in book two”. Then Dead Simple came out and I started getting inundated with emails from people speculating what might have happened to Sandy and I thought “You know what? I could have some fun with this!” That’s why I kept it going for so long.

I particularly like the way that you interweave Grace’s personal story with each crime investigation.

Well, luckily these days half of our social life, my wife and I, is with police, I guess it has been for a long time now, because I’ve just always gravitated towards them, because I actually find them both fascinating and immensely human people. So I see that home side of them, which I think most people don’t. There was a great quote by the head of the Met: “Wearing a uniform does not protect you from trauma.” They are ordinary people doing extraordinary things, that includes all emergency service workers.

You mentioned trauma – a police officer who’s attended a horrific car accident or a murder must often experience something like post traumatic stress, and then have to go home with that experience in their head.

Yes, exactly. I’m very friendly with a traffic officer. In East Sussex about ten years ago there was a case of a horrible divorce, a couple had two small children aged two and four. The wife gassed the two children, put them in the boot of the car and tried to frame her husband. It’s almost unimaginably horrible. This friend of mine was literally first on the scene and spent half an hour desperately trying to resuscitate the kids before the ambulance got there, and obviously they were long dead. Then he went home off shift and had to bath and put to bed his own kids. That’s something that I think people forget, that officers go to a horrific accident where someone’s lying in the road with his head off, or a domestic abuse victim, or just the sheer misery of a couple who’ve been swindled out of their life savings, and then they go back to their lives and relationships.

We talked earlier about the stereotype of the dysfunctional, hard drinking loner, but presumably there are police who, like Grace, can maintain good relationships and still work at the top of their game?

Oh many, yes, absolutely, I know a number of very happy marriages. We are very good friends with one couple where he’s always just been a police constable and she became Chief Superintendent. I know two or three couples where there’s a kind of traditional role reversal on this. But I would say the police is not a great career to go into for stable marriages, there’s quite a high rate of divorce, but there’s also a great number of extremely happy and strong marriages.

But it is tough. I was out for dinner with some friends and the guy had a similar role to Roy Grace at one time. I asked his wife “What’s it like being married to Steve?” and she said “It’s a bloody nightmare!” She said “A month ago it was our wedding anniversary, so we were driving through the centre of Brighton to dinner, and we’re going to leave the car and take a taxi home. Steve suddenly spots a villain he’s been looking for for two years, so he just pulls up at the kerbside and says ‘Take the car, go to the restaurant, order me a gin and tonic, I’ll see you there’ and he hares off and chases the guy for two miles through Brighton, rugby tackles him and I’m sitting in the restaurant at 11:00 o’clock and he’s still booking him in.” A lot of officers cannot switch off.

Do you ever think about ending the Grace series?

Right now I have absolutely no plans to end it, I’ve just signed a new contract with my publishers for another five books and at the moment ITV are incredibly enthusiastic and planning long term.

I know that Conan Doyle got so fed up with Sherlock Holmes he killed him off, but then he couldn’t find anything else that was as successful so he had to bring him back, so yes, that does happen, but I really love them. For the themes that I want to explore, where it wouldn’t work in the confines of a detective novel, I write my standalones, and I do a standalone roughly every three years. Most of what I want to learn about I can do within the Roy Grace books.

What I love about the Grace series is that just a few weeks or months have passed  between each book. I think that has a really immersive effect on a reader – is that why you chose to do that?

Very much so, yes. Ian Rankin moved Rebus on a year with each book, and then he hit the buffers of 60 at retirement age. Luckily for Ian the Scottish Police raised the retirement age to 65, so it gave Rebus another 5 years, but now he is retired. I didn’t want to do that with Roy Grace, and also I wanted to show Roy’s new love of Cleo. A year in a relationship is a massive time from first date to living together. I wanted to show that relationship slowly developing against the background of the missing Sandy story, so I thought “Well, I will take author’s licence and play with time”. Luckily Roy is only 43 now after 19 books!

Each book starts a short while after the other, one or two start the next day, but I’ll move them on a year at a time as much as I can. I’m having a slight struggle at the moment with what I do about positioning Covid. The latest one I finished is set in September 2019, but the new one I’ve just started, I’m still trying to make my mind up, because Covid date stamps things.

So you have to perform a  juggling act with real time and fictional time?

I think it’s really important to keep the books current but without losing that ongoing continuity. It is a juggling act. I try to avoid things that will clearly date it, but I had to deal with the Olympics, and in Dead Man’s Footsteps, I wrote about the guy who faked his disappearance at 9/11, which I wrote five or six years after 9/11 had happened. But now with ITV making the series it’s 20 years on, so we’ve had to update that and change it from 9/11 to something else, to keep it contemporary.

You portray Grace having to switch his focus back and forth between the warm, loving world of his private life and the dangerous, dark world of his working life – is it a similar process for you as a writer, having to switch back and forth between those two worlds?

Yes, and I enjoy the challenge of that. I think that with somebody like Roy, a detective investigating murder, there are not many jobs that carry more responsibility, because not only have you got to try to catch the killer to provide closure for the family but also, the longer you don’t catch the killer the longer that killer is out there and could kill again, so there’s an incredible responsibility that comes with that work. But at the same time he has a family. And chickens! That reflects me a bit. We have lots of animals and I find them very grounding. I remember waking up the morning of the Manchester bombing a few years back, and the world felt a very dark place, and then going out and hand-feeding the alpacas carrots and slices of apple – they don’t know all this s*** that’s going on in the world, so it brings you down to earth, it’s wonderfully grounding.

I really enjoy your portrayal of Roy Grace’s twice daily briefings with his team on a major investigation, the democratic way he runs them, with everyone from the lowliest officer upwards feeling free to speak up, give their opinion and theorise.

I’m glad you like that, because I get really angry when I see on television Senior Investigating Officers portrayed as bolshie, angry bullies. In my experience homicide detectives are emotionally intelligent people who do listen to their team.

How have you developed such a close relationship with Sussex Police? They must trust you completely.

I think it’s a relationship built up over many, many years. I got burgled back in 1982. My first two books had just been published (they were very bad spy thrillers) and a young detective came to take fingerprints, a guy called Mike Harris, and he said if you want any help with research give me a call. He was married to a detective. My then wife (who was a lawyer) and I became friends with them and they invited us to a barbecue one day. There were a dozen of their friends and they were all cops in different disciplines, homicide, traffic, response, neighbourhood policing, and just talking to these people I thought, “Nobody sees more of human life in a 30 year career than you guys do”.

When they realised that I was genuinely interested, not just out to get a story to flog to the paper, they invited me to come and spend a day with them in a response car and see what they do, and it kind of went on from there. Then I started putting police characters into my books and they liked the way I portrayed them, they felt that I was showing the world what it really meant to be a police officer. And that was how it all began.

Over the years I’ve worked quite closely with them, quite a number of the books I’ve written have come out of suggestions by the police. They asked if I would write a book about organ trafficking, so that’s what led to me writing Dead Tomorrow. More recently, for example, with Dead At First Sight, Sussex Police approached me and said people in Sussex had been scammed out of over £5 million in the previous two years through internet romance fraudsters. They said they would be willing to show me their files, obviously without names, to show me the extent of the issue, and that if I would consider writing a Roy Grace book about it that would help maybe raise awareness of it, and highlight it.

And Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, when he was head of the Met, wrote to me about seven years ago, when they’d just created the Super Recognisers*. He asked me if I would like to go out and spend a day at Scotland Yard with the Super Recogniser team because he’d love it if I put it in my books, to help raise awareness to other police forces about it.

And presumably bring it to the attention of readers who might want to volunteer to be Super Recognisers?

Yes, I was delighted that at least five or six people subsequently wrote to me and said that they had become Super Recognisers for the police after reading about it, so that’s wonderful.

So they trust you to convey what their work is really like, and also to get important issues across to the public?

They do. I always let them see what I’ve written before it goes to final print. They’ll tell me things in confidence and say “Don’t write that” and I won’t. I’ve never broken that trust.

I try to give them something back as well, so I’ve donated a couple of police cars to Sussex Police, and also supported campaigns for them, and I’m co-patron, with the Chief Constable, of the Sussex Police Charitable Trust, which helps police officers who suffer trauma or hardship.

I genuinely think that the police get a bad press these days, some of them feel that they’re constantly under attack. But I genuinely believe that most police officers are extremely good, decent people who do this job because it’s one of the few jobs where you can actually make a difference to the world. And I think police are a major part of the glue that holds civilisation together.

 

* In his book Need You Dead, Peter James introduces the new field of Super Recognisers:

… the average human being can recognise 23 per cent of faces that they’ve seen previously … But a tiny percentage of the population, now known as Super Recognisers, can achieve up to 90 per cent … with consistent accuracy, from just one single feature. An earlobe. A nose. A chin.

 

#peterjames #roygrace #detectivefiction #crimefiction #detectivenovels #roygraceseries #brightonauthors #itvgrace #crimeseries #authorinterviews #crimewriters #policeprocedural

Reading Elly Griffiths, inspired by this blog

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Contributor: Helen Jeffries

A couple of months ago I read the interview with Elly Griffiths on this blog and was inspired to buy one of her books.  I thought I would start with the Brighton series and intended to buy the first book but (owing to not paying attention or being an idiot) I bought the most recent by mistake – Now You See Them.  I read it at once and spent quite a long time thinking “there’s a surprising amount of backstory here for the first book in a series” before I twigged!  At least I proved that there’s no actual need to read Elly Griffiths in the right order as the book was extremely enjoyable as a stand alone although I’m now going back to start at the beginning properly.  I liked the Brighton setting and particularly the sense of time with the Mods and Rockers battling on the sea front.  The pervasive presence of stage magic was also rather nostalgic for me – I’m of the generation that grew up with the Paul Daniels magic show being ubiquitous on TV and I imagined the character Ruby’s hit programme as being along those lines.

After that first Brighton book, though, I got on to the Ruth Galloway mysteries and I must confess I was immediately hooked – I’m now on The Chalk Pit which is the ninth and have no intention of stopping.  I apologise that there will be slight spoilers in what follows but I’ve tried not to give away too many key plot points.  First of all I like the character of Ruth – a heavyish middle-aged woman with an academic background who likes a solitary life is a demographic I can certainly associate with.  I also like the setting – I recently attended my godson’s confirmation in a wild part of Norfolk that I have in mind when I read the descriptions of the empty countryside and lonely but spiritual setting that Ruth inhabits.  And finally – here’s a spoiler – I doubt there is anyone who’s done a PhD who can’t get a bit of a kick out of the idea of their supervisor drowning in a bog.  Come on now – we’ve all visualised it haven’t we?  (I’m assuming my supervisor-as-was is never going to be reading this… )

As the Ruth Galloway series continues we get more insight into the returning characters.  Clearly anyone would be charmed by Cathbad the druid – he’s a wonderful character with a very accurate but not infallible sixth sense.  That fallibility is what makes him real when he could just have been a person who’s always right.  Judy Johnson the police sergeant is also a compelling character who could easily warrant a series of her own, were she not overshadowed by DCI Nelson, the main police presence in the series.  And even Tanya Fuller who started out as a deeply annoying over-ambitious young police officer, is growing into something much more interesting as her strengths and personal life begin to be revealed.  I must reserve a special mention for Phil Trent though.  He is the head of Ruth’s department at the University of North Norfolk and is set up as a TV- and funding-obsessed hazard of academic life, but I really like him!  I’m so pleased to see from the interview that in a book I have coming up – The Lantern Men – he gets a chapter from his own perspective.

Finally, I have to touch on the spirituality in the series which was discussed in the interview with Elly Griffiths on this blog.  Speaking as an Anglican, I must confess to a certain feeling of “oh heck not another lapsed Catholic!” every time one hoves into view – as the godparent of a Norfolk Anglican I am happy to report that a range of Christian denominations is represented in that county!  I’m being unfair of course and in The Woman in Blue we do get to see some Anglicans, although not all in a particularly positive light.  As I move through the series I hope to see some more of these people – particularly the Anglican vicar with a black belt in Taekwondo who takes muscular Christianity to a very encouraging place when confronting a poison pen writer.

So then, what is the charm of the Ruth Galloway series that has got me hooked?  Partly it’s the characters and how they develop, partly it’s the emphasis on archaeology and the past and how they impact the present, but perhaps most of all it’s the sense that although terrible things do happen in the stories, predominantly the characters make the best of things and find the positives.  This is a world in which light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it, and that’s a very suitable spirituality for this winter season of the year.

The Ruth Galloway series by Elly Griffiths

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Contributor: Rosalind Esche

If you asked a random sample of Elly Griffiths readers what distinguishes her books in a crowded crime genre, they would almost certainly mention her warmth and humour. It’s probably safe to say that her series based in North Norfolk is her most popular, thanks to her much loved main character Ruth Galloway. Immense warmth emanates from the pages of these books, they are comforting, but not in a cosy way. There is darkness in them, but also a powerful sense of the strength of ordinary, flawed, but fundamentally decent people trying to do the right thing.

An evocative sense of place informs this series – the remote marshlands and vast skies of North Norfolk lend an eerie atmosphere to the setting in which these unnerving tales unfold. Ruth lives with her young daughter Kate and their cat Flint in one of three remote cottages, at the edge of what Elly Griffiths calls the Saltmarsh. Her description of this wild, lonely place which is neither land, nor sea, nor sky, but a liminal space between all three, is as haunting as any supernatural tale. Griffiths conjures the ghosts of sacred burial places and ancient henges, skilfully weaving superstition, folklore and myth into the fabric of her mysteries without compromising the credibility of the police investigation or Ruth’s forensic archaeology expertise.

However, the sinister aura of these unsettling stories is regularly dispelled by the author’s wry sense of humour, which she expresses through the interaction of her delightful cast of characters, for whom she clearly feels much goodwill and compassion. Archaeologist Dr. Ruth Galloway, who lectures at a (fictional) university in North Norfolk, is a most engaging character, professionally confident and very good at what she does, but less assured in other ways. Although she’s comfortable in her own skin, she is not immune to feelings of inadequacy about her weight, lack of dress sense and unruly hair. This vulnerability makes readers warm to Ruth. The developing story of her relationship with DCI Nelson is the fulcrum of the series, and is what keeps readers coming back for more.

One of Elly Griffiths’ many skills is her bringing together characters of very different backgrounds and beliefs, and forging plausible relationships between them. The friendship between DCI Nelson (a lapsed Catholic) and Cathbad (a Druid) is a moving and often humorous example of an unlikely, and yet utterly convincing, connection between two ostensibly incompatible people. The author explores her characters’ differing beliefs with a generosity of spirit that embraces a “many paths to God” philosophy.

This deeply satisfying series stands out in a crowded genre by virtue of the quality of the author’s writing, through which she has created a profound connection in readers’ hearts with her characters. If you are not already hooked on these wonderful books, start reading them now, and you soon will be.

 

 

 

 

 

Peter James

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Contributor: Rosalind Esche

Peter James is known amongst crime writers and readers alike for his exceptional accuracy in portraying police procedures and investigative methods. In fact his books are positively educational – whoever knew about gait analysis? I certainly didn’t until I encountered Dr. Haydn Kelly, forensic podiatrist, in the pages of a Roy Grace novel. James is meticulous in his attention to detail, his authenticity is even endorsed by the Sussex Police themselves, with whom he has developed a close working relationship over many years in the course of his research for the Grace books.

James is a master at seeding snippets of information into his plots that pique the reader’s attention, or misdirect it. Not only does he keep his readers hooked with the intricate unravelling of each complex plot, but he also leaves loose ends which trail into the next book, with minor characters reappearing, criminals resurfacing with unfinished business, with the potential for danger to Grace, his team, and his family further down the line, so that the reader cannot wait until the next book resumes the story.

One of the best things about this series is that the time lapse between each book is very brief, a matter of months, which is immensely satisfying, because readers remember characters and stories, incidents and unsolved mysteries, and enjoy a sense of continuity and immersion. This technique creates a satisfying sense of connection with characters and plots. James has an unerring instinct for drip feeding pieces of information so subtly that the reader almost absorbs them unconsciously, only to feel their full impact later when disparate loose threads are woven together into a fuller, clearer picture. There are several examples of James’s skill at this technique relating to what might be called Grace’s paranormal experiences. Grace definitely has some sort of sixth sense, James doesn’t emphasise this in an obvious way, he does it with infinite subtlety and thus renders it all the more powerful and believable.

Another great technique is the brevity of his chapters – this device keeps the plot moving along nicely, holds the reader’s attention (there are no longueurs in the Grace books) and helps the reader juggle several complicated storylines along the way. James is adept at providing regular reminders and reinforcement of information and characters, so necessary in books of such complexity and detail.

What is less talked about, if at all, is the extraordinary emotional power of this series. Running alongside the plot of each major crime investigation is the unfolding personal story of his detective protagonist, Roy Grace. Unlike many fictional detectives, Grace flouts the stereotype of the jaded, hard-drinking loner propping up bars in seedy pubs, antagonising all and sundry by day, listening to mournful music alone in his room by night. Roy Grace is a stable, level headed man, dedicated to a job at which he excels. Yet it becomes apparent that he has a haunting backstory of his own – the disappearance of his wife Sandy, many years before the first book opens, on his 30th birthday. The painful legacy of this traumatic event, and its impact on his life as the years go by, is a theme running through all the novels, drawing in the reader more deeply with each new book in the series.

James writes with sensitivity and real emotional power about his detective, weaving the thread of his private story into the fabric of each successive crime plot. He is skilled at creating in the reader emotional investment in Grace as a person, which means that while each book tells a gripping crime story with intricate twists and turns, shock revelations and misdirection, it also grips the reader’s attention with developments in his personal story, as he begins to rebuild his life. 

I have been surprised by Peter James’s detective novels, I never expected to experience the emotions I feel when reading them. I can honestly say that no other crime writer has moved me in the way that he does. It is actually Roy Grace’s story which keeps the reader coming back for more, because of course his story continues to develop. Crimes are solved and cases closed, but Grace’s story is never closed, and the reader’s concern and affection for him grow with each successive book. He is an immensely likeable character, kind and decent, tough but caring, and vulnerable to his own private griefs and struggles, so we as readers become engaged in his life and want the best for him.

Considering that James is largely known for being spot on with his police procedural content (which I find strangely compelling) you might be forgiven for thinking that the books must be accurate, but somewhat dry, accounts of crime investigation and police methods, devoid of emotional engagement. This could not be further from the truth – this series packs an immense emotional punch, through the patient unfolding of Roy Grace’s story, parts of which delight you, while others haunt you long after you close each book.

Elly Griffiths talks about misdirection, redemption and forensic botany …

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You write under the names Domenica de Rosa and Elly Griffiths – do you find that writing under two different identities affects your style?

I suppose I do feel like that a little bit. I was first published as Domenica de Rosa, which is my real name (my father was Italian). I wrote what you might call women’s fiction under that name. I think Summer School is my favourite of all my books.

The summer school of the title is a creative writing course in Tuscany – did you ever do a writing course like that?

No, I didn’t. I remember I got an advertisement to go on a creative writing course and I couldn’t afford it at all. It was in Tuscany, and I’m half Italian, so obviously I love Italy, and I thought it sounded great. I got the programme and the programme was “Morning: Stretch” which went on for an hour, and then “write” and then “go and look round a vineyard” and I thought this is lovely, I’d love to do that, but I couldn’t afford it. So the next best thing to do was to write about it. So I write all the pieces the creative writers do on the course, I write a little bit of each of their books, that was so much fun to do. But I’ve still never been on a creative writing course like that. I’d never taught creative writing then, but of course now I do teach creative writing at Madingley Hall in Cambridge and West Dean College in Sussex.

Then when I wrote a crime novel, my agent said I needed a crime name, partly because Domenica de Rosa is too lovely for crime. I guess it sounds like a romantic fiction name, but more than that it sounds made up, which is ironical really because it’s my real name. I remember at work I’d pick up the phone and say “Domenica De Rosa” and people just thought I was singing! The thinking was that crime was a new genre for me and it gave me a new debut in a way. My grandmother’s name was Ellen Griffiths, I didn’t really know her very much, she died when I was five, but the thing I’d heard about her was that she was a very clever woman, very literate, loved books but had to leave school at 13 and go into service, so I thought she’d really like her name on a book. I wanted to be Ellen, but when the first Ruth book came out, somehow I became Elly, and I remember asking my editor about it and she said “Oh, it just looked a bit tidier.”

I think my writing style is still my style when I write the Ruth books and the historical fiction series, the Brighton Mysteries. I think my writing is the same, but people often write to me saying they wouldn’t have known it was the same person writing, it’s so different.

How interesting, because I do feel that the Brighton Mysteries have a very different atmosphere.

That’s interesting. The Brighton Mysteries are seen as a bit sort of Golden Age – it says on the cover “recalls Agatha Christie” because Agatha Christie was quite dark, and I think there is a dark atmosphere to them, so I think you’re absolutely right about that, particularly the new one, The Midnight Hour, which has just come out. I went for a dark feeling, although hopefully there are funny bits as well. So I think  you’re probably right, having said I thought that the style was the same, I think possibly those are a bit darker.

Do you think it’s because they’re set in the early ’50s at the start of the series, when there’s still rationing and there are references to people’s war experiences, so they have a more sombre atmosphere?

Yes, I do. And although The Midnight Hour is set in the 1960s, I suppose I wanted to show that the ’60s weren’t all swinging, that there was a darkness there. William Shaw, who writes brilliantly about the ’60s in his Breen and Tozer books, says for most people the ’60s didn’t start till 1970, and that’s true in a way. It’s partly about women’s liberation (one of the characters has been reading The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan) and that’s kind of central to the plot, making points like women police officers couldn’t drive police cars until the ’70s, that sort of thing, but there’s still a bit of humour in the books, for example the women are still always asked to make the tea.

So the female characters in The Midnight Hour are struggling with the restrictions of the times?

Yes, exactly. Emma, is married to the love of her life and has a very happy marriage, Edgar is a really nice man and he’s a modern man, and there were those sort of men in the ’50s and ’60s, but even so she finds her life restricting and frustrating and she wants to be working, and I really do sympathise with that. And I want to show the sometimes not such nice things she thinks, because we all think like that sometimes. She wants to support Meg as a young police officer, but also she’s a bit jealous of her because she’s a single woman and she’s out there, solving crime. I wanted to show that it’s all very complicated.

When I had my twins 23 years ago I was working at Harper Collins as Editorial Director for Children’s Fiction and I left because I couldn’t do the job with the twins, and I worked freelance for a long time, and then I started publishing books. I felt that I still had the job, but I’d lost my career, and I really did feel upset about that. Even though I loved my children, and I adored being a mum, and absolutely wouldn’t swap that time, I still missed my career.

There’s always a spiritual/mystical element in your books – could you talk about why that is?

I am really, really interested in spirituality and what people believe and why, and I think that’s why it comes into my books. It’s funny though, because my first four books written as Domenica de Rosa are mainly set in Italy and I said to myself right after that, “no more Italians and no more Catholics”, and I did stick to the “no more Italians” rule until Ruth book 10, which is The Dark Angel when they go to Italy. But the “no more Catholics” rule was broken the minute Nelson appeared, because I knew he would be a lapsed Catholic! And I just wanted to have all that, why people believe and how it affects their life. I’m not an atheist, I was brought up a Catholic. Now I would say I was a liberal Catholic, I guess, a freelance Catholic! I wanted to show that it’s with you all the time. I still get a great deal of comfort from prayer, meditation and those aspects. I have a friend who was brought up a Catholic like me and is now a Pagan, so I wanted to show her views respectfully through Cathbad and Nelson, who get on really well, they have a connection.

Something Nancy Mitford said always stuck with me. She said the people she really suspected were the people who talked about God as if his real name was Godfrey and God was just their nickname for him. I’m a little wary now, as I’ve got older, of certainty, where people think they know the answers, and I think initially Ruth’s parents, who were born again Christians, that’s their line, although book 14, called The Locked Room, the one that’s just about to come out, I think is nearing more understanding of her parents’ beliefs really, but yes, I’m very wary of that certainty.

I love all that doubt, and I love the fact that Nelson isn’t quite sure what he believes, but he’ll probably still say the Hail Mary if he has to. And Cathbad is a Druid but he’s also not above praying to his patron saints if he wants to. I suppose tolerance is what I’m aiming for in the books, that “many paths to God” line.

What made you choose crime fiction? Or did it just happen?

I think I was always interested in crime because I wrote my first book when I was 11, it was called The Hair of the Dog, which must have been something my parents talked about, but I didn’t know what it meant, but I did understand the revenge aspect of it – that the hair of the dog that killed you is the bit that makes you better.

And that was the plot, it was set in Rottingdean, which is right near where I still live. It was about a village where nothing much happens so they stage a fake murder there to try and get on the news, but of course the fake murder turns into a real murder. It wasn’t a bad plot, I don’t think. I was obviously already interested in crime, and there are two detectives, one is called Edgar Stephens, and of course I used the name later on for Edgar, and there’s a Max in it as well, so I even used that very name again in some of the books. So you know all the elements were there even when I was really young. I was a real fan of Enid Blyton and the Five Find Out-ers, and then I went through Agatha Christie and absolutely loved it. I’m a real fan as well of Nancy Spain, who wrote a book that’s been a big influence on me, called R in the Month. It’s set in a faded seaside town, and it’s about poisoned oysters. In the Brighton Mysteries I have tried to get that slightly dark, melancholic atmosphere that she gets in that book and she wrote some other really good ones, Cinderella Goes to the Morgue, Poison for Teacher, Death Goes on Skis. My mum had some of these books, I think she was very popular in the ’50s and my mum must have been a fan of hers, and she was an out gay woman at a time when that wasn’t very common, and she was often on talk shows and in the media. So I think I was influenced by her as well.

It was my husband Andy, who’s an archaeologist, who gave me the idea for The Crossing Places. It was a chance remark that he made when we were walking across Titchwell Marsh in North Norfolk, he said that prehistoric people thought that marshland was sacred because it’s neither land nor sea, but something in between, a liminal zone, a bridge to the afterlife, and that’s why you find bodies buried there, bog bodies. And almost immediately the plot for The Crossing Places, the first Ruth book, came into my head. Although I suppose at the time when I thought of Ruth as a character, I wasn’t even sure that it was crime. Ruth is asked by a police officer DCI Nelson to look at some bones he’s found, and those bones are 2000 years old, which is how she is drawn into the case. There’s the question “is it right to dig down into the past and disturb it?” That’s definitely a theme to the books.

When is your next Ruth book due to come out?

Early February. It’s called The Locked Room and it’s set during lockdown, which I thought would be interesting. I thought long and hard about whether to do lockdown in the books. But then, because I’ve written a book every year for the last 13 or 14 years it felt wrong to miss it out for a long term series. I think if I were writing a standalone I wouldn’t have set it in lockdown, but for a series I thought people might want to know what happened to those characters during that year.

Do you have to plot each book meticulously before you even start to write?

That’s changed a bit for me actually. So when I started The Crossing Places the plot did sort of come into my head as almost a complete book, but other than that I used to write a full chapter plan for my book, and  set one line for each chapter. It was quite short. Some writers do immensely long plans, but I did one line for each chapter, but I would work to the end and I would know who did it. But the last four or five books, probably starting with The Stranger Diaries, my first standalone, I didn’t have a written plan and it was just in my head and when I wrote each chapter, I’d just write a little bit of the next chapter. I read a brilliant thing  E.L. Doctorow said, that planning like that is like driving in the dark with your headlights on, you can only see a bit of the road, but you can make the whole journey like that.

Do you have a daily writing routine?

I’m quite disciplined. I don’t really like to write away from home, so I’m not one of those writers who takes their laptop to a cafe or on trains, but what I really like is to be in my little writing shed in the garden. I had only just finished it really before lockdown and it was an absolute godsend because it was somewhere else to go. I’ve got a cat called Gus, and at 8 o’clock every morning he goes and sits by the door of the writing shed and waits – he’s like my little furry conscience, so ideally I’ll go into the writing shed. I’ve got a coffee machine, I like coffee, I make myself a strong coffee and then I write. I try to write at least 1000 words a day. It’s not such a big target really, my books are between 80,000 and 90,000 words, so you’d think that in 80 days you’d have a book, but it doesn’t work like that. But I do try not to go back on it too much, I do try to do a different 1000 words each day until I have a manuscript and then I can go back and change it, so that’s how I work really. I try to do that in the morning, mornings are better for me and in the afternoon, do admin and all the other things that you have to do, but ideally 1000 words a day in my shed.

The Ruth books are written in the present tense, but the Brighton Mysteries are written in the past tense – how do you decide which tense to use?

It is really just what seems natural. We were talking earlier about different atmospheres, and I do wonder a bit if the different atmosphere of the Brighton Mysteries is because they’re in the past tense, with that slightly melancholic feeling. I didn’t really plan for Ruth to be in the present tense, but because I’d written those four books before under my real name, that sort of women’s fiction genre is often in the present tense, so I wrote The Crossing Places in the same way. Some people don’t like it at all, and I still get people saying they couldn’t read a book because it was in the present tense, some just don’t like it. It seems a bit of a shame not to read a book because of it, but there are people who don’t.

But the Ruth books have got real immediacy because of it, haven’t they?

Well, I think so. I think in some ways it seems to suit crime writing quite well because the reader is discovering everything at the same time as the writer. One thing that I love about crime as a genre is that you don’t read in a passive way, you read in a very active way because you’re trying to solve the crime, so I think it suits that very well.

The present tense can be quite hard to get right, the “she looks, she stops, she stares” etc because it’s like being repeatedly hit over the head with the action. So when you want to relax a bit or go into the past it can get a bit clunky and you can get a bit pluperfect – you know, “he had had had had had” something, so it can be a bit difficult! I think after the first book I did say to my editor that I might switch to the past and she said, “I think that would be fine too, to be honest I don’t think people would even notice, I think it would be OK” but then I thought maybe the present tense is the way I get Ruth – I do think that the fact that people have so connected with Ruth, which has been a wonderful thing, is partly to do with the present tense.

I think people like her because she’s not perfect and that was deliberate when I thought of her as a character, and what I liked was that she was going to be a woman who was very confident in her work as a forensic archaeologist but not so confident in other things. I feel she wouldn’t know how to drape a scarf! And hair is quite a thing – my daughter has lovely long hair and I always felt inadequate because I’m not very good at plaiting, whereas my German friend is amazing at plaiting and her daughter always had this wonderful plait that went round her head three times, and I would be in Assembly looking at the backs of their heads thinking Juliet’s plaits were a little bit, you know, uneven, thinking why can’t I be the sort of mother who plaits? Those moments are quite human I think, and people love that about Ruth, they can identify with her, because we all feel like that sometimes.

It’s been very touching to me to hear people saying that the books have helped them through lockdown. I decided to read the first Ruth book on my Facebook page at the beginning of lockdown, hoping that people might find it comforting and they did seem to really find it comforting, and there was that lovely exchange with readers saying “I look forward to 6 o’clock every night when I can listen to you reading” And it was really nice, I did feel a real connection to readers through that.

Misdirection is such an important theme in the Brighton Mysteries – are you playing with parallels between a magician misdirecting the audience, criminals misdirecting the police, and the crime writer misdirecting readers?

I think so, yes. When I teach plotting, that’s how I teach it. I start by showing the students a magic trick on YouTube (because I can’t do them myself!). I start by showing them a trick and I break it down and of course, that’s what you use in your writing, so you have the build up which should involve you getting an emotional attachment to the person, so it could be the magician doing their patter. Then you have jeopardy, when the magician shows you the sword and how sharp it is, and then you have misdirection, which sadly in the magician’s case often involves scantily clad women coming along! So you’d say, “Oh, look over there! There’s a woman over there. Look she’s not wearing any clothes!” while something else is happening, and as a writer, you’re doing things like, “Oh, here’s this new character. Maybe they’re a love interest for Ruth, but maybe they’re not.”

You can misdirect your reader in loads of ways, for example if you always call someone Grandad, the reader thinks “Here’s Grandad, oh that’s nice”, you forget his real name is James, and that he could also be the sinister Jim. So you have all those layers of misdirection, and then you get to raise the stakes, so that’s where after you’ve had one body, you maybe have another body and maybe have a third one, and then you get the reveal at the end when it’s all resolved. That’s all in the trick.

There’s a wonderful bit in a great book (and a great film) called The Prestige by Christopher Priest where he describes the trick in three parts: first of all, the magician shows you something, an ordinary thing, say it’s a pack of cards, and quite often he will get you to tap it. I mean, there’s nothing in that tap but you’re involved then, that’s why he makes you do it. Then he does something that makes it disappear. But that’s not the thing, the thing is when he brings it back, and that’s the third bit. It’s the involvement that makes the trick work, and in a similar way crime readers are actively involved in the trick, or mystery.

You have said that you think readers should be able to solve the mystery in the last few pages. Do you misdirect all the way through, but seed little clues that you hope some people will pick up?

I think even if readers don’t get it on the first reading it has to be retrospectively cursive, to use someone’s wonderful expression, so if you go back and re-read it, you should be able to see how everything was actually there for you to find. If you think of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, such a clever book still, when you go back and read it again you see that Agatha Christie has not cheated for one second.

There are lots of little tricks. One of them is to put the big clue in the prologue, because people always forget the prologue. There’s one book in which the author tells you the murderer’s name in the first line, he does tell you, but you forget. And you go back and you think “Wow, it was there!” And there are other ways that you can hide things. Lists are good, something in the middle of a list could be the big clue, but people don’t notice if it’s in the middle.

I think if somebody does guess you want them to guess at the right moment, just when there’s the reveal, you want them to think “oh yes!” but not before that, because that’s just annoying. And what annoys me a little bit in crime fiction (even the great Agatha does this a bit) is where their detective knows and says, “but I won’t tell you.” Why not?! Poirot keeps saying “Yes, I do know these things but I will not tell you” – and you think “If you know, say!” –  they have to have the moment of revelation at the same time for the detective and the reader, so they shouldn’t keep it too secret.

In Northanger Abbey Jane Austen says something like the reader can tell by the “tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together towards perfect felicity.” Isn’t that good? That reminds us of the joy of reading a real book – there’s a heightened excitement because you know you’re going to find out the solution soon. I think it’s a bit different on a Kindle (and I read a Kindle) where you know you’ve got 10% left, it’s not the same as seeing the physical pages diminish as you read.

Speaking of Jane Austen, Emma is a mystery in a way, isn’t it?

Yes, absolutely. And Miss Bates’s monologues have lots of clues in them. That’s another way of hiding clues, to have a so called boring, garrulous character like Miss Bates talking, talking, talking , talking – nobody takes any notice of what she’s saying, but her monologues are full of clues about Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax all the time.

You’ve got police and amateur sleuths working side by side in the Brighton Mysteries and The Postscript Murders, and there’s a certain tension between them. Is that a useful plot device for you?

I think it is, and to be honest I don’t really know enough to write a straight police procedural in the way that Peter James does, where the investigators are just police, although actually I do have a police advisor who also advises Peter James, called Graham Bartlett, who was the Chief Superintendent for Brighton and Hove. He’s written brilliantly about policing Brighton and Hove, actually, and he does advise me on the police, but I didn’t meet Graham till about book three in the Ruth series. I think the first three have very little actual policing in them! I think I met him at a Peter James launch actually, and suddenly you get more policing in the books because I found out what they actually do! I did have a retired policeman help me with the first few books but because he had been retired a while, he might even be responsible for Nelson’s rather old-fashioned attitude, because I put that onto Nelson! But Graham obviously has retired young because he was a victim of police having to retire after so many years’ service, but actually he’s a young man and his son’s a police officer, so he knows what’s going on at the moment.

I quite like in The Postscript Murders, that you get the detective Harbinder’s irritation with the amateurs bumbling their way through. It is the fault of crime fiction to make us all think we know the answer. I know we’re both big fans of the 19th century – think of the Road Hill House case that Inspector Whicher solves, a hideous crime, with Brighton links as well – the amateurs were sure they could solve it. Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens were guilty of this too, they  were constantly writing to each other, trying to solve the case.

But you know, there is a snobbery about it, that intelligent, maybe middle class, people could solve it better than the working class officer. It is a class thing I think, it’s a kind of arrogance. And in the Golden Age as well you get bumbling police officers and then Lord Peter Wimsey comes in and solves it.

There’s an element of that in Sherlock Holmes too, isn’t there? Lestrade and the others at Scotland Yard are  patronised, with Holmes as the great genius solving the case for them.

There is, and don’t forget that in Enid Blyton early on (and there’s no doubt that she is a crime writer), her police officer is a PC Goon, and there is a PC Plod. All right, these are Noddy books but even so, it does tell you something, the sense that working class people can never solve the crime, that you need a higher class, educated amateur to come in and solve it, there is a certain snobbishness about that.

I think I wanted to play with that a little bit in the The Postscript Murders where Harbinder, as a professional police officer, has this group of people who just because they’ve read a lot of crime or they’re literary, or they do the Times cryptic crossword and they’re good at anagrams, think they can solve the case. Obviously there is a bit where they do work together and they do reach an understanding, but even so.

I think with Ruth and Nelson it’s different because what Nelson really likes about Ruth is she’s on the same level, they’re both professionals, very good at what they do, and they respect each other. And although she does get involved in rather more murders than most archaeologists, she does try to confine herself to the archaeology and she’s actually not that interested in doing the police work.

Ruth respects what the police do, she doesn’t think she knows better, she’s just part of the team working on it.

Yes she does. I think one of the things that I’ve learned from Graham and from other experts, like  Elizabeth Haynes who’s a really good crime writer and a civilian police expert, is that there’s a massive, massive team behind every crime investigation. They will talk to forensic soil experts and people like that.

Yes, I’ve learned a lot from reading Peter James, for example I never knew about forensic podiatry and gait analysis before reading his Grace books.

Exactly! I’ve met his forensic podiatrist, Dr Haydn Kelly, and what a fascinating guy he is – he told me how you can tell if someone was carrying a body upstairs! I love those little details. A forensic archaeologist told me quite early on, and I’ve used it in a few books, that nettles are often a sign that there’s a body there, because you can’t get nettles without some sort of human interaction, so it could just be someone weed there, but it could be something buried there. I did an event with a terrific Scottish writer called Lin Anderson, who writes about a forensic scientist, and she said that on the Jacobite graves in Scotland, on the hills, no heather grows on those graves, it’s just grass. And sometimes there’s a dip where there’s a grave, because imagine there’s a body, when its rib cage goes, then there’s a dip in the earth. So it’s fascinating reading the landscape. I like that behind every crime there’s a whole team of different experts, all working together to solve the crime, that’s something I have learned from talking to police officers.

Are the police helpful when you’re researching for a book?

I’m always amazed at how nice people are about it, you know. Graham is, particularly. I’ll send him something and I’ll say, “could this happen?” Clearly he wants to say “no, not in a million years” but he’ll say, “well, that’s a bit unusual, but I can see how that might happen this way.” For example, there’s an armed siege in The Night Hawks and I said to him, “I want to have an armed siege in it, can I send you the chapter?” And I did, and he’s always really nice, but he said “actually, that’s not how that would happen. How it would happen is Nelson would have a firearms commander who would be taking their advice from somebody else.” And he said, “actually, I can see how well that would work in the book, because Nelson would be really frustrated by that” and he made that chapter so much better because you have Nelson being frustrated because he’s not in charge, and all the decisions are being taken by someone not at the scene so they can be totally dispassionate, and that actually does make it a more dramatic scene, and he understood that totally, but he’s a writer himself, so he understood about the fictional tensions.

But police officers are really generous, and archaeologists have been super generous. In one of my books I had to find a plant that only grew in a certain place. Of course I could have made it up but it’s nicer not doing that, and a Brighton archaeologist friend of mine, Matt Pope, put me in touch with a forensic botanist who found this fern that only grew in a certain place. And in the book there were these spores on the body that could only have come from this place.

For The Woman in Blue, which is set in Walsingham, I actually went on a pilgrimage to research it and I was very honest with the priest who was leading it, and I said I’m obviously going to be very respectful and I understand the prayer experience, I’m going to enter into that, but I’m also researching a book, and he was so keen, in fact he was almost too keen! We’d be in a chapel and everyone would be lighting candles and we were all very silent and Father Kevin would be shouting at me “Dom, do you think you could kill someone with a thurible?” And everywhere we went he was saying, “oh, I can see this would be a good murder!” Father Kevin does get a mention in that book because he was really helpful. I think there’s something about a crime novel that does get people really interested, despite themselves.

It’s in our head, isn’t it, as we’re hastening together towards perfect felicity in the books? We’re trying to solve it and we want to work it out. I think some Golden Age mysteries are just a puzzle without having much else, a poisoned chocolates case, you know, whereas probably what modern crime fiction does quite well is it’s also really involved in the characters. I do think they have more depth. I think it’s great to have the puzzle which everyone loves, but also the human element and the development of relationships in a series.

That’s the way of keeping a series fresh, isn’t it? You’ve got a new crime plot each time, but you need to continue the personal lives of the recurring characters, and that keeps people coming back for more.

I do think that’s true, and I do think that is why people like series, the development of the characters. Miss Marple, bless her, doesn’t change at all, I don’t think, during the course of the books. I’m one of the twelve writers being asked to write a new Miss Marple story for her centenary next year, which is such an honour. One of the better things about it, what it makes it possible, is she’s not always centre stage in all the books she’s in, sometimes they’re first person by someone else and she is there in the background, so that makes it a little bit easier, but I think generally speaking, nowadays we do go to series because of the characters, they keep us coming back. And they say there are only so many plots, don’t they? And I don’t think a writer can think of a massive killer twist every time, but what makes each book different is the characters and how they interact and how they’re growing. Ruth has a child, and that’s quite a nice way of being able to see time passing. When I started the last book I thought “Kate’s nearly 11, she’s going to be going to secondary school soon” –  that’s the same shock you have with your own children, that sense of time passing and characters ageing.

Nelson’s mother Maureen is one of my favourite characters, but we haven’t actually seen her in person since Dying Fall, and I’ve been waiting to bring her back in, and also there was a slight theme in that book about parents being actual people as well, because Ruth is having discussions with her bereaved father, where he’s moving forward with his life, and so I wanted that to be part of that book. So it was quite nice to bring her back in, and Ruth’s brother, as well, reappears in that book. We haven’t seen him since The Outcast Dead and we’ve never met Judy’s parents, I think we might have to meet them. It’s nice when people come in and out.

With writing a series you live with characters over many years – what does that feel like, do you  feel that they’re almost real people?

Yes you do, in a way, although you try and remember they’re still words on a page, really. But definitely, and I’m certainly attached to Ruth and Nelson in a way that means I can’t ever really just treat them as words on a page.

One of my favourites to write is Justice, the heroine of my children’s books, and that’s because she’s very much based on my mum and on the stories she used to tell about being at boarding school (she’d write stories as well.) Justice has many of the elements that my mum had as a character, resilience and bravery, she’s actually a great person to be with and she cheers me up a lot, so I write a Justice chapter every Friday to cheer myself up. So in some way she’s my favourite character to write, whereas Cathbad I do like as a character but I find it hard to write from his point of view, and I’ve done that very rarely in the books. There’s a little bit in the new book, and there’s a bit in Dying Fall from his point of view, and I wonder if that’s because, although I respect his world view I don’t totally share it, so it’s quite hard to write without looking at it from the outside, you wonder how much he really does believe, and if you’re being him, you have to know.

Also with Ruth’s boss Phil, who is quite an unappealing character really in the books, suddenly in The Lantern Men I had not even a chapter, just a brief bit, from his point of view, the first time I’ve ever been his point of view, and it totally changed my feelings towards him. I’d always been outside sneering at him when he grows a beard, and because he loves being on TV, but when you’re him you can’t take that slightly sneery outside tone. He’s cycling home and they’re having a dinner party and he stops to buy something for the dinner party and he thinks “I’ll get some After Eights ’cause my mum used to buy those for dinner parties” and suddenly I think “Oh Phil!” and feel more sympathetic towards him. It took me twelve books to understand that!

With the Ruth series do you ever wonder how you’re going to end it? Do you intend to end it?

It will come to an end, or at least there will be a pause. I couldn’t see that pause, but funnily enough, writing book 14, The Locked Room, set during lockdown, did change something in me and I could certainly see how it was going to end, so now I can. And it won’t be that far off. But it might not be an end forever.

Does it feel difficult to contemplate letting go of a series?

It seems quite scary, but I have so many other ideas for books, different projects, different series, different characters.

You are very prolific, and quite unusual in having several distinct detective series.

That is partly because I do have lots of different ideas and I’ve just been so lucky that my publishers have more or less gone with my ideas. At the moment I’m starting a new standalone, with Harbinder in it, so she sort of is a series, I didn’t mean her to be, but she’s turning into a series.

When I had the idea for the Brighton Mysteries, which are partly based on my Grandad, who was a musical entertainer, I did hope my publishers would say “Oh, that’s great, so you can write a Ruth book one year and then a Max book the next year” but actually they said “Oh that’s great, you can do two a year”! So that’s how I got into the two books a year, and I don’t want to keep on doing that forever, but I do have lots of different ideas, and lots of different characters wanting to come out. So maybe there will be a break from Ruth, but maybe there’ll be another character people like as much as Ruth, you never know.

Do you avoid reading people who write about Brighton or Norfolk?

Not really. When I’m in the middle of writing about the ’50s, I do read people like Monica Dickens, who get into that ’50s tone a little bit. I suppose I might not read books that have archaeologists in them, there seem to be a few around now, so maybe I’d steer slightly clear of those, especially when I’m in the middle of a book. I just read everything really, and I quite often have an upstairs book and a downstairs book, so it depends where I am when I’m reading! I love biographies, I like history, I love C.J. Sansom, another Brighton writer, who writes those amazing Tudor mysteries.

Did you have Graham Greene in the back of your mind when you wrote the Brighton Mysteries?

Yes, a bit. I love Graham Greene, Brighton Rock is amazing, but my favourite book of his is The End of the Affair because it’s about belief. And The Power and the Glory, that sense that somebody can be an unworthy vessel but still be a really good priest. Also Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, that moment at the end when Lord Marchmain makes the sign of the Cross, and Sebastian, who’s holy in a way that really pious characters like Lady Marchmain can never be. I was very struck by A Married Man by Paul Piers Read and the idea of redemption in that book. I like redemption in a story, particularly when it’s unusual, like the moment at the end of Brideshead when Charles Ryder kneels down to pray – everything isn’t better from that moment, but actually there is a moment of redemption, isn’t there?

What do you read for pleasure?

I do read a lot even though I think I’m a slower reader than I used to be. Now I read before bed and I always have to have a book with me. I read a lot of crime fiction, partly  because a lot of it’s now sent to me to read, but a lot of it I would read anyhow. I’m a big fan of Lesley Thomson, who’s a  crime writer, and a good friend of mine as well, she wrote the Detective’s Daughter series. William Shaw I really like as well, Sarah Hilary, Jane Casey’s Maeve Kerrigan series, she’s a great character, Maeve. I’m a big fan of Liane Moriarty, and American writers like Alison Lurie and Anne Tyler. I think David Lodge is one of my favourite writers, Nice Work is one of my favourite books. I’ve just read Elizabeth Day’s Magpie, which I thought was really, really good, so I’m trying to keep up with stuff. I re-read Georgette Heyer, whenever I go on a ‘plane I take a Georgette Heyer book just in case.

 

 

 

Elly Griffiths wrote four novels under her own name (Domenica de Rosa) before turning to crime with The Crossing Places, the first novel featuring forensic archaeologist Dr Ruth Galloway. The Crossing Places won the Mary Higgins Clark award and three novels in the series have been shortlisted for the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year. The Night Hawks (Ruth #13, published in February 2021) was number two in the  Sunday Times Top Ten Bestsellers list. Elly also writes the Brighton Mysteries, set in the theatrical world of the 1950s. In 2016 Elly was awarded the CWA Dagger in the Library for her body of work. Her first standalone mystery, The Stranger Diaries, won the 2020 Edgar award for Best Crime Novel. The second, The Postscript Murders, has recently been shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger. Elly also writes A Girl Called Justice, a mystery series for children.

Emily Winslow, a unique and original voice in crime fiction today

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Contributor: Rosalind Esche

Emily Winslow, with her multiple narrators (reminiscent of Wilkie Collins’ great detective novel of 1868, The Moonstone) has introduced an unusual and distinctive voice into the world of contemporary crime fiction. For Winslow, the story is central, and everyone comes and goes in and out of that story, like characters entering and exiting the stage in a play, each bringing something of their own to bear on the unravelling of the mystery set before the reader. As the title of her first book The Whole World implies, everyone has a part to play, every voice counts, every viewpoint is important, and no one person is the star.

Winslow uses this literary device in order to convey the unreliability of memory, the potential incoherence of differing points of view and the challenging process of piecing together the disparate pieces of a puzzle in order to understand the whole.

Winslow has said that she does not know the resolution of each mystery before it begins – she participates in the process of investigation as she writes, piecing random facts together, uncovering evidence, trying to make sense of conflicting accounts, working her way towards the resolution alongside her detectives. This makes for a most unusual experience for the reader, who feels drawn into the psyche of the characters, with their “first person” view of the world, their alienation from one another, their cross purposes and failure to connect.

The author’s style unveils a subtle process of layering characters’ innermost thoughts, feelings and memories, gradually building as close to a coherent picture as possible, somewhat analogous to the technique of an artist delicately shading in blank spaces on a sheet of paper, slowly building depth and dimension.

Emily Winslow has certainly established herself, in a genre crowded with talent, as a sophisticated storyteller with her compelling and unsettling books. It is safe to say that no one else out there is writing anything like these books.