At school, were you good at English?
At school, English was my favourite subject – so much so that I did my undergraduate degree in English Literature.
Who are your favourite writers?
My favourite writers – now that’s hard to narrow down! These days my go-tos are probably John le Carré, Martin Cruz Smith, Philip Kerr, Cormac McCarthy, J.G. Ballard, Don DeLillo, James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard, Raymond Chandler and Chester Himes – and I’m enjoying S.A. Cosby and Colson Whitehead.
What have you written to date?
My first book was the neo-noir, neo-western novelette ‘Nevada Noir: A Trilogy of Short Stories’, and in June 2023 I released my first novel – ‘Corona’, which is a dystopian thriller set in South East London. My newest release is a Nordic Noir detective-versus-serial-killer crime fiction thriller ‘The Drowned’ – which should be coming out just as you read this interview, so keep your eyes peeled on the CFA page for more info on that one!
What are you working on at the present?
I’m halfway through writing the first draft of a prequel novel set in the world of, and featuring some of the characters from, Nevada Noir. It has the working title Nevada Noir Zero.
What genre do you write?
I predominantly write crime fiction, with a noirish edge.
What draws you to crime?
I love the moral ambiguity of noir and neo-noir – flawed characters, bad deeds, good motivations, hope, greed, the grey areas between the black and white. I love an anti-hero, a flawed protagonist. In the words of James Ellroy: ‘Noir is… the nightmare of flawed souls with big dreams and the precise how and why of the all-time sure thing that goes bad’.
What made you decide to sit down and start something?
Nevada Noir started as a dream of an old man in a wooden shack as a storm broke overhead. When I woke up, I knew it was somehow inspired by the Nevada my wife and I drove through the year before on a road trip in the US. I couldn’t get the scene out of my head, and wrote it down on the Notes app on my iPhone in bed, in the shower and on my commute to work. From that grew the first tale in the trilogy of intertwined short stories, entitled The Last Storm.
Do you have a special time to write?
I don’t manage to write every day as I have a full-time job (in television) and a family. But when I do write it tends to be on my commute in the morning, or in the evening after putting my daughter to bed.
Where do your ideas come from?
My ideas seem to be inspired by travel – I have discovered, perhaps accelerated by lockdown, that I love fiction that transports me to another place. And I like to write fiction that can do the same – that puts the reader right there, somewhere they can see, smell, taste.
Do you work to an outline or plot or do you prefer to see where an idea takes you?
I’d probably call myself a ‘plantser’ – half planner, half ‘pantser’. I often write the opening lines as inspiration hits me, then work up a very rough outline to write from, but then see where the characters and situations take me from there.