What are you working on at the present?
A publishing house contacted me last year and offered to take me on. They then, apparently, checked out my work and rescinded the offer, claiming they only wanted detective fiction, not CSI fiction. Yeah, right.
So, at the moment, I’m writing detective fiction. Ha!
I’ve decided to write three books featuring a female detective first seen in book 7 of the CSI Eddie Collins series (Death Warning). Her name is Regan, and you don’t mess with her. I’m at the halfway point and love working with her. The series is actually one huge story told over three books, so you’ll really have to read these in order. If it goes well, I will consider writing her again – perhaps in first person next time, who knows?
Oh, and I’ll let you know if the publishing house takes it on.
What genre do you write, and why?
I am a practising Crime Scene Investigator, and have been for 27 years. So, I write romance. No, no, no, I’m only kidding. Actually before getting the job in 1996, I used to write YA horror. I only wrote for me, there was no Amazon back then, and the chances of getting published were mighty slim.
Anyway, after 1996, it made a lot of sense to change genre and begin writing crime fiction. And coincidentally, that’s when Amazon was born (though I didn’t take advantage of their book platform until about 2011). I’m never sure what to label my books as. Are they police procedurals, are they crime fiction novels, are they crime thrillers? I don’t really know, and I suppose I’m happy to straddle all those genres and more.
My Eddie Collins novels are riddled with humour, have a spattering of forensic detail in them, and, perhaps most important of all, are as realistic in their descriptions as I can make them – and that includes the language used. The only fictitious part is how involved Eddie becomes in each case, but that’s the beauty of writing someone like him – he’s a civilian, not bound by the same rules as police officers, and he gets away with much more than they would, he’s not weighed down by the protocols of his detective brethren. And of course, it’s fiction. It’s why I enjoy writing him so much, and it’s why readers comment more about the character than they do about the story. For me, character is always king.
All that said, I do have a sneaky love affair with psychological thrillers. I’ve read and enjoyed a few, and so I thought I’d have a bash at writing one of my own. I wrote The End of Lies in 2017. It’s written in first person from the main character’s viewpoint, and the main character is a female called Becky Rose, and she’s a librarian. She comes home from work one day to find her husband dead in the lounge and a gang of men searching her house. Her husband had something belonging to them, and they want it back. Becky goes up against the gang. I loved writing it, was tense, it was thrilling, and it literally fell out of my keyboard. And incidentally, this is the only book of mine that I’ve had made into an audiobook, narrated by the wonderful Colleen MacMahon.
Do you work to an outline or plot or do you prefer to see where an idea takes you?
I once tried to create an outline in the hope it would make me a quicker writer, but trying to plot something that was as yet invisible to me was a horrible experience and one I’ll never try again. I found it fiddly, tedious, and wholly deflating. I imagine knitting with freshly cooked spaghetti would be easier – and that’s from someone who doesn’t know how to knit.
I choose a scene and write it. It’s like a movie scene, and there is an ending to that scene, one that sparks off the beginning of the next and the next. The places I visit and the people I come across while building the story are as new to me as they are a reader, and I love meeting imaginary people in made-up places – why, you can do anything! You can have people as extreme as your imagination will permit, and until you encounter them on the page, you’ve no idea where they will lead you or how dangerous it might become. That’s part of the excitement for me that plotting (or attempting to plot) would kill.
But I rely on characters as well as situations to guide me through to the end. At some point in the evolving story, an ending will occur to me, and I just point the ship at it and press go.
Of course I get stuck occasionally, and I really have to dig deep to figure out where to go next. But I like it like that because it means the work is growing as naturally as one might expect it to if this was happening in real life. I look at where I am and where I’d like to be and work towards it taking care that the characters remain true to themselves. And guess what? If the outcome of those stuck moments surprises me, it sure as hell surprises the reader, and that’s what readers want.
How long does it take you to write a book?
I try to put words down each day, and I like to write a couple of thousand if I can. On really good days, the keyboard can spill up to six or seven thousand all over the screen. But that’s only half the story.
The quickest book I ever wrote was Black by Rose. I published it within six months of putting pen to paper. That is slow as hell for some writers, but it’s quite good for me. The longest book was The Third Rule which I began around 2004. I put the finishing touches to it in 2012 and it measured 260-thousand words long – approximately three standard novels. In my defence, I took four or five years out writing scripts, and I also took a break from writing for a couple of years too – so really that book took me about a year, 18-months, to write.
I aim to write a novel and a novella each year. Well, that’s my intention, but there’s always something else comes in from somewhere unexpected and steals my writing time. And though I hate deadlines, I really do try and get at least one novel out each year.
For your own reading, do you prefer e-books or paper books?
Paper. I find reading on screen tougher, for some reason. If I need to read a large document, I always print it. When I finish writing a book, I always print it ready for editing. Reading on an ereader like a Kindle, for example, is better than reading on a computer screen. But I still find them not as easy to read as a book, and I find they also have limitations that never occur with a paperback.
With a Kindle, the battery eventually goes flat, and you can guarantee it’ll go flat when it’s the least convenient time like when you have five minutes to kill in the car before work, or when there are no charging points, or when you’ve forgotten your charging cable, or when you’ve got three pages left of a thrilling book and now you have to wait till tonight to find out the ending.
I admit, that doesn’t happen often, and I further admit that a person with a modicum of common sense or with even the slightest portion of organisational skills would solve this problem before it ever happened – but that kind of rules me out, and I’d have to wait to read the final pages.
Also, with a book, it’s there in front of you, ready to reveal its magic. It requires no power, no charging cable or charging points, and you know it has three pages left because you can count them, you can see there are three pages left. With a Kindle, you see a number. A Kindle doesn’t have the book cover on display, and if it does it’s not in colour, and if it is, it’ll be an advert for another book!
I think there is room enough for both formats, and I love both formats – but the paperback, although it might need additional lighting sometimes, still wins out.
Do you proofread/edit your own books, or do you get someone else to do it?
After I’ve written my first, and very often messy, draft, I go through it again on the computer and eliminate as many typos and grammatical errors as I can find. I then go through it again on the computer filling the scenes I omitted, or scrapping the scenes the story no longer needs, and it’s at this point I like to add flourishes, details, perhaps a few similes to really give the story a heartbeat.
Then I print it, and use a fine-point red ink Bic to highlight any newly found errors, and to add notes in the margin to help the story flow better or to iron out inconsistencies in flow or to improve dialogue.
Once it’s finished, I’ll make those adjustments on the computer and produce a new document for my wonderful readers/editors to use. They will make comments and suggestions which I either agree with or ignore. I’ll go through it all one last time to make sure it’s as clean as can be. Readers do still sometimes find errors, and I’m very grateful to them whenever they report them to me. I always take that opportunity to fix the problem and reupload the book – I want it to be as good as possible.
How do you select the names of your characters?
I choose my character names very carefully. Sometimes.
Take Eddie Collins, for instance – his forename came out of thin air right after I’d thought of his surname, which came from my favourite dictionary.
For me, names are crucial. I can’t write someone if it feels wrong. For example, in the first Regan book, I was writing about a villain called Drake Sullivan. And everything was going well until I invented another, meaner character, Drake’s boss, if you like, and called him Kriss Driscoll. I realised instantly that I had the names the wrong way around, that the characters and their characteristics suited a name swap. So Kriss became Drake. I know that sounds peculiar, but it’s true – names aren’t just words, they have a colour, too, and they (obviously) have a sound, and those things resonate with a certain person and effect the way I’ll write them.
Some strange names I’ve chosen in the past might include from Ledston Luck, Divine Wright – the female farmer whose religious mother gave the name, and then, for me, it became like a clown, something that should be cheerful and happy, but instead was ghoulish.
Also from Regan’s book, we have dealers, Yogi and Turpin. No idea where they came from, but I like the sound of their names and I’ll definitely return to them in the course of the story.
Eddie too has a penchant for giving out names, or changing people’s names (I do this at work if I find someone’s name difficult to remember – a colleague is called Alicia, or it might be Alecia, I can’t remember, so I now call her Bob). One of Eddie’s CSIs is Mark, so Eddie now calls him Skid. The receptionist, whose name he never really knew, was known to him as Miss Moneypenny, and her replacement, as Beelzebub. In The Note, Eddie refers to a DS Trafford as Officer Dibble, and his sidekick, Bashed Crab.
One of the few names that made it all the way to a title was Blake Crosby. Do you know which book I’m talking about?
It’s wise to take note of generational names too. Call someone Gladys and you can expect an elderly female, call someone Chelsea and you might see a young lady in a bikini chewing gum.
As an aside, I keep an Excel sheet of all the names I’ve used since writing the Eddie Collins books, they amount to more than 400.
What is the hardest thing about writing a book?
For me there is a whole list of hard things encountered when writing a book. The first and biggest obstacle is time – or lack of time to be more precise. I have kids and I still work full time so being able to sit down in front of the keyboard and knock out a few thousand words is a luxury to me.
One of the silliest things that makes it onto the list is ideas. You often hear how writers have a book full of them, but I don’t. I have a file on my computer called ‘Novel Ideas’, but it’s not exactly bursting at the seams. No, I have to really dig deep to come up with an idea, a spark that will set me off typing. If I can get a scene in my head, we’re onto a winner: I remember how Ledston Luck began – I pictured a naked old woman sitting in a wooden rocking chair in a dark farmhouse kitchen. As two burglars entered through the door, she picked up her shot gun and took aim.
Once, I had a fully-formed idea land in my lap and I pounced on the keyboard and then, at around fifty-thousand words, realised it wasn’t a fully-formed idea at all, and I stalled. That was several years ago, and it’s still waiting for me to return to it. I will one day.
What is the easiest thing about writing a book?
Writing.
I know how trite that sounds, but when you have a character who fits you like a second skin, and when you have a storyline that’s giving something each time you think of it, and when you’re in the flow of creativity… that. There’s no other feeling like it, and I adore it.
When your fingers are a blur on the keyboard and you’ve no idea what the words you’ve written look like on the screen because your focus is a thousand miles away in the land of your character, and all you are is a conduit, all you’re doing is recording what’s playing out in front of you… that’s the best feeling.
I have to say that the first few dozen variants (yes, there have been very many indeed) of A Long Time Dead were awful to write. I look back now and treat those years as a sort of apprenticeship, if you will. You see, I was just writing back then, open to influence, scared to make errors, worried about word choice and viewpoint and tense. And then somewhere in the middle of the second book, Stealing Elgar, a switch flipped. I found my voice, my own way of putting feelings and emotions and actions on the page in my own way. And it was magic, it was wonderful, and it was liberating. No longer did I care about word choice or making errors. Now I was wholly focused on reporting the goings-on in the movie playing out before me, transcribing what my characters said and did. I did not care what anyone thought about my writing. I was free of all that.
That is when writing is easiest.
Are your books standalones or in a series?
There is The Dead Trilogy, which consist of three books in the SOCO Roger Conniston series, and these need to be read in order:
- A Long Time Dead
- Stealing Elgar
- No More Tears
There is the CSI Eddie Collins series, which can be read as standalones because the stories are all independent. But if you do, you’ll lose some of the character development of the regular characters that appear through the series. In order, they are:
- The Pain of Strangers
- Black by Rose
- Sword of Damocles
- Ledston Luck
- The Death of Jessica Ripley
- This Side of Death
- Death Warning
I get a huge buzz writing Eddie Collins, and so I like to write first person novellas featuring him, too. These are exclusively about Eddie and the situations he finds himself in and contain no backstory and few secondary characters. You can read these in whatever order you please.
- The Lift
- The Note
- The Lock
- The Crew
- Eye Contact
Note: Eye Contact was originally written for a charity anthology, and so I haven’t published this one as an individual book (the others I have), but it is available in the collection of novellas, called Short and Curlies.
And then there are what I call the standalones. The End of Lies is a psychological thriller featuring librarian Becky Rose. I already spoke of this in an earlier question, so I’ll move along to the next standalone, The Third Rule.
The Third Rule was for many years the series opener for the CSI Eddie Collins series. After those years, I decided it wasn’t a fair representation of the series because it wasn’t a true crime thriller like the other books were. So I pulled it from sale, wrote a new first-in-series, The Pain of Strangers, and gave The Third Rule a new cast of characters, and set it adrift all by itself. So that is a standalone crime thriller which was once long enough to be three individual books. It’s true; now I’ve edited it to within an inch of its life so it’s now a fairly large book at 160 thousand words. Or thereabouts.
Before I roll onto the next Eddie Collins book, I thought I’d give a detective series a try. As mentioned earlier, this new trilogy features a female detective sergeant, and I absolutely love writing her.
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