How Are We Going to Write About This?

As we speak, I am in the midst of a Blog Tour for the publication of my new book, the second in the Lakes Crime Thriller trilogy, BONES IN THE RIVER. I should have been talking about the book at Newcastle Noir and CrimeFest as well.

Current circumstances—UK lockdown for Covid-19 coronavirus—have put paid to any physical festivals or conventions. So, everything has moved online, with panels and interviews and readings. I took part in the recent Virtual Noir At The Bar (Episode 5 on April 29, from about 44:00min to 51:00min) instead of actually meeting up, in an actual bar, to do actual readings from our works.

As well as keeping on top of the Blog Tour, I’m also deeply into the planning of the next two books. And that’s where I run into the biggest questions of all.

How are we going to write about the events of 2020 in the future?

If I look at BONES IN THE RIVER, for instance, the events of the story occur at the annual Appleby Horse Fair, held in the Cumbrian market town for hundreds of years and famous as being the largest gathering of Gypsies and Travellers in Europe.

 This year it has been cancelled.

The opening scene, in which a man accidentally runs down and kills a child on a deserted country road at night, could still happen in lockdown—but not after he’d just spent an evening having a meal with friends where they were undoubtedly all sitting around a dinner table—inside—in close proximity.

My CSI, Grace McColl, goes from crime scene to office and out into the field again, mixing with both the public and her colleagues. My detective, Nick Weston, goes to interview suspects and potential witnesses in person rather than by phone or Zoom, because how can you really get a feel for the reactions of the people you’re talking to unless you can see them while you talk.

People are brought in for questioning—their legal representatives sitting alongside them. What will happen in future? Zoom again, or will this cause a major leap forwards in projection hologram technology?

Grace visits her mother, Eleanor, who has moved back from the south coast up to Appleby. Grace’s ex-husband, Max, has been making himself useful around Eleanor’s new house and garden, perhaps as a way of trying to reinsert himself into Grace’s life. Even with the slight easing of lockdown due to take place in the UK from June 1, this is dubious behaviour. They have a barbecue—which as it’s outside would probably be allowed. But Nick also attends and he doesn’t count as family. Not sure he and Grace stay the full six feet apart at all times there, either…

Besides, Nick’s a father with a young daughter, Sophie. Would he risk her health by associating with others more than he absolutely had to for his job? And what about Nick’s partner, Lisa, who has been working suspiciously late at a hair and beauty salon that wouldn’t be open for business yet anyway.

Meanwhile, one of the other CSIs is suspended for a supposed error. He’s staying at home in his scruffs, watching the TV and playing video games—perfectly feasible in these lockdown times! But then he gets a visit from one of his colleagues and, instead of insisting the man stays on the doorstep so they can chat (no garden available in a little terraced house in Workington) he invites the man inside his home—without hand sanitiser, gloves or face mask.

The Travelling community at the Fair live in close proximity inside their vardo and bow-top horse-drawn caravans, and spend their time largely out of doors, but at the Fair they all mix and mingle with no thought to cross-contamination. There’s plenty of washing goes on, but it’s mostly of horses in the River Eden, as fits with tradition rather than to prevent the spread of Covid-19 infection.

And at the stand-off near the end of the book, the police are more concerned with the numbers involved than the risks of getting too close to the saliva of others.

If I’d been writing this book next year, and setting it this year, it might have been a very different story altogether.

So, what do I do about the third instalment? Do I mentally set the story pre-winter 2019, when Corona was still just a beer, and a virus was something more likely to be contracted by your computer than by your elderly relatives?

After all, I didn’t specify that BONES IN THE RIVER was set in any particularly year. It’s contemporary but not tied to any specific, non-transferrable event—the millennium, for instance.

But, in a few years’ time, the obvious setting of a book pre- or post-Covid-19 will undoubtedly date it. I went through my very first book recently, KILLER INSTINCT and UN-dated it. I didn’t change the story but I did take out references to minor things that I felt dated it badly. References to computer floppy disks, video cassette tapes—even public phone boxes, most of which have either disappeared from our streets or been turned into tiny libraries or stations for community defibrillators.

The next book I have planned is a bit more of an experiment, and therefore could be set at any time in the last few years. I don’t intend to make reference to Covid-19 in that story. It still feels too soon. Too raw.

This will give me time to see what’s going to change in societal behaviours in the slightly longer term before I start the next Charlie Fox book. If Charlie’s greatest threat to someone in the future is that if they don’t stop what they’re doing, she’ll cough on them, it’s going to change things in a big way…

What are your feelings, both as writers and readers about the inclusion of Covid-19 in books written right now, to be read in the next year or eighteen months? Do you want them to reflect these strange times in full and horrible detail, or do you read as more of an escape of what’s going on around you, and therefore not want to be reminded?

And will pre-2020 become seen as the new Golden Age—both of crime and of life?

This week’s Word of the Week is petrichor, meaning the smell of rain on dry earth. It comes from the Greek petra, which means stone and ichor, which means the fluid that flows in the veins of the gods in Greek mythology. My thanks to EvKa for sending me this among a whole list of wonderful words. A gift to treasure for a logophile like me!

BONES IN THE RIVER, book No2 in the Lakes crime thriller trilogy, was published worldwide on May 26 2020by ZACE Ltd. You can grab a sneak peek at the first three chapters, and buy here from all the usual retailers.

ISBNs:

eBook: 978-1-909344-69-3

Mass-market paperback: 978-1-909344-70-9

Hardcover: 978-1-909344-71-6

Hardcover Large Print: 978-1-909344-72-3

Driving on a country road late at night,

you hit a child.

There are no witnesses.

You have everythingto lose.

What do you do?

The traditional Appleby Horse Fair hosts the largest gathering of Gypsies and Travellers in Europe.

The sudden influx of more than 40,000 visitors into the small Lakeland town has always caused its share of problems, with strained relations between off-comers and locals.

But it’s also known as a good time to settle old scores.

This year, the Fair brings with it with the discovery of two bodies near the River Eden—one very recent and another a long time buried.

As CSI Grace McColl and Detective Nick Weston search for answers, old secrets are revealed, old wounds are reopened, and tensions threaten to erupt into violence.

While someone much closer to home is trying to get away with murder…

The follow-up to DANCING ON THE GRAVE, the first of the Lakes crime thriller series, BONES IN THE RIVER is a self-contained story featuring:

CSI Grace McColl. She is forty, amicably divorced from her husband, Max. Born in the Lakes, she was always a keen photographer, who trained as a crime scene investigator after her photographs were used to help acquit a man who later caused a woman’s death. Grace still feels she has much to make amends for. She hides her emotions behind a calm façade that can make her sometimes appear cold. She lives in Orton village, with a Weimaraner dog called Tallie.

Detective Constable Nick Weston. He is thirty-two, living with his partner, Lisa, a hairdresser, with whom he has a volatile relationship, and a young daughter, Sophie. Nick worked in Firearms in Manchester and then undercover for the Met in London. After he was compromised and almost beaten to death on an undercover op, Lisa persuaded him to transfer up to her native Cumbria, where he is considered an outsider among his colleagues. Nick is still coping with some of the mental and physical after-effects of his experiences.

The Bay—new ITV crime drama set in Charlie Fox’s home town

Zoë Sharp

A new six-part crime drama series started this week in the UK on ITV. Set in Morecambe and called The Bay, it stars Morven Christie as a Detective Sergeant, Lisa, who is assigned as Family Liaison Officer when fifteen-year-old twins go missing in the seaside town. Her job is to support the family and be on the inside for the police investigators.

As soon as the distraught father, Sean (played by Jonas Armstrong) arrives home, however, she discovers that he’s the bloke with whom she had a quickie while on a girls’ pub crawl the night before. Much complication ensues.

Morven Christe in ITV's The Bay

Morven Christie’s recent TV credits include Grantchester, Agatha Christie’s Ordeal By Innocence, and The A Word. Jonas Armstrong’s recent outings include Ripper Street, Troy: Fall of a City, and Line of Duty. The work of playwright and screenwriter, Daragh Carville, The Bay has been mooted as ‘Broadchurch in Morecambe’—which I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t yet got around to watching.

I confess, though, that I do quite like TV dramas where one story is told over a number of instalments. You do seem to get more depth to the characters and, ultimately, more sympathy for the victim—and in some cases for the perpetrator as well.

Of course, I’m equally a fan of TV series made up of standalone stories—more like the way a book series is structured. At least if you miss one, you can still follow what’s happening in the next episode. Although, now we’re in the age of catch-up and box set TV, that’s not as much of a consideration anymore.

When it came to The Bay, one of the reasons I was keen to see it was because I lived around that area for many years, and briefly in Morecambe itself. The drone camera footage of the area was particularly effective, I thought. Apart from one climactic scene on the sands, they did seem to manage to pick filming times when the tide was up, which always makes the place look better! Even the famous statue of Eric Morecambe made a brief cameo appearance.

Stunning drone camera shots like this one are now well within the budget of most TV shows.

The other reason, of course, was that the first two books in the Charlie Fox series, KILLER INSTINCT and RIOT ACT, both take place around Morecambe and Lancaster. Indeed, the first scene in KILLER INSTINCT is outside an ageing Morecambe hotel right on the prom. I took a real building and renamed it the Adelphi—soon to be refurbished as the New Adelphi nightclub. The original was knocked down years ago.

I still find the area fascinating and full of dramas of its own, so it’s wonderful to see it playing such a major role in a new TV drama. And even though I had to bite my tongue at some of the decisions she made, I look forward to seeing how DS Lisa Armstrong manages to extract herself from the tangled web she’s unwittingly woven.

As for Charlie Fox, she fought her way out. What else did you expect?

Sorry, I couldn't resist!

This week’s Word of the Week is gaslighting, which is a term I’d heard but not clearly understood. It means to psychologically manipulate someone to the extent that they begin to doubt their own sanity. The term has only come into common usage in recent years but originates from the 1938 stage play ‘Gaslight’ by Patrick Hamilton. In the play—and two later film adaptations—a man dims the gaslights in his home and then persuades his wife that she is imagining the change.

May 2

NOIR AT THE BAR NEWCASTLE—the Town Wall pub, Pink Lane, Newcastle NE1 5HX

Doors open 19:00

Organised by the inimitable Vic Watson, the line-up is Neil Broadfoot, Mik Brown, Ashley Erwin, Derek Farrell, Jónína Leósdóttir, Gytha Lodge, Judith O’Reilly, Zoë Sharp, Lilja Sigurðardóttir, plus a wildcard chosen on the night.

May 9-12

CRIMEFEST INTERNATIONAL CRIME FICTION CONVENTION—Mercure Bristol Grand Hotel, Bristol

Friday, May 10, 13:40-14:30 Contemporary Issues: Reflecting How We Live Candy Denman, Paul Gitsham, Cara Hunter, Amanda Robson, Zoë Sharp (Participating Moderator)

Saturday, May 11, 11:20-12:10 Ten Year Stretch: The CrimeFest Short Story Anthology Peter Guttridge, Caro Ramsay, Zoë Sharp, Michael Stanley (Stan Trollip), Kate Ellis (Participating Moderator)

Sunday, May 12, 09:30-10:20 The Indie Alternative Beate Boeker, Adam Croft, Barry Faulkner, Lynn Florkiewicz, Zoë Sharp (Participating Moderator)

Getting From There to Here

Zoë Sharp

Zoë Sharp in natural habitat

I blame Jeff and Stan. They ambushed me in the bar at Bouchercon last month. One minute we were recounting our favourite Flanders and Swann songs, with much juvenile giggling, and the next I’d been talked into joining this illustrious little gang. I’m still not entirely sure how we got from there to here.

I don’t even drink.

But, here I am, nervously smoothing down my hair and straightening my Sunday-best frock, trying to remember my lines and hoping not to be met with, at best, a blank-faced stony silence.

And it occurred to me that I really ought to introduce myself properly to my new bloggers and bloggees. So here goes.

I took a weird path into the writing game. Is there a normal one? I wasn’t a noted student, opted out of mainstream education at the age of twelve and did correspondence courses until I was legally old enough to go out and get a job. The local authority sent me to see a careers advisor when I was fifteen or so. I told him I was interested in writing. He said, “We’ll put you down for clerical.”

I’d already written my first novel by then. It still sits, unpublished, in a folder in the attic. A children’s story, but no fledgling Harry Potter. My father threatens every now and again to dig it out and see if it will fly on eBay. I have it well hidden.

A few years later I ended up at my local newspaper, selling display advertising — the ads in the front half of the paper, rather than the classifieds. A soulless job if ever there was one. Everybody suspects that half the money they spend on advertising is wasted, but they don’t know which half so they resent spending any of it. I lasted six months of impossible targets and nail-biting deadlines and picked up a temporary heart murmur for my pains. Towards the end, my manager — knowing I wouldn’t stay past the probationary period — asked the editor if there was any chance the editorial side would take me on. I’d already written advertorial copy and he knew that’s where my interest lay. The editor turned him down flat. “No qualifications.” They fired me.

I'm the idiot clinging to the back ...

I looked at getting those qualifications. Seven years of study just to become a cub reporter. I gave it up. Instead I sold pensions, delivered yachts, taught people to ride horses, and did a few other things I probably shouldn’t talk about too much. During this period I acquired my first car — a broken-down Triumph Spitfire MkIV wearing more different colours of paint than Joseph’s coat, with a six-inch nail holding one of the front brake calipers in place. Not my first choice but the best I could get for the money. I rebuilt it, worked out how to make it go round corners, resprayed it Brooklands green. And started to write about it.

Before I knew it, I was writing for the classic car magazines. In 1988, with an arrogance that frankly shocks me now, on the basis of a couple of accepted articles I gave up my job — no loss there — and turned freelance full time. It was four years before one of my magazine editors asked me what qualifications I had. By that time I could tell them they’d been sending me cheques for four years. What more did they want?

The freelance market was good, the rates reasonable, so I expanded the scope of my work. An editor asked could I supply words and pictures? I borrowed a camera and gave it a try. My fiction writing ambitions went on the back burner, until something happened to revive them.

I was sent to see a bloke in south Wales to do an interview. But when I arrived it soon became clear that the car collection I was supposed to be featuring didn’t ... actually exist. And he looked kind of shifty when I didn’t turn up alone. The bloke made some sort of lame excuse and we left, annoyed at the wasted trip. It was only afterwards that I started to wonder what he had planned. I’d made an appointment, so he couldn’t claim he wasn’t expecting me. The only thing that had thrown him was that I hadn’t come alone. And what then?

Say no more.

A couple of years previously, Brit real estate agent Susie Lamplugh disappeared after going to show a prospective buyer round an empty house. She was never found. It struck a chord. Especially when, after that abortive interview, every time my picture appeared alongside a regular column I was writing in one of the classic car mags, I received death-threat letters. Professionally done, with the words cut out of newspaper like a ransom note. Telling me I was scum, telling me they knew where I lived and my days were numbered. The police never tracked down who’d actually sent them.

As for my reaction, I learned self-defence from a little black belt karate and kyushu jitsu instructor with a benevolent smile and steel fingers. I did not, as has been erroneously stated in the past, learn to shoot in order to protect myself. I could already shoot to competition standard.

 But I did start to write fiction again. Maybe it was a form of escape, of regaining control. Maybe it was a desire to create a world where the bad guys died screaming. I wanted a strong female lead who wouldn’t buckle when she was put under threat, and one day Charlie Fox turned up on the doorstep of my mind, fully formed, with an attitude and a motorbike, a traumatic past, a failed military career, friends who loved her. She said, “I’ve got a story to tell. You might want to write this down.” I didn’t argue.

The result was KILLER INSTINCT: Charlie Fox book one. To date, there have been another nine series books, a short story e-thology, plus a novella, and this summer my first standalone, THE BLOOD WHISPERER came out. Over the winter I'll be working on book-number-the-eleventh.

And, in one of those little tweaks of fate that so rarely happen, several years after I turned freelance I got a call from the publisher of the newspaper who’d sacked me, offering me the editorship of another paper in the same group. I let them take me out for a very nice lunch to discuss the position, then turned them down. Maybe I should have told them I simply wasn’t qualified ...

It’s been my habit to have a Word of the Week every time I blog. For this one I’m going for absquatulate, meaning to leave abruptly or quickly, or to flee. As opposed to levant, which means to run off without paying a debt, or abscond, to run in order to evade capture or justice, usually taking something or someone along with you. If your dog gallops out of the house and hot-foots it down the garden, he’s absquatulating. If he has the Sunday roast clamped in his jaws while he does so, he’s absconding.

Guest blogger Zoë Sharp

My guest today is Zoë Sharp.  She is the author of the bestselling crime thriller series featuring her ex-Special-Forces-turned-bodyguard heroine, Charlie Fox, of which the latest instalment is DIE EASY: Charlie Fox book ten.  Her work has been nominated for Edgar, Anthony, Barry (twice), Benjamin Franklin, and Macavity Awards in the United States, as well as the CWA Short Story Dagger. The Charlie Fox series was optioned for TV by Twentieth Century Fox.  She blogs regularly on her own website, www.ZoeSharp.com, on the acclaimed group blog, www.Murderati.com, as well as wittering on Twitter (@AuthorZoeSharp) and fooling around on Facebook.

Not only is Zoë a terrific writer, she is also a talented photographer, a (very) fast driver, a sailor, and a target shooter.  When I first met her she was telling a rapt circle of other writers that she could use any prop they gave her to kill someone.  I’m not sure she noticed the radius of the circle increasing. Zoë writes fiction full time in the beautiful Lake District.

Please welcome Zoë Sharp.

Stan - Thursday

________________________

Getting From There to Here

Have you ever stopped and looked around you, and wondered how you got from there to here?

I’m not talking about those momentary lapses during familiar journeys when the autopilot takes over, and you suddenly realise you’ve missed your junction on the motorway. Nor am I indulging in some deep cosmic navel-gazing.

Instead, I’m asking the question on a more down-to-earth level—when you first became aware that there was this nebulous thing called ‘a career’ and that you were expected to have one, what did you imagine you would become?

Caroline Bradley

Being a horse-mad child, I naturally wanted to emulate my show-jumping heroes—or in this case, heroines—and in particular Caroline Bradley, who really set light to the sport until her tragic death in 1983 at the age of only thirty-seven.

Sadly, being jumped up and down rather a lot on by very large horses with very big feet soon proved to me I don’t have the nerve for the really big fences, although being a riding instructor is still more or less my only professional qualification.

Clare Francis

I was brought up on a boat, so naturally sailing featured strongly in my early life. I was fascinated by the achievements of transatlantic yachtswoman Clare Francis, devouring her non-fiction works about her voyages, not only several times across the Atlantic, but in the Round Britain Race, the Azores and Back Singlehanded Race, and the Whitbread Round The World Race. And then her highly successful career as a novelist.

Writing, as well as sailing, was one of the mainstays of my early life. Having opted out of mainstream education at the age of twelve (I was a horribly precocious child), I eventually wrote my first full-length novel at fifteen. My father loyally typed it up for me, complete with carbon copies, (cue peals of laughter from anyone under thirty), and it did the rounds of the major publishers, receiving what are known in the trade as “rave rejections”.  Looking back, most fledgling writers today would be incredibly heartened to get the kind of encouraging criticism I received, but at the time I was devastated. I assumed that particular door would remain forever closed to me and looked round for Something Else.

That Something Else included a variety of jobs, some of which I’m not really able to talk about, but suffice to say that during that time I picked up one or two useful skills, including the ability to hit a moving target with a large-calibre rifle at 300 metres with open sights. (No, really—don’t ask.)

Still the writing side of things never quite released its grip on me.

Michele Mouton

As soon as I learned to drive, cars became my passion. I bought an elderly Triumph Spitfire, rebuilt it, resprayed it, and drove it as much in the style of the great Group B World Rally competitor, Michèle Mouton as I was able, considering she had at least ten times the horsepower and four-wheel drive. I would have loved to follow in her footsteps, but elderly British convertibles with no ground clearance were not the most competitive vehicles in which to attempt serious off-roading. 

Change of course

 That passion for cars never faded, though, and almost by accident I fell into writing about classic cars, which combined two loves very nicely. I started doing a few reports for one of the local historic car club magazines. Before I knew it, I was freelancing for the mainstream press, winging it, and praying nobody asked me what qualifications I had for the job. Fortunately, it took one of my commissioning editors four years to do so. By then I was able to tell her, “Well, you’ve been paying me to do it for the past four years. Does that count as qualification enough?”

It did, apparently.

And I might have put aside my fiction ambitions indefinitely, had it not been for the death-threat letters I received in the course of my work, which had two immediate effects. The first of these was that I took a sudden and very keen interest in learning a great deal of self-defence dirty tricks—erm, I mean tactics, and the second was to try to make sense of the whole thing by writing it out of my system.

The result was KILLER INSTINCT: Charlie Fox book one.

Now I look back on it, the whole of my life has been useful preparation for getting to this point. Every skill I’ve acquired—every bit of information I’ve picked up, or journey I’ve taken—has informed my writing in some way. No experience, however nasty it might be at the time, is ever wasted.

And I realise that although I may have come to it by a somewhat circuitous route, I am in the incredibly lucky position of having achieved my childhood ambition. 

I am what I’ve always dreamed of being—an author.

What about you? Are you where you hoped you’d be when you first set out? And if you’re doing something completely unexpected (but which you enjoy anyway), how did you stumble onto that path?

And if you’re doing something you don’t enjoy, can you see a way to change course in the near future—a means of getting from here to there?

Good reading,

Zoë