Gentleman Jack

My blog tour is more than half way through now. I’d like to thank all the bloggers and everyone who has read their posts and sent comments. Both the reviews and the comments have been delightful – I am hugely appreciative and grateful. Thank you!

I’m now looking forward to the last three posts. The tour finishes on 30^th November – a fitting date, as winter starts ‘officially’ the next day. I’m sure the generous and perspicacious posts will encourage more readers to snuggle down with DI Yates in the cold, dark evenings!

Special thanks to Anne Cater, who pulled the whole thing together. I have loved working with her – she is down-to-earth, determined and efficient and she has a fine sense of humour. If you are looking for someone to organise a blog tour, I wholeheartedly recommend her.

Bookmark’s lovely display of the DI Yates crime mystery thrillers

Yesterday it rained.  And rained.  And rained.

And it didn’t spoil a thing.

I was at three events in Spalding to celebrate the launch of Chasing Hares: a signing session at wonderful Bookmark, where all my novels have been launched, and where the hospitality from Sam and Sarah and their team was as warm as always;

I enjoyed talking to Michael about his work with Tonic Health, a health and wellbeing charity based in Spalding

a very special event hosted by Anthony and Marcus on the island where most of the novel is set;

Host Anthony, reading a chapter of ‘Chasing Hares’ with verve

Hosts Marcus and Alfie

and an evening talk and readings at Bookmark, attended by just as large an audience as usual despite their having had to turn out in grim weather.

Ever the thoughtful welcome from Bookmark’s Sam Buckley

Thank you, everyone! I both appreciated and enjoyed it all very much indeed.

And Chasing Hares? Well, it is unique among the DI Yates novels in that its two (related) plots were both suggested to me by other people. In the summer of 2018, my husband and I called in on our friends Madelaine and Marc. It was a hot, sunny day and their friends Anthony and Marcus, who own several boats, offered us a trip along the river Welland from the island house where they live. Anthony showed us round the house and made us coffee before we went. As we sat in the garden outside, I said I had almost finished writing Gentleman Jack and the conversation turned to what I should tackle in my next novel.

I can’t remember who suggested I should write about this island: it was Madelaine, Marc or Anthony, or a combination of all three. Marc, who’s a fount of knowledge when it comes to local history, said he’d heard there had been a row of small cottages on the island – hovels, really – and that a retired soldier had lived in one of them. Local people called him Soldier Bob. Anthony had heard this story, too. The soldier was half-crazed – we speculated that he might have been a WWI veteran suffering from shell-shock – and trigger-happy. He was also a recluse. He didn’t take kindly to having people disturb him. A man approached his cottage one day and Soldier Bob shot him dead. (Anthony’s version of this was embellished by the detail that the victim was the postman and Soldier Bob shot him through the letterbox.) Bob was arrested and tried for murder but acquitted – and presumably taken into care – on the grounds of insanity.

Listening to the tale of Soldier Bob, I could see that setting the next novel on the island offered great possibilities. I didn’t want to tell the tale of Bob, however – though it is mentioned in Chasing Hares – because for some time I’d been toying with the idea of writing a novel that drew inspiration from the Golden Age of crime fiction, but with a modern twist.

A glimpse of the house which is the setting for much of ‘Chasing Hares – and the River Welland

A popular device used by Golden Age crime writers is the country house crime story. It has a lot to recommend it: a group of people gather in a country house, usually secluded and some distance from civilisation; a murder is committed; one of the people present must have been the murderer; all turn out to have motives for killing the victim; and the reader is titillated along the way by accounts of gracious living, exquisite dresses, sumptuous picnics, fine dinners, afternoon tea, torrid love affairs –  the lot.

I thought it would be interesting to create a modern-day version of such a gathering, spiced with a little bit of irony. I decided to update it further and, as a double irony, instead of depicting an upper-class social event, I made the reason for my gathering a crime mystery weekend. Instead of being presided over by a suave and cultured society hostess, the party in Chasing Hares is hosted by a perennially mean and crooked wheeler-dealer, Gordon Bemrose. Instead of representing high society, his guests hail from humbler – and in some cases, dodgier – walks of life, but, like their country house counterparts, they are all potential murderers. Finally, instead of being entertained by a chamber orchestra or string quartet, their entertainment is a play, a bowdlerised version of Arsenic and Old Lace, put on by the local amateur dramatic company but starring Gordon’s actor nephew, Anton Greenweal.

The second part of the plot was suggested to me by a policeman who has been following me on my blog for some time. He wrote to me to say that the biggest single problem rural police forces have to deal with, particularly in East Anglia and parts of Northern England, is hare coursing. I’ve since carried out quite a lot of research on this and it’s a truly horrific crime. It’s not just the hares that are hurt – they’re horribly mutilated by the dogs before they die – but also the dogs themselves: they’re often badly injured by running into each other or spraining or breaking their legs by trying to follow as the hare changes course rapidly in its attempt to escape. There’s nothing ironical or tongue-in-cheek about the hare-coursing passages – they’re deadly serious.

That’s all I’m going to say about Chasing Hares for now…

What Spalding means to me: the evening launch of ‘Chasing Hares’

Old friends at Bookmark, Spalding

Gentleman Jack is launched!  Thank you to all those who helped.

Gentleman Jack, the seventh novel in the DI Yates series – and the first about a serial killer – was published on October 15^th 2018. This is a round-up of the events and some of the reviews I’ve been lucky to have received since.

On October 15^th, Bookmark in Spalding – always a staunch and much-appreciated supporter of my novels – gave me a signing session.

On the 17^th, I had a very lively interview with David Harding-Price at Radio Lincoln City.

Interviewed at Lincoln City Radio by David Harding-Price

Then it was back to Spalding for an event in the library on the afternoon of the 18^th and to give a talk at Bookmark that evening. Both talks featured serial killing and how I have tackled the subject. At these events, I was delighted to meet so many friendly faces, both those well known to me and some new ones.  A very happy direct outcome of the Bookmark occasion was that I was able to meet an old schoolfriend whom I last saw before I was married; I was also reconnected with two other friends from Spalding High School. I was also privileged to be supported in the evening by the current owners of the real Sausage Hall and their daughter.

A warm reception at Spalding Bookmark

My sincere thanks to Sam and Sarah at Bookmark  and Sharman in the library, not forgetting all their colleagues for making these events a success.

On October 19^th, I was interviewed by BBC Radio Lincolnshire’s Carla Green, who was as generous as always with her time and praise. (Then I went to India for five days – the day job intervened.)

On my return, Walkers Books of Stamford provided their usual impeccable hospitality with a signing session – this has become an annual event – and, as always, I enjoyed talking to their customers, who included some of the people I met at the Stamford Academy Literary Festival last June.  A big thank you, therefore, to Jenny and Linda at Walkers.

At Walkers, Stamford

Meanwhile, Emma Dowson, Salt’s PR Manager, had organised the best blog roll I’ve ever had the good fortune to experience. I’d like to thank all the bloggers for their very generous reviews, and for publishing several articles they requested from me as guest posts on their blogs.  Zoe Myall, of the Spalding Gazette, wrote a brilliant review of Gentleman Jack and I’d very much like to thank her, too.

My final event before Christmas was, if not the most ambitious, certainly the quirkiest. I am a frequent visitor to Papworth Everard, in Cambridgeshire, as I have family living there, one of whom told me that a micro-brewery had recently opened in the village and that it sold a beer called ‘Mad Jack’ – not quite ‘Gentleman Jack’, but near enough! The micro-brewery is situated outside Papworth, but its products are sold in a coffee shop there that doubles as a bar and gin palace in the evenings – it’s called ‘The Courtyard’.

(As one of my readers said – ‘Crime and gin – what more could anyone want?’) I happened to pop in for a casual gin and met Chris Jones, the proprietor of both bar/gin palace and brewery, who told me that he had been thinking of holding some events there. One gin led to another and we agreed to collaborate to provide a crime evening with a focus on the DI Yates books… and with liquid refreshment! It proved a winning combination! 😉

At The Courtyard

I made many new friends there and was also supported by several long-standing ones. Much gratitude to the captive audience of locals who’d only dropped by for a drink but nevertheless joined in, one of whom even called up his wife, a book enthusiast, to bring her down! I was also staggered that one member of the group had bought and read In the Family in advance of the session – much appreciated, Nathalie! I also particularly enjoyed having the opportunity to meet and chat to the members of the Papworth Reading Group. Huge thanks to Chris Jones and his long-suffering staff, who cheerfully waited for us to leave some time after closing time. You, Chris, will be pleased to know that Mad Jack is now being celebrated far beyond Papworth!

I do have one more piece of news, but I’ll save that for another post. For now, I’d like to thank everyone who has helped Gentleman Jack to meet the world, including the many people whose names I have not been able to mention in this short post.

And if your library, bookshop or reading group is looking for someone to talk crime, killers and bodies, you know where to come!

My copy of Gentleman Jack has arrived at last! I am, as always, delighted with Chris Hamilton-Emery’s brilliant jacket design and distinguished typesetting. ‘Jack’ is officially published today, 15th October 2018. It’s my first novel about a serial killer. I’ve thought for a long time about the best way to tackle this type of criminal in my fiction. Indirectly, it draws on my own experiences of living in Leeds as a young woman when the Yorkshire Ripper conducted his reign of terror, but, like all my novels, it is much more concerned with portraying the psychology of the killer than the ‘blood and guts’ of the crimes themselves. It’s also about the organised theft of agricultural vehicles, a scourge which periodically afflicts farmers in Lincolnshire and other rural areas.

I know that many of my regular readers – across the world – have been looking forward to reading it.  I’d like to take the opportunity to thank you all for your support and your continuing enthusiasm for my books.  Ipso facto, one can’t really be an author without readers; words cannot express how much I value the time you spend on reading my books. I offer you my profoundest thanks. And I do hope you will enjoy Gentleman Jack!

Also published today is The Book of Alexander, the debut novel of Mark Carew, a fellow Salt author. I was privileged to read this book in draft form and I heartily recommend it. It’s not exactly a crime novel, although there are some relevant features: Alexander, the protagonist – stalker or not? No spoilers!

The Book of Alexander follows the time-honoured and exciting literary tradition which explores different versions of the self.  Who is Alexander? Who is his mysterious grandfather, ‘Mr Travis’? Who is Melanie, Alexander’s down-to-earth girlfriend, and is she really competing with rivals for Alexander’s affection? Above all, who is the dullish private detective who tells the story – and is he really so dull?

The second half of the novel is episodic. Alexander embarks upon a journey, not to distant lands – although I suspect he may do that in a future novel – but through the city of Cambridge and around the River Cam and its environs. This journey is by turns sinister, comical and exasperating.

The Book of Alexander contains a rich cast of characters, including: Mick and Yin, who run the garage where the private detective roosts when spying; a bevy of girlfriends (real or imagined?); and Alexander’s eccentric but lovable parents, who perhaps hold the key to Alexander’s whimsical character. Or then again, perhaps they don’t!

Have I hooked you yet?

Lisa, patisserie expert at Bettys, Harrogate

On a very wet day during the long August bank holiday weekend, I got up early to arrive at Bettys (sic.) cookery school in Harrogate by 8.30 a.m. I had booked myself in for a day’s tuition on patisserie. The course didn’t begin until 9 a.m., but the students were advised to arrive half an hour early for breakfast, which consisted of Bettys croissants and pains au chocolat. Delicious!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Bettys, it’s an upmarket baker and confectioner operating six tea-shops in Yorkshire. It’s not named after a woman – Mr Betty was an immigrant, an Austrian patissier who came to the UK in 1919 and opened his first shop in Harrogate, then still a famous spa town.

The cookery school is a relatively recent innovation. It’s been running for a few years – my son attended one of the early sessions, on boning meat – and since then the courses have proliferated.  Passionate about Patisserie, the course that I attended, was a present from my son and daughter-in-law. (No ulterior motive, they assured me… though I’m a touch dubious about that! I am a keen baker, which they appreciate, but I’d never before done any of the fancy stuff.)

All fifteen places on the course were filled; only one of the students was male – a man attending with his daughter, because, she explained, she’d been away all summer and hadn’t seen much of him. I was very impressed by this – and later came to realise that she, too, may have been influenced by a filial ulterior motive, as he proceeded to do all her washing up as well as his own. Together we made one of the groups of three – each of the five work benches had three sinks and three ovens. I enjoyed working with these two throughout the day; I also spent some time talking to a woman in her fifties who had inherited money from her parents, retired early and become a sort of Bettys junkie. She does all the courses and avidly waits for new ones to appear.

There were two Bettys staff taking the course, led by Lisa, who said she’d been working for Bettys for more than thirty years – she must have joined the company as soon as she left school – while one other – Philippa – was catering for the participants; it was she who made the breakfast pastries, the lunch of quiche, salad, rosti and lemon tart and the afternoon tea of scones, cream and jam, while we concentrated on our own cakes and pastries. It was the one time in my life I’ve experienced the opportunity to have my cake and eat it!

I found the day relaxing for many reasons. Foremost among these was that there was an unquestioning assumption that patisserie is all about taste and look. There were no apologies for the number of calories involved or concerns about whether the fats were saturated or the sugars ‘organic’; no consideration, even, of the expense of the ingredients!

I have to say, my Sacher torte looked promising, even if it suffered travel damage on the way home!

Despite this, it was by no means the cake version of a Bacchanalia.  Each step of each recipe (we completed three) was completed with military precision and each was accompanied by some precious nuggets from Lisa’s store of cake wisdom. Thus I learnt that: metal mixing bowls give the best results; you should never remove the ‘twiddly’ bits when preparing eggs for cake-making, because they are your friends – they help to stabilise the mixture; and that getting the temperature right is key – since all ovens, even new ones, vary from one day to the next, an oven thermometer is an essential investment. There was something I didn’t need telling, because I found it out for myself years ago: baking well is an art as well as a science. Like good writing, it is 95% hard graft, 5% inspiration.

We all completed our three recipes and everyone’s efforts were successful. However, as well as getting the temperature right, I’m also aware that weighing ingredients correctly is imperative to getting good results. This was something we didn’t have to do – probably because there wasn’t time – so we were supplied with little packages of all the ingredients we needed, no doubt weighed accurately down to the last milligram. Repeating the recipes, therefore, may still be a bit of a challenge!

The need to get the temperature right reminds me that, two years ago, I finally abandoned my ailing and capricious electric Aga, which had never worked properly since it was bought new seventeen years before (a Friday afternoon job, obviously). It would actually be more correct to say that it abandoned me – it finally gave up the ghost just before Christmas (!), having cost as much again in repairs as was spent on it originally. We replaced it with a Falcon range, which, mercifully, fitted (to a millimetre) the gap vacated by the Aga… exactly, perhaps because Falcon was acquired by Aga! Then I discovered that the Falcon, unlike the Aga, has no dedicated cookery books and I vowed to write one myself – perhaps with a criminal theme! This ambition was rekindled by the Bettys experience – so if anyone reading this has some Falcon recipe tips, I’d be glad to receive them.

While I was at Bettys, my husband spent the very damp morning at RHS Harlow Carr gardens, where there is a Bettys café, reading the digital proofs of Gentleman Jack, drinking Bettys coffee and, like me (though he didn’t know it), indulging rather more heavily in their breakfast pastries.  So much for his plaintive declaration, when we met up again, of indifferent supermarket sandwiches for lunch… and he timed his arrival for the cookery course tea and cream scones!

After returning home, I unpacked my bunch of goodies to show him and went off to get changed. On coming back downstairs, I couldn’t find one of the small fruit tartlets, which I was sure had been there. Hmmm.

The (travel-damaged) Sacher torte, completed

Lemon and strawberry torte

French fruit tartlets

On Saturday 14^th April 2018, I spent the afternoon at a Lincoln City Library event organised for me by the indefatigable Tina Muncaster and her colleagues (indefatigable, because we first tried to run this event on 3^rd March, but were thwarted by the astonishingly heavy snow that had gridlocked Lincoln a couple of days before, when I was very kindly interviewed by Lincoln City Radio).  As Tina said, when she re-invited me, perhaps the daffodils would be blooming if we rearranged for April!  This turned out to be correct: the daffodils in Lincolnshire are magnificent this year.

Arriving in Lincoln early, I decided to explore the city.  I’ve been to Lincoln several times before, both as a child and later, but in the past I’ve always headed for the Cathedral and the steep streets that lead to it.  This time, I visited the waterfront and was amazed both by its beauty and its long history. (I particularly wanted to see the Fossdyke Navigation, which features in Gentleman Jack, my next novel.) I’ve already published a separate post about my explorations.

Nine people attended the event, with Tina and her colleagues joining in as their work permitted. The members of the audience – or, I should perhaps say, my fellow writers – were wonderful.  There was an almost equal balance of women and men, from a wide age range. I was particularly happy that Elise Harrington, of Lincoln City Radio, was able to join us.

Like the event in February in Spalding, this was not just about reading from the DI Yates novels and talking about them. Tina had said that she thought her library patrons would also be interested in discussing how a really bad character is created and so we planned a modified version of the Spalding activity. We therefore focused on Hannibal Lecter for the first part of the discussion and considered some published extracts depicting evil characters before I read a short passage about Peter Prance, taken from In the Family.

After a break, during which the Library served up tea and delicious biscuits and almost everyone bought a copy of one of the DI Yates titles (I’d like to say here how grateful I am for this), we got down to the business of creating some brand new nasties! The group worked in twos and threes. It’s no exaggeration to say that everyone was fascinated by the task and completely absorbed by it, as I hope the photographs demonstrate. The villains created were imaginative and ingenious – they included a woman who was a housekeeper and ‘saw’ everything, a transgender sailor and a male villain with a ‘small man’ complex.

After everyone had shared their villains with the others, the event concluded with another short reading, this one from Fair of Face. By this time, it was 4 pm – and the event had been scheduled to run from 1.30 pm – 2.30 pm!

If you were one of my fellow crime writers on Saturday, I’d like to thank you very much indeed for sharing your creative ideas and for so obviously enjoying yourself. And double thanks to Tina Muncaster and her colleagues: they’ve kindly said they’ll invite me to Lincoln again and I shall jump at the opportunity. Thank you also for my beautiful bunch of tulips, the first I have enjoyed this year.

Finally, I’d like to thank Sharman Morriss at Spalding Library, both for hosting me there and also for setting in train a series of Christina James events in libraries around Lincolnshire. I’m next at Gainsborough Library and then, shortly afterwards, at Woodhall Spa, a stone’s throw from the River Witham I wrote about in my previous post.

Readers of this blog will know that DI Yates and I have been fortunate enough to have been supported with many events in Spalding, owing to the extraordinary generosity of a growing list of people, especially Sam Buckley and her team at Bookmark, Michele Anderson and her colleagues at Spalding High School and Sharman Morris and the other librarians at the public library. As regular readers also know, I’ve now been privileged to lead several writers’ workshops in other places. This Spalding event was my second workshop there and, like the first, was hosted in the library by Sharman, and thanks to her and her colleague, Amanda, and the wonderful audience they gathered, it was a resounding success.

We took as our main topic ‘How to create a really evil character’ and we began by considering the attributes that such a character requires the author to deliver to make him or her come alive. We talked at length about how to achieve credibility and what sort of writing maintains the tension demanded by an evil character (and the kinds of writing that fail to maintain that tension). We considered Hannibal Lecter’s first meeting with Clarice Starling, how it is described by Thomas Harris in The Silence of the Lambs and what that tells us about Clarice, as well as Hannibal himself.

The audience then broke into small groups to work on creating some evil characters of their own.

All of the groups were totally engaged and they came up with some startlingly fresh ideas. I particularly enjoyed the debate that took place between the four members of one group as they discussed whether or not to allow the serial killer’s dog to travel with him in his cab. The dog would be a useful tool to deflect suspicion, but – amid much hilarity – could not be trusted not to eat his sandwiches, so he wouldn’t be able to leave those in the cab as well! I hasten to add that this was actually only a small part of the conversation, most of which was a serious consideration of how alibis work and what constitutes ‘normal’ behaviour – and how the Victorian music-hall villain is a stereotype that never occurs in real life. Real-life killers don’t provide good role models for authors, either, as they are frequently banal – ‘black boxes’ who don’t tick. We agreed that to be a successful evil character in fiction you must always have an inner life which the reader is allowed to penetrate, and often also demonstrate a certain glamour.

As the groups read out what they’d written and described the progress they’d made with creating their characters, some of the audience also began to share fascinating real-life anecdotes.  One was about a dog which actually did eat its owner’s sandwiches every time it was taken in a vehicle; two others focused on making unfair judgements about people because of mistaken preconceived ideas. One of these told how his grandfather liked to dress up and go to a pub on a Saturday night. One Saturday, slightly well-oiled, he tripped and hurt his face on the pavement. Several people passed him by without stopping, assuming, despite his good clothes, that he was a habitual drunk. It was only when a party of punks saw him that anyone helped him to his feet: having done so, they walked him two miles home and made him a cup of tea.  This story prompted someone else to recount how, when she moved to a new area, she thought the local pub looked rough and shunned it until she, too, tripped outside and was helped inside and cared for by some of the regulars whom she’d previously disdained.

I gave two short readings from my own books, the first from the passage where Grace Brackenbury asks to see the bodies of her foster mother and baby daughter in Fair of Face and the episode in which Peter Prance begins to challenge Hedley Atkins on the train journey to Liverpool in In the Family. Many of the audience stayed to talk to me informally after the organised part of the event was over. We spoke some more about reading and writing and what they mean to us. It was very clear that all participants in the session had enjoyed themselves. For my own part, I had a fantastic time: it was a great privilege to be able to spend a Saturday morning with such a lively group. They’ve asked me to lead another workshop after Gentleman Jack is published and I shall be delighted to do so – if Sharman doesn’t mind weaving her magic again!