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Article: 16 Things I would say to my younger self

19/3/2016

'If I could turn back time...'

Aged 18, with my best friends, Lynn and Jackie

I have been musing today about what advice I would give to my younger self, should I ever have the opportunity to go back in time and meet me. Not that the teenage Karen James would ever have listened to any advice. But it was a fun exercise anyway.

Stay true to who you are. Don’t let anyone steal your sparkle. Recognise that there are those who will try to do this – and learn to avoid them.
Take that cigarette Joanne Parrish offers to you behind the bike shed when you are twelve. Yes, it will make you vomit but it is far better to be sick on your socks and put off from smoking when you are twelve than start the habit at sixteen and become a life-long nicotine addict.
Boys, lots of boys, will come and go. Stop obsessing over them; there’s far, far more to a happy life than men. You’ll be amazed.
Hesitate and think carefully before using the word ‘should.’ Steer clear of those who repeat it like a mantra.
Get on a bloody plane and do the travelling you always dreamed about.
Your may think your education will finish at twenty-one but you will never stop learning. Embrace the changes in technology as they arrive. This new-fangled thing called the Internet will make your fortune.
Please remember that you don’t lead a charmed life. Don’t use rope swings or climb onto the back of motorbikes when you are drunk.
Your love of reading is what makes you into you and is the foundation stone of your future career. Don’t let anyone stop you reading.
Put aside at least fifteen minutes every day to practise your writing – and don’t let rejection put you off. Scribble, scribble and scribble some more.
Never give up on your dreams. They can, and will, come true.
Enjoy being young, pretty and confident but remember that skinniness doesn’t last for long.
Your mistakes are good; you will learn from them. All 100,000 of them.
Parenthood is an exhausting slog – but it is the best, most rewarding thing you will ever do in your life. Seriously.
Friends will come and go, but that’s okay. You will still be making new friends in your fifties.
Money is good – not bad – and it should be horded. Save money instead of spending it. Avoid credit cards like the plague and remember that banks are NOT your friend.

Buy shares in a company called Google.

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Artical: Writing Habits

27/1/2016

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Spring Clean

The Inner Sanctum (after a good clean.)

Feeling very proud of myself today. I've just filed away all my 'Sculthorpe Murder' notebooks and tidied up my desk and office. It needed it. While I had my head immersed in the edits and rewrites of ‘The Sculthorpe Murder,’ my study started to resemble the bottom of a hamster cage (minus the poop droppings.)

I was surrounded by torn scraps of paper, a mountain of reference books, random piles of notes and the lingering smell of rotting food. Evidence of absent-minded snacking and my coffee addiction were everywhere. I found dirty crockery behind my thesaurus, an unwashed spoon in an empty yogurt pot and a mouldy pear festering at the bottom of my over-flowing waste paper bin. If I’d harvested all the white fluff on its surface, I would have had enough penicillin for the Fever Ward at the local hospital.

IMHO housework and the intense concentration needed for novel writing are not natural bedfellows. While deeply immersed in my fiction, I don’t see the rubbish mushrooming like a wild organism around my work space or the thick layer of dust settling on everything that doesn’t move. And as my cleaner is scared of damaging or moving something she shouldn’t in my inner sanctum, it rarely has a thorough clean. Fortunately, a bit of muck never did anyone any harm.

Anyway, today I’ve emptied the bin and wiped everything down with damp cloth. I've got 'Fleetwood Mac's Greatest Hits’ playing in the background and a Ylang Ylang candle burning on the window sill to mask the lingering smell of rotten pear.
I also made a brand new job list and itemised all those boring admin things I need to do at this time of the year. I wonder how far down this list I will get before I abandon it and start writing another book?

But for the moment, I’m clean and efficient. I’m ready for the rest of 2016 and whatever literary challenges this sparkling New Year may bring.

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Article: Musings About Writing

21/12/2015

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Heaven...on a canal towpath

Today has been one of the most satisfying writing days I have ever experienced.

Last August, a dramatic finale for ‘The Sculthorpe Murder’ started to form in my mind. The full scene was sketched out with the help of my Dad out on his garden patio one hot, memorable night. We’d both had a bit to drink and giggled and laughed our way the process.

A few days later in Leicestershire, on another glorious summer day, I took a long walk down the tow path of the canal in Market Harborough. I sat in the soft grass beside the still, green and opaque water watching the ducks and the narrow boats pass by and decided to commit the first tentative words of this scene to paper.

Saunt's Bridge, Market Harborough Canal Arm

Today, the shortest and darkest day of the year, was the culmination of this creative process and a day I’d been looking forward to for months. I ignored the gloom outside and surrounded by three notebooks, with numerous Internet webpages open on my computer for further reference, I sat down and wrote 2,500 words, the final version of this momentous scene.

It’s dramatic, action-packed and scary. It’s wonderful to finally release the tension, write something that has formed and reformed in my mind for so long and wind up the two sub-plots I’ve threaded like embroidery thread throughout this novel.

But it’s not quite ‘The End.’ Not yet. Lavender’s final words today were: “I think it’s about time we arrested the murderers of William Sculthorpe.”

And that, my friends, is what Detective Stephen Lavender and I will be doing tomorrow.

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Article: THE PLEASURE OF THINKING

25/4/2015

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THE PLEASURE OF THINKING

“Sometimes I sits and thinks, sometimes I just sits.” – A. A. Milne

Thinking is one of the greatest pleasures in my life. I can spend forty minutes at a time with my chin on my hands just staring into space. I’m usually lost in thought during a walk on the beach and when I’m driving. Sometimes I have no recollection of how I got from A to B. These day-dreaming sessions are as important to me as regular meals and sleep. Without the daily opportunity to disappear into the quiet recesses of my mind, I can become cranky and agitated.

This is where my stories come from. These periods of reflection are the springboard from which my creativity leaps. Plots twist and unfurl in those quiet minutes, characters evolve and settings are enriched with detail. While some authors do mental gymnastics or writing exercises first thing in the morning to wake up their brains, mine has a far lazier more thoughtful start. I have no particular structure or routine. From the moment I get out of bed, my imagination has a free rein to wander wherever it likes, whenever it likes. Maybe into the work in progress; maybe not. Sometimes it wanders all day and doesn't come home.

I write when I've got something to write about and not before. And I have to wait patiently for my wandering thoughts to start to make sense. It can be months after the last novel has finished before I know exactly where I’m going with the next. But when that moment does come, it comes fast. Suddenly my brain clicks into a higher gear and with amazing clarity it shapes a myriad random thoughts into the outline of a full-length novel. This is my ‘Eureka!’ moment - and I have had one with every book. Those disjointed, half-formed strands and ideas now make a whole and I have a credible plot and characters with purpose. It’s a wonderful, satisfying and exhilarating sensation. I know I am lucky I am to be able to take my time, indulge the roaming nature of my imagination and work through this process at leisure.

Sadly, quiet reflection time for their work is not something that everyone is allowed. It is my perception that thoughtfulness is generally undervalued in our society. There is hardly any time to pee in most modern workplaces, never mind to sit and think things through. Our society is obsessed with 'DOING.' Every moment has to be accounted for; every second filled with action. Reflection is regarded as an unnecessary indulgence and day-dreamers and thinkers are viewed with suspicion as lazy wastrels who don't pull their weight in the office. Many professions talk blithely about the importance of evaluation and reflection but they rarely give their staff the time to do it before the next project comes hurtling through the door.

The Internet mirrors this act-now-think-later attitude so pervasive in our society. A quick Google is all that is needed to confirm that the most powerful tool on earth is full of platitudes about the dangers of over-thinking and the importance of doing rather than thinking. These clichés far outnumber any quotes about the value and satisfaction which comes from reflection. In fact, if the internet is anything to go by, the only people in the entire history of the world who seem to share my pleasure in this pursuit and recognise its importance are philosophers and other artists.

Yet quiet reflection is essential to creative problem-solving and the success of projects in every sphere of life and work. How much more creative would our nation be, I wonder, if people were simply given more time to think?

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Article: TEN THINGS NO ONE TELLS YOU ABOUT BOOK PUBLISHING

19/4/2015

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TEN THINGS NO ONE TELLS YOU ABOUT BOOK PUBLISHING

In a recent survey carried out by YouGov and published in The Independent newspaper, 60% of UK adults declared that being a writer is their ‘dream job.’ 14,294 adults were interviewed for this survey. I can only assume – that they all assume – that being an author is both stress-free and lucrative.

In response to this article about the YouGov survey I stuck my tongue in my cheek and jotted down a few observations about the truth behind a publishing contract – especially with a small publishing house. This list of observations is gathered from my own experience and that of fellow authors. I have decided to share it with you below.

If you are ‘lucky’ enough to acquire a publishing deal with a small traditional publisher the following may happen…

1. You probably won’t be paid an advance and won’t see a penny in royalties until six months after the book is published.

2. In the meantime, you will be expected to do an awful lot of marketing to promote the book and this will cost money. A surprising amount of money. You will buy in lots of stock, organise expensive book launches which no one attends and travel up and down the country to poorly attended events where no-one buys your book.

3. You will annoy and pester your teenage children into designing webpages for you. And beg them to teach you about Facebook and Twitter.

4. You will rapidly lose friends – especially on Facebook and Twitter – as you harass everyone you know into buying your book.

5. Those family and friends who do read your book will make the most bizarre assumptions about upon whom the characters are based.

6. You will soon realise you are spending more time marketing your first novel, than you are writing the second one.

7. You will harbor a secret hope that despite having no publicist or marketing budget that somehow your novel will make it onto the best-seller list and be signed up for a film deal. You will dream of retiring from the day job, moving to the Mediterranean and spending the rest of your life sipping cocktails beside the pool, while tapping out another best-seller on the laptop.

8. Everyone else in the world will assume that you are coining in the cash, while you may have an uneasy suspicion that this is just turning out to be a VERY expensive hobby.

9. When your first royalty cheque arrives, you will be devastated and convinced that there should be another zero at the end of that figure. At this point, your long-suffering partner will lose all patience with you and refuse to support you or your writing anymore. If you are really unlucky, your publisher will fold and disappear off into the ether still owing you money.

10. Despite the fact that your spouse has filed for divorce and the bailiffs are on the doorstep, no-one will ever have any sympathy for you…because you are a writer ‘living the dream.’

Of course, this is the worst case scenario but even authors with the bigger publishing houses have problems. They write to strict deadlines which are often inflexible and can be exhausting. Midlist authors with the Big Five live in constant fear of being dropped by their publisher because of poor sales and as we all know, we are all only as good as our last novel.

Self-publishing authors work to their own timetable but have a massive learning curve to undergo in order to be successful. They need to source decent book cover designers, editors and proofreaders and have to learn how to format. They are entirely responsible for their own administration, marketing and success and it is not easy to get your novels noticed on Amazon when yours is just one novel among so many millions.

Having said all that – if it works out—being an author IS the best job in the world. Like many novelists, my experience of the publishing industry has thrown up some horrible lows as well as highs. There is hard work, heartache and disappointment behind every one of my books. But each morning as I climb out of bed with a spring in my step and a smile on my face, I remember the words of Édith Piaf:

"Non, je ne regrette rien.”

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Article: Bow street magistrates' court

5/12/2014

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The Fascinating & gruesome history of
bow street magistrates' court

Bow Street Magistrates’ court, was the thriving centre of policing in the crime-ridden capital of England for two hundred and fifty years. Now abandoned, empty and awaiting conversion into a hotel and museum, the silent and ghostly building has seen some of Britain's most notorious criminals cross its threshold - and it still hides some grisly secrets today.

In the mid-18th century, every fourth shop in London was a ‘gin house;’ a vast sex trade sprawled across hundreds of brothels and gangs of highwaymen and cut-throats terrorized the roads on the outskirts of the capital. There was a growing call in the city to find an effective means to tackle the increasing crime and disorder. In 1747, Sir Henry Fielding, novelist and magistrate, persuaded the British government to establish a police force based at number 4 Bow Street in Covent Garden.

Fielding brought together eight reliable constables, who soon gained a reputation for honesty and efficiency in their pursuit of criminals and later came to be known as ‘The Bow Street Runners.’ But Fielding faced an uphill struggle against both organised crime in the capital, and the mistrust of the politicians who paid for his policemen.

By 1809, the year of my Detective Lavender Series of novels, Bow Street Magistrates' Court had been expanded to include several of the neighbouring properties and prison cells had built built around the back. The number of police personnel had dramatically increased and a horse patrol had been established to bring some law and order to the crime-infested outlying areas. Principal officers were restyled ‘detectives’ and had various roles. Apart from supporting their colleagues in the capital, they were often sent out to help magistrates in the provinces with difficult cases. They provided security for the Royal Family and the Bank of England and took part in undercover work in periods of insurrection, for example, during the Luddite riots in the Midlands

The arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst

Bow Street remained a magistrates’ court until 2004. During its two hundred and fifty year reign as Britain’s best-known police station, it has had both the famous, and the infamous, pass across its threshold. From the legendary lover, Giacomo Casanova, to the murderer, Dr. Crippen, and the notorious East End gangsters, the Kray twins. Other notable inmates include: the famous mother and daughter suffragettes, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst; the brilliant, homosexual playwright, Oscar Wilde and more recently, the Chilean dictator , General Pinochet.

Bow Street Magistrates’ court now stands empty, waiting for its conversion into a hotel and museum. It has an ornate frontage which mirrors the creamy and elaborate façade of the Royal Opera House on the opposite side of the road. But at night, it is silent, dark and brooding compared to the noisy, brightly-lit bistros and taverns on the rest of this busy street. Its façade is built with pearlescent Portland Stone and it glows eerily in the moonlight.

Around the back, the building is stark, plain and ugly, with many twentieth century extensions. A high brick wall with barbed wire encloses outhouses, prison cells and a courtyard, which was used as an exercise yard for the prisoners. My hotel was slap-bang next door and I took these photographs while leaning out of a second floor bedroom window with my camera.

I was surprised to learn that the site had been continuously occupied since the mid-16th century. As a result, before it can be refurbished an archaeological study is being carried out.

'What are they hoping to find?’ I asked the hotel manager. And added hopefully: 'Regency handcuffs?'

'No,' she replied. 'Human remains.’

The scales of justice

'But it's a court house - not a church graveyard,' I said, startled. 'It's not consecrated ground!’

‘I don't think it mattered back then,’ she replied with a certain amount of glee. 'If someone died in prison two hundred years ago and was a pauper, they'd just drop them into a hole. There's also a rumour that there was a lime-pit on the premises for disposing of any fever victims.'

I've always known that gaol fever was rife in Britain's overcrowded prisons during this era, but personally, I'm still hoping that my informant had a fevered imagination herself. The thought that my protagonist, Detective Stephen Lavender, and any of his noble colleagues might have been involved in callously disposing of dead prisoners beneath the courtyard slabs of Bow Street Magistrates' Court, just does not bear thinking about.

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Article: All characters in this novel are entirely fictitious...

14/5/2013

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‘ALL CHARACTERS IN THIS NOVEL ARE ENTIRELY FICTITIOUS...’
Part One

Q: What’s in a name?

I had a fun conversation with my Mum yesterday. She had done some family history research into her own ancestors and was bemused to discover that she had a seventeenth century relative called BARNABUS GOULDSMITH. For some reason this tickled her pink. She loved the sound of his name and spent twenty minutes persuading me to put Barnabus into my next novel. To keep the peace and to avoid being disinherited, I finally agreed. However, I may draw the line at her suggestion that I make him into a smuggler.

This made me wonder how many other authors find themselves under similar pressure to adjust their plots and characters for the amusement of their loved ones? And more intriguingly, how do authors choose the names for their characters in the first place?

North Carter Moor Farmhouse

When I wrote Catching the Eagle the naming process should have been simple. This novel was based on the true story of our criminal ancestor, Jamie Charlton. Genealogical research had already revealed the real names of his family, the witnesses at his trial in 1812, the court officials and half the population of rural Ponteland.

But it quickly became obvious that I would have to make some adjustment to those names. For a start, nearly everyone back in 1812 was called ‘John.’ This included Jamie’s father, son, brother, best friend, the man he robbed and the magistrate who charged him. Obviously some of them had to go or be known as ‘Jack.’ (Or even Nathanial.) This tradition of calling children after other family members had helped us trace our relatives back through the centuries and uncover Jamie’s sorry tale of injustice. But to write a novel about three generations of the same family, all in the same farmhouse and all called either ‘John’ or ‘Ann’ would have confused the hell out of my readers.

Then there was the problem of the sheer number of people our research had uncovered. They had big families back in the nineteenth century and ours was no exception. A cast of thousands may have worked well in the bible but it rarely works in modern fiction.

Fortunately, novelists can use artistic license. In Catching the Eagle, I changed names, liberally handed out nicknames and killed off one character a couple of decades early. However, this process can still be dangerous in a novel based on a true story because someone somewhere is going to be unhappy that you have altered history. I think I may have inadvertently offended a distant cousin in Australia when I changed the name of his 4 x great-grandmother from ‘Ann’ to ‘Mary.’

From the naming point of view, it was quite refreshing to sit down and write my second novel, The Missing Heiress. Apart from Detective Stephen Lavender and a brief appearance by Magistrate Clennell, the rest of the characters were fictitious and I could call them what I wanted. I took a pragmatic approach. I picked a different letter from the alphabet for each character, chose names indigenous to Northumberland, appropriate for the Regency era and tried to make sure that there was no repetition. I often find it confusing if characters in novels have similar sounding names or if they begin with the same letter.

However, when I called the younger brother of the missing heiress, ‘Matthew’, I never imagined the embarrassment this would later cause me. Matthew was a very popular name in late 18th century England. It is also the name of my own younger brother. (Yes, I think you can see where this is going.) When I plotted the book I instinctively named Matthew Carnaby after my own brother and thought nothing more about it. In my head, this was a convenient – possibly temporary - arrangement which would help me remember who he was while I sorted out the rest of the details about him and the other characters.

At the start of a novel, everything is fluid and full of potential. Minor characters like Matthew Carnaby are particularly sketchy; his personality and circumstances were vague. He eventually became a sad and tragic figure, the victim of horrific abuse in his infancy which had left him mute and physically scarred. He developed into one of my favourite characters and will probably appear in a later novel in the series, but somehow while I was writing the novel I completely forgot about the significance of his name.

Post-publication, my slip up came back to haunt me. Mum was the first to contact me with feedback after Heiress was released. Of course she loved the book (bless her) and was full of praise. But at the end of the conversation she quietly asked me:

'Why did you name the ‘idiot’ younger brother after our Matthew?'

Ooops. I didn’t see this one coming. Cue a blustering and red-faced author. I can honestly say that until that moment, I hadn’t realised the implications when I gave the Bellingham village idiot the same name as my sibling.

‘Our Matthew’ also read The Missing Heiress and he sent me a text:

Reading Heiress and loving it. Just got to the bit were the idiot younger brother has the shit kicked out of him…

Ouch. He noticed. In fact, he’s mentioned it several times recently. Matthew has made it clear that I’m not going to get away with this one lightly - innocent mistake or not. I sense a lifetime of ribbing ahead.

It is amazing what else those close to you read into your work. In the same conversation, Mum also wanted to know why I had called the unsavoury Baxter Carnaby after my gentle, God-fearing uncle: Howard Baxter. I hadn’t. In my mind, Baxter was just a strong, memorable name. Memorable is vitally important in fiction.

Happier times: My siblings and I

I will be more cautious in future when naming my characters but I’m not sure that it will help. In my experience, authors face an uphill struggle against the boundless imaginations of their close family and friends. Our nearest and dearest fly off on a tangent when they read our books. They hear our voices as they read and automatically look out for connections – obscure or real - to the life we lead and the people we know. Their spiralling tangents have no limits.

The last I heard, I am still in my parent’s Last Will and Testament (just) but I may have to avoid being alone with my brother in the same room for a while. In the meantime, for penance, I am doing a little research about Kentish smugglers and sketching out the character of one Master Barnabus Gouldsmith...

Q: What’s in a name?
A: Everything!

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Article: Bow Street Runners and Early British Detectives

6/4/2013

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Bow Street Runners and Early British Detectives

Kirkley Hall, Ponteland

In 2005, we made two surprising discoveries while researching my husband’s ancestors. We first learnt that he had a convicted felon, a Regency jail-bird, roosting in the branches of his family tree, called Jamie Charlton. Then we found out that a Bow Street detective, Stephen Lavender, had been involved in the investigation which sent our Jamie to trial.

Naturally, our first priority was to find out more about our skeleton in the closet but we were also intrigued by Detective Lavender. He was referred to as ‘a principal officer’ with the Bow Street magistrates’ court in London. I had heard the phrase ‘Bow Street runner’ many times before but I had no idea that there were British detectives as early as 1809. I had always assumed that detectives were created along with the rest of the police force by Sir Robert Peel in 1829.

Years of research at The National Archives in London and the Northumberland Records Office gradually disclosed that our Jamie had been convicted of stealing the rent money from the Northumbrian manor house, Kirkley Hall. It was an audacious crime; over £1,157 had been taken from the estate office at the hall. Our research also revealed that Nathanial Ogle, the wealthy owner of Kirkley Hall, had paid for Detective Lavender to come up from London to solve the case.

To Ogle’s delight, Lavender recovered the bulk of the missing money. It had been thrown back over the wall of the kitchen garden in a sack, and lay half-hidden by a currant bush for several days until the detective instigated a thorough search of the grounds. Only £162 of coins remained outstanding. This is not as surprising as it may seem. Most of the recovered money was paper banknotes which had only been in circulation for a few years; in 1809 most British commoners did not understand or trust paper money.

Lavender also discovered that Jamie Charlton, a disgruntled ex-employee of Kirkley Hall, had been on a generous spending spree in the weeks after the robbery and his investigation focussed on him. In May 1809, he had Jamie arrested and sent for trial at the August Assizes in Newcastle. However, they released him after an initial hearing because there was no evidence to actually connect him to the crime. At this point, Stephen Lavender went back to London, famous for retrieving most of the stolen rent money but unable to secure the conviction of his main suspect.

Jamie Charlton also went home but he was rearrested a year later. This time the evidence came from Jamie’s former cell mate, William Taylerson, and the local magistrate instigated the arrest. Taylerson claimed that when they shared a cell together in prison, Jamie Charlton had confessed to him that he had, indeed, committed the crime. Taylerson was a horse thief, already sentenced to death. After a trial which lasted fourteen hours, a jury of local landowners and nobility found Jamie guilty in just five minutes. They sentenced him to transportation, and granted Taylerson a full pardon. The whole thing smacked of a miscarriage of justice - even by the dodgy legal standards of the Regency.

The ideal plot for a historical novel had just landed in my lap and Catching the Eagle was born. It took two years to write this book, which was eventually published by Knox Robinson Publishers of Historical Fiction in December 2011.

Bow Street Magistrate's Court, London

According to my research, when the principal officers like Lavender went out to work on cases in other counties of Britain, they usually worked alone. As a novelist, this presented me with an interesting dilemma. Literary convention in any crime fiction usually requires that the detective has an assistant. In the end, I decided to veer away from historical fact with Catching the Eagle and bow down to the literary convention; I gave Lavender an assistant, Constable Edward Woods. Although they were only minor characters in this first novel, I thoroughly enjoyed creating Woods and Lavender and developing the rapport and humorous dialogue which erupted spontaneously between them. I felt that I had created a winning duo of crime fighters and I didn’t want to let them go.

Natural curiosity drew me towards their world. I began to invest time, money and effort on investigating those early British detectives. ‘A Certain Share of Low Cunning: A history of the Bow Street Runners 1792 – 1839’ written by David J. Cox became the main source of my research. I discovered that back in 1809, Bow Street Magistrates’ court, was the thriving centre of policing in the crime-ridden capital of England. Bow Street and the Old Bailey Criminal Court were the vibrant partners in London’s justice system.

http://www. oldbaileyonline.org/ is ripe source of information and inspiration for any author interested in crime, criminals and early British detectives. This website documents the proceedings of the Old Bailey, between the years of 1674-1913 and contains details of 197,745 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court. Stephen Lavender frequently appears on the stand as a police witness in these documents.

Number 4 Bow Street was where Sir Henry Fielding, novelist and magistrate, first persuaded the British government to establish a police force in 1747. This was in response to the growing call to find an effective means to tackle the increasing crime and disorder in the capital, where every fourth shop was a ‘gin house,’ a vast sex trade sprawled across hundreds of brothels and gangs of highwaymen and cut-throats terrorized the roads on the outskirts of London. Fielding brought together eight reliable constables, who soon gained a reputation for honesty and efficiency in their pursuit of criminals and later came to be known as ‘the Bow Street Runners.’ But Fielding faced an uphill struggle against both organised crime in the capital, and the mistrust of the politicians who paid for his policemen.

George IV, The Prince Regent

In the late eighteenth century, the wealthy elite of Britain preferred to spend their money on personal security, rather than funding a communal police force. If you needed to track down a criminal there were plenty of ‘thief takers’ – an early form of bounty hunter – whom the rich could employ to drag a suspect into the dock. There was huge resistance to the notion of a centralised police force because of the brutal excesses of the French police system across the Channel, under the revolutionary fanatic, Joseph Fouché.   Nevertheless, the crime fighting force started by Sir Henry Fielding expanded and gained national recognition.

By 1809, the year of my novels, the number of police personnel had dramatically increased and a horse patrol had been established to bring some law and order to the crime-infested outlying areas. Principal officers were restyled ‘detectives’ and had various roles. Apart from supporting their colleagues in the capital, they were often sent out to help magistrates in the provinces with difficult cases. They took part in undercover work in periods of insurrection, for example, during the Luddite riots in the Midlands.

The principal officers were a policing elite, famous throughout London, and the aristocracy loved them. They did security work for the Bank of England and acted as bodyguards for Royalty, especially the Prince Regent. They were the only policemen allowed into Buckingham House, the forerunner of the palace. On occasions they were even sent abroad to help with crimes and criminals who had spilled out over our borders onto the continent.

According to the records I have unearthed, Stephen Lavender spent a lot of his time working on difficult cases out in the provinces. Wealthy landowning citizens, like Nathanial Ogle of Kirkley Hall, could request the help of a principal officer. Bow Street would charge them a hefty fee and the detectives could claim lucrative expenses on top of their salary. Many principal officers became very rich.

The arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst

However, the Bow Street officers were still regarded with mistrust by the general population and there were many allegations of police corruption – some of them genuine. In 1829, the government charged Sir Robert Peel with the task of creating a new national police force; a force which was properly funded and more accountable. Following this transition, Stephen Lavender became the highly-respected Deputy Chief Constable of Manchester.

Bow Street itself remained a magistrates’ court until 2004. During its two hundred and fifty year reign as Britain’s most famous police station, it has had both the famous, and the infamous, pass across its threshold. From the legendary lover, Giacomo Casanova, to the murderer, Dr. Crippen, and the notorious East End gangsters, the Kray twins; from the famous mother and daughter suffragettes, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst to the brilliant, homosexual playwright, Oscar Wilde and more recently, the Chilean dictator , General Pinochet.

In that tense and frustrating period between the completion of my debut novel, Catching the Eagle, and securing a publisher for the book, the first seeds of a Regency whodunit began to germinate in my head. As far as I was concerned, there were only two policemen in England who could crack this mysterious case. I sat down at the computer and The Missing Heiress was born, with Detective Stephen Lavender and Constable Woods as the main characters. Ultimately, Stephen Lavender was the man who charged our ancestor with stealing the Kirkley Hall rent money and placed him in the dock but I’ve never held that against him. He was the natural choice for the detective in my new novel. In my mind, he had grown from an interesting minor character to a fully-fledged and fascinating protagonist. The Missing Heiress flew off my keyboard like silk and I completed it in ten months.

In this first novel in a new series, the two policemen are called back to Northumberland, to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a beautiful young heiress from a locked bedchamber. Convinced that this is a simple case of a young woman who has eloped with her lover, Lavender and Woods are later alarmed to discover a sinister world of madness, violence and secrets lurking behind the heavy oak door of the ancient pele tower at Linn Hagh.

The Missing Heiress was published by Knox Robinson Publishing on 6th December 2012.

(Article first published on Shots: Crime and Thriller eZine, December 2012)

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Article: The Frustrations of plotting crime fiction

20/1/2013

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The Frustrations of Plotting Crime Fiction

Artwork by Bradley Wind

Successful crime fiction needs the fertile imagination of a confident author who can plot with the precision of an engineer, while juggling motive, clues, suspects and conflict like a circus clown. It can be a frustrating process.

Crime fiction is essentially plot driven, which is rather annoying when you consider that it is primarily the strong character of the sleuths whom everyone remembers. From Sherlock Holmes to Miss Marple, Rebus to Morse, this truth is self-evident. No matter how well they are crafted, crime and thriller plots are easily forgotten. Yet, crime fiction demands a compelling and credible plot to sweep the reader to a satisfying dénouement.

Ideas for crime novels often come from seemingly unconnected events. Recently, I viewed a BBC program Imagine, which followed best-selling writer Ian Rankin for six months. I watched with fascination as he pulled out a battered manila folder bulging with press cuttings, scribbled notes and photographs. These unconnected events were the source of his inspiration.

The two unconnected events which led to my own novel were my desire to set readers the challenge of a locked room mystery and the chance discovery of a family will from 1770. Back then, ours was a dysfunctional family of ten half-siblings, two mothers and a mistrustful father. This damning document revealed that favouritism, injustice and cruelty were rife in that farmhouse. I began to imagine the burning resentment the will could ignite in the unbalanced mind of one of those spurned, and the murderous consequences which might follow.

A crime fiction writer who relies exclusively on real life murders for stimulation may find that their work becomes flat. Stripped of their grisly horror, real murderers are remarkably predictable and murder is one of the easiest crimes for the police to solve. Criminology reports throw up the same information time and time again. Murder victims tend to know their killer. A trio of three deadly motives, money, sex and revenge, generally lie behind the bloody act. Statistically, serial killings by fiendish monsters are a relatively rare occurrence. Women usually murder in self-defence or after years of abuse by a husband or partner, whereas men tend to kill out of sexual jealousy or as a matter of honour.

This is where the fertile imagination of the crime fiction author needs to enrich the banal, avoid the stereotypes, switch genders and exaggerate. Have the honour killings committed by a woman. Let two Hannibal Lecters lurk in the dank alleys of your sleepy town. Blur the edges of the motives. Yes, a large inheritance is an excellent reason to kill someone but alone it can become predictable and one-dimensional. Spice up your novel by allowing your sleuth to also uncover the murderer’s deep-seated psychological need to take revenge on the dead father who always favoured his youngest child.

Many, if not most, crime fiction writers fear readers will suss out their plot before the end of the book and be left disappointed. This fear sometimes pressures authors into the fantastical, or they create a plot with more twists and turns than a staircase in a New York skyscraper in order to stay one step ahead of the reader. These decisions can be a disaster. Crime fiction writers need self-confidence and control. Have faith in yourself and faith in the imagination of your readers. If you’ve got doubts about your plot ask for the help of a couple of honest friends to tell you how your storyline has developed.

I was initiated into the genre of crime fiction in the bizarre world of Murder Mystery Weekends at a luxury hotel. I wrote the scripts and directed the action but quickly learned that the guests’ imaginations were more twisted than my own. What seemed obvious to me, sent them spiralling off on a tangent. I didn’t need to create red-herrings; they went fishing and happily netted plenty for themselves. This experience gave me confidence. When I wrote The Missing Heiress, I felt comfortable drip feeding clues into my story, knowing that my readers would not always spot them or understand their significance. I wrote the book I wanted to write – and so should you.

Crime fiction writers also need supreme organisational skills and discipline. The first step is to strip the story down to its bare bones and pin point where the conflict lies. Make notes and place these sparse details onto a timeline or blank calendar which covers the timespan of your novel. This helps you keep track of everything - especially the suspects. Insert subtle clues into the plot and check your plan for pace, flow and balance. Is your sleuth’s investigation a frenzy of activity on some days, while not much happens on others? Does the conflict build gradually towards the climax of your book?

In its initial stages any novel is fluid and gradually evolves. Nothing is sacred, and authors can reinvent and reject until they settle on something that feels right and continues to feel right. But as criminal investigations intensify one wrongly placed incident can throw the whole thing off track.

Half way through writing The Missing Heiress, I hit a wall. I just couldn’t see the ‘big picture’ of my novel on the computer screen. So I grabbed the family noticeboard from the kitchen and divided it up into days. I scribbled down the scenes of my novel onto post-it notes and pinned them into the cork. It worked. I now had a physical representation of how my story would unfold and could shuffle everything around with ease until balance and pace were restored. On top of this, I had the added satisfaction of watching the post-it notes vanish as my novel crept towards the finish line.

I have since learnt that Apple Mac have devised an ingenious computer program called Scrivener which provides a digital representation of a cork noticeboard. No doubt, it reduces the frustration of some authors busy plotting crime fiction. However, I wonder if it can mimic the kinaesthetic satisfaction I experienced when I ripped down those final post-it notes, rolled them into a ball and hurled them into the bin?

This article was first printed in The View from Here magazine on December 3rd, 2012.

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