Category Archives: Blog Tours

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Here’s an Easter treat… we’re great fans of Isabelle Grey here at Crime Thriller Fella, so we’re delighted to be taking part in the Blog Tour for her hard-hitting new novel Shot Through The Heart.

We loved Grey’s first Grace Fisher novel Good Girls Don’t Die, and now Grace, and the wonderfully disreputable journalist Ivo Sweatman, return in a story which follows the shocking consequences of a multiple shooting in Essex at Christmas – when five people five people are gunned down before the lone shooter turns his weapon on himself.

Grace, now a Detective Inspector, is tasked with making some sense of this atrocity – all the more sensitive because the first of the victims was one of their own: a police officer. The case throws her back together with crime reporter Sweatman, but as she investigates it becomes clear that the police connection goes much deeper than she thought.

As the evidence of corruption grows and she is obstructed at every turn, Grace knows she is walking further into danger. Then, her young key witness disappears . . .

Isabelle is a lifelong writer. She’s been a television scriptwriter – writing episodes of Accused and Midsomer Murders, among others – a journalist and an author of non-fiction. In this fascinating interview she talks about Grace, gun crime, how her own experiences as a journalist inspired the roguish Sweatman, and how words on a page are never wasted…

Tell us about DI Grace Fisher…

DI Grace Fisher is a young woman who isn’t afraid to make mistakes, or to live with the consequences of her actions. A life spent writing fiction can sometimes feel trivial and irresponsible, so Grace was inspired by close women friends who do demanding jobs in the real world – head teacher, GP. Their daily decisions have lasting consequences, and I wanted Grace to feel that her work carries weight in the same way.

How has the character developed since her debut in Good Girls Don’t Die?

In Shot Through The Heart Grace feels a little older and wiser, grateful for friends she can trust, but not yet ready to go looking for anything more intimate. Her passion is directed instead towards rooting out bullying and corruption in the police, even if she has to bend her own rules to do so.

Shot Through The Heart follows Grace’s investigation into a multiple shooting on Christmas Day – when researching the novel what did you learn about gun crime in the UK?

The idea for the book began with a newspaper article about the conviction of a criminal armourer. I became intrigued by how such a pivotal underworld figure could manage to remain so shadowy and hidden while illicit weapons were so readily available on the street. I then found Home Office reports that supplied exhaustive detail on guns and gun crime in the UK. Around that time, as a volunteer with the prison charity The New Bridge, I was making visits to the high security prison, Whitemoor, near Ely. Driving through the flat and lonely fenland landscape, I passed a sign for a gunsmith on an otherwise empty road; on each of the long journeys home, I began to spin a story about the gunsmith’s daughter.

Why are we as readers so intrigued by shocking violent events such as random shootings, do you think?

I think it’s because they are so often random. Like the invented commencement speech, Wear Sunscreen, they’re the kind of troubles that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday. They appear to come out of nowhere, the victims may have no connection whatever with the shooter and have done absolutely nothing to deserve such a fate, yet these tragedies are not senseless. Something drives each shooter to enact such atrocities.

Cynical crime reporter Ivo Sweatman makes his second appearance in the series – was Ivo shaped by your own experiences in journalism?

Ivo is certainly shaped by the romantic idealism I felt for journalism when I began writing for The Times in the late 1970s. I was a feature writer – I never managed to become a reporter – but I’d been at school as Watergate unfolded and had followed every detail. Even though Ivo works for a fairly sleazy tabloid, he would love this year’s Oscar-winner, Spotlight, about the investigative team on the Boston Globe who broke the story about the protection given to paedophile priests by the Catholic Church. It’s a film that proves how incredibly important – and exciting – good journalism can be.

As a television screenwriter, how did you come to write novels?

There were stories I wanted to tell that, for various reasons, I was unlikely to get commissioned for television. I’m lucky to have a wonderful editor at Quercus, Jane Wood, who allows me the freedom to find my story in the writing – a luxury that the structure of the film and television industry is seldom able to offer. Of course it would be lovely if a production company wanted to pick up Grace Fisher for a TV series!

What’s the hardest lesson you ever had to learn about writing?

Apart from the fact that rejection hurts?! It’s that, if something’s getting in the way of my story, I have to dump it, even if it’s most of what I’ve written or a character I love. It’s vital to be clear about what my story really is. If the abandoned material deserves a place elsewhere, it’ll worm its way back in some other form. Nothing is ever wasted.

Who are the authors you admire, and why?

TV crime dramas are now ‘authored’ in a way they seldom used to be, and I really admire writers like Sally Wainwright for Happy Valley, Jed Mercurio for Line of Duty or Baltasar Kormákur who created the recent Icelandic drama Trapped.

Give me some advice about writing…

Keep going. Finish it. Then re-write. More than once. Do everything you can to help the reader get the most out of the experience of reading your work.

What’s next for you and Grace?

I’m over halfway through the first draft of the next book, in which Grace investigates a ‘non-recent’ allegation of child sex abuse, with all the political intrigue, denial and double-dealing that goes along with that. It brings her up against Scotland Yard, who aren’t going to be very happy with her!

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Shot Through The Heart is out right now in hardback and ebook, published by Quercus. Happy reading this Easter!

The Intel: Kate Medina

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Kate Medina - credit Philippa Gedge Kate Medina received widespread acclaim for her debut thriller, White Crocodile – written as KT Medina – set in the minefields of Cambodia. Now, with Fire Damage, Kate’s started an explosive new series featuring army psychologist Dr Jessie Flynn.

When asked to treat a severely traumatised four year old boy, Jessie has no idea that she will soon becoming embroiled in something much bigger – involving family secrets, army cover-ups and a killer on the loose.

They say write what you know, and Kate has combined her experiences in the Territorial Army as a Troop Commander in the Royal Engineers with the knowledge she gained studying for a degree in psychology to write the novel.

A generous and fascinating interviewee, Kate tells us about the genesis of her new portage Jessie, why she made the painful decision not to continue with the heroine of her first novel – and how a writing course may be just the ticket to help unlock the talent in all of us.

Plus, I love the way she name-checks a writer who I don’t think has been mentioned in The Intel before, but who has surely sowed the seed of inspiration at an early age in many a crime writer down the decades… Enid Blyton.

Can you tell us about Dr Jessie Flynn … ?

Dr Jessie Flynn is a twenty-nine year old clinical psychologist with the Defence Psychology Service. Her need to understand the ‘whys’ of human behaviour drove her to become a clinical psychologist, and yet there are huge swathes of her own personality that she struggles to understand, let alone to control.

Women are often portrayed as victims in crime literature. I wanted to create a character who reflects the huge number of strong, funny, clever, independent women that I know. Jessie is complex and conflicted, and my new series will be written from her intense, brilliant, flawed, but moral perspective. I hope that people remember Jessie and the issues raised through her long after they have finished reading.

Fire Damage, the first novel to feature Jessie, is set in both England and Afghanistan – tell us about it.

In Fire Damage, Dr Jessie Flynn is counselling Sami Scott, a deeply traumatised four year-old-boy, whose father, a Major in the Intelligence Corp, was badly burnt in a petrol bomb attack whilst serving in Afghanistan. Sami is terrified of someone or something called ‘The Shadowman’ and tells Jessie Flynn that ‘the girl knows’. However, there are no girls in Sami’s life. Sami also carries a huge black metal Maglite torch with him wherever he goes, clutching onto it like a loved teddy bear. Sami’s parent insist that his trauma stems from seeing his father in hospital burnt beyond recognition, and that Major Scott is ‘The Shadowman’, but Jessie feels that that something far darker explains Sami’s trauma.

Fire Damage is first and foremost a story about families: love and hate, kindness and cruelty and the destructive nature of some relationships. The fear and helplessness experienced by a child trapped in a dysfunctional family was, for me, a very powerful emotion to explore, as was its flip side – intense love and an overwhelming desire to protect.

You did a psychology degree and served in the Territorial Army, but what other research did you have to do for the novel?

My degree in Psychology sets me in very good stead to write about a character who is herself a psychologist, so for Jessie’s professional life I needed to do very little research beyond the knowledge and experience that I already have.

Likewise, my experience as a Troop Commander in the Territorial Army and as head of land-based weapons at global defence intelligence publisher Jane’s Information Group set me up well to write about people who serve in the Army and also about the political situation in the middle-east.

The ‘star’ of Fire Damage is Sami Scott, the deeply traumatised four year-old-boy. I have three children, the youngest of whom is a four-year-old boy and so I suppose you could say that my poor son was a living, breathing research subject for the character of Sami. However, I can assure my readers that my son’s life is wonderful compared to Sami’s!

What’s the biggest challenge in establishing a new series?

For me, White Crocodile, my debut thriller was hard act to follow, firstly because it was very personal to me, as it was based on time I spent working in the minefields of Cambodia, and secondly because it got universally fantastic reviews, being called variously, ‘a stunning debut’ in the Sunday Mirror, ‘an ambitious thriller’ in The Mail on Sunday, ‘a powerful, angry book’ in The Times, and being compared to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in The Independent. The biggest challenge in establishing the Jessie Flynn series, was therefore to find characters and a subject matter that readers would enjoy even more than White Crocodile.

I knew that I wanted to write a series because, although many readers of White Crocodile wanted to see Tess Hardy again, her job as a mine clearer and the subject matter didn’t really allow for her return. I also wanted to write a series that used my expertise – as a psychologist and my military experience – and one that was a little out of the ordinary in the crime genre.

In Jessie Flynn and the two other key characters, who appear in Fire Damage, Captain Ben Callan and Detective Inspector ‘Bobby’ Marilyn Simmons of Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes, I really believe I have developed characters who my readers will love and want to live with in many future novels.

Before writing your first novel White Crocodile you did an MA in Creative Writing – was that an experience you would recommend for wannabe writers?

Most novelists I meet are former journalists, but I had no previous writing experience beyond school essays, just a strong desire to write White Crocodile. Writing a novel is a real challenge, not just in terms of crafting great sentences, but also in terms of developing believable, empathetic characters and sufficiently complex and surprising plots. I found the MA enormously helpful and would definitely recommend some kind of formal writing teaching for wannabe writers, if they have as little experience as I had when starting out! However, there are many ways to skin a cat and reading widely in the genre in which you write is a great way to learn how to write well in that genre.

What’s the hardest lesson you ever had to learn about writing?

The hardest lesson I’ve learnt is to be self-aware and to take feedback from people who are more knowledgeable than myself. Writing a novel is a huge commitment in terms of time and emotional energy and with White Crocodile I had to throw away and rewrite about a third of it on the advice of my agent. At the time, it was heartbreaking, but the experience taught me so much about how to write a great crime novel and neither White Crocodile nor Fire Damage would be nearly so good without the very painful lessons I learnt from my agent right at the beginning of my writing career.

Who are the authors you admire, and why?

I have always loved to read and much of my childhood was spent immersed in stories. Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series was one of my favourites and in common with many other tomboys I wanted to be George. Two other books that really captured my imagination as a child were Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird. They are both fantastic psychological thrillers for young people, with great story lines and incredibly vividly drawn, memorable characters. I have read both of these novels a number of times over the years and never fail to appreciate them.

I am still an avid crime and thriller reader, which is why I choose to write in that genre. I love writers such as Jo Nesbo, Stieg Larsson, Martina Cole, Mo Hayder and Lee Child.

Mo Hayder, generates fear in a novel like no other writer I know. Jo Nesbo’s novels, particularly my favourite which is The Snowman, are also terrifying and he is fantastic at developing very complex plots that make it impossible to put the book down. I must have read all 500-odd pages of The Snowman in two days. Martina Cole is gritty and realistic and Lee Child just writes enjoyable and very easily readable stories.

I also love Khaled Hosseni, because he blends fact and fiction so well, taking readers into a very traumatic real word, through incredibly empathetic fictional characters.

What’s your best advice on writing…

My best advice is to read widely, particularly in the genre that you are interested in writing in, to take advice and be self-aware and most importantly, to enjoy yourself. Enjoyment and passion will transfer itself to the page. I love Jessie Flynn, Sami Scott and the other characters in Fire Damage, and really enjoyed writing about them, and I think that this love and passion really makes the novel work.

What’s next for you and Jessie?

I have already completed a first draft of the second Jessie Flynn novel and sent it to my publisher, Harper Collins, so I am waiting with baited breath to see if they like it. Jessie Flynn is a hugely compelling and multi-dimensional character, and as such is a gift to an author, and I am looking forward to developing her, Captain Ben Callan and Detective Inspector ‘Bobby’ Marilyn Simmons of Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes, in many future novels.

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Fire Damage, the first Jessie Flynn novel, is out this Thursday — March 24th – in hardback, published by Harper Collins.

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Guest Post: Amy Stewart

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Photo: Terrence McNally

Now the Girl Waits With Gun Blog Tour has rolled to Crime Thriller Fella, let’s talk about Constance Kopp…

She towers over most men, has no interest in marriage or domestic affairs, and has been isolated from the world since a family secret sent her and her sisters from the city to the country fifteen years before. When a powerful, ruthless factory owner runs down their buggy, a dispute over damages turns into a war of bricks, bullets, and threats as he unleashes his gang on their farm. The sheriff enlists her help, and it turns out that Constance has a knack for outwitting the criminal element, which might just take her back out into the world and onto a new path in life.

Constance is a larger than life character, to be sure – all the more remarkable, then, that she was a real life person. Author Amy Stewart has taken Constance – and her smart siblings – and turned the story of America’s first woman Deputy Sheriff at the beginning of the 20th Century into the first of a new series of novels for Scribe.

In this Guest Post, Amy – the award-winning author of six novels – tells us about the obscure historical feud that inspired Girl Waits With Gun…

While researching my last book, The Drunken Botanist, I ran across a story about a man named Henry Kaufman who was arrested for smuggling tainted gin. I thought I should do a little more investigation to see if Henry Kaufman went on to do anything else interesting.

That’s when I found an article in the New York Times from 1915 about a man named Henry Kaufman who ran his car into a horse-drawn carriage driven by these three sisters, Constance, Norma, and Fleurette Kopp. They got into a conflict over payment for the damages, and it escalated from there. The sisters received kidnapping threats, shots were fired at their house, and they were generally tormented for almost a year.

I never did figure out if this Henry Kaufman was the same one who was arrested for gin smuggling, but I kept digging into the story of the Kopp sisters. Once I compiled a short stack of newspaper clippings, I thought, “Well, surely somebody has written a book about the Kopp sisters. At least a little local history book, or a children’s book, or something.”

I was amazed to find out that nothing had been written about them at all. There was no book, no Wikipedia page—nothing. They’d been completely forgotten about. I reconstructed their life stories from scratch. A lot of people write historical fiction about well-known figures from another era, but I think it’s a very different thing to pluck someone from obscurity and put the facts together for the first time.

The result is Girl Waits with Gun—the first in a series, all based on the real-life story of the Kopp sisters.

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Girl Waits With Gun is available now in paperback, published by Scribe.

The Intel: Adam Brookes

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Spy novels have never been so popular, and Adam Brookes is at the forefront of a new generation of authors who are reinventing an enduring genre for a whole new century.

To kick off the Blog Tour for his new novel Spy Games, published by Sphere, Brookes gives us the intel on the second oldest profession.

It’s fair to say that he knows his stuff – as a BBC correspondent in Washington, Brookes was deeply engrained in the world of government secrets, and has reported on assignment from many of the world’s most dangerous countries, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Korea.

And in China he found himself in a potentially dangerous situation when he received repeated visits from an anonymous man offering to sell him military secrets to pass to British Secret Services – a likely ‘dangle’ designed to entrap him. The event inspired the writing of his first thriller, the acclaimed Night Heron.

Brookes is a fascinating and informed interviewee. He talks about his hunted protag Philip Mangan, how technology is changing the face of the spying game, and he talks about the big beasts of the genre who inspired him to write…

Tell us about Philip Mangan…

Philip Mangan is a freelance journalist who works in China. He files copy for a newspaper and television packages for a small TV news agency. He’s tall, rangy, red-haired, shabbily dressed, disorganised in all but his thoughts. We meet him at the start of Night Heron in Beijing, where he’s based. He tries to report seriously on China, but Communist Party control and the difficulty of getting to the story leaves him feeling hamstrung and restless. He’s vain, too, and, like many journalists, he sometimes hankers to be involved in the events he observes. It’s that impulse that will draw him into espionage, and into trouble.

Spy Games picks up where its predecessor Night Heron left off – with Mangan in a very sticky situation. Where does Spy Games take him?

By the start of Spy Games, Mangan has fled China. We find him in Ethiopia, still reporting, hovering at the edge of the clandestine world. But Chinese intelligence knows who he is now. And they have plans for him.

Is it difficult to keep up with ever-changing geopolitical complexities – are you afraid your topical spy novels will be superseded by real events?

I try not to think about it, to be honest. And I try to focus on the building of my imagined world, where real geopolitical events may be reflected, but where they aren’t essential. You can still read a spy novel written in the Cold War – one long ago left behind by events – but which retains its power because of its characters and the world they inhabit, and the predicament they find themselves in.

As the BBC’s China correspondent, you found yourself in a dangerous situation when a man offered to sell you military secrets – what happened?

This elderly guy came to the BBC Bureau in Beijing and tried to get me to accept Chinese secret documents. He claimed to have all kinds of tantalising information – military secrets relating to missile technology – and he wanted me to be his go-between with ‘the right people’ at the British Embassy. I sent him away, rapidly. He was very persistent, but eventually disappeared and I heard no more. I’m fairly sure it was some sort of provocation. Someone was testing me, just to see what I’d do. This happens to journalists and businessmen from time to time. It’s not so unusual, but it’s weird when it happens to you, the sense that you are being watched, evaluated.

How has spying as a profession changed over the years, do you think?

I’d only know from what I read and what people tell me, but I think much has changed because of technology, obviously. Information that once moved on the airwaves in code, or in diplomatic pouches, or was handed around in paper files, now resides on servers. Technical collection now uses the bulk of intelligence agencies’ resources – cyber, eavesdropping, satellite imaging, the tracking of electromagnetic and chemical signatures, biometric monitoring, data mining. But many in the intelligence agencies continue to argue for the centrality of old-fashioned human intelligence: the recruiting of agents to spy.

Technology has changed things here too, of course. Where a fabulously successful Cold War agent like Penkovsky might steal or photograph hundreds of documents, a single USB stick can now hold hundreds of thousands. Where once the target of agent recruitment might be a disillusioned colonel or a wayward diplomat, these days the agencies want to recruit systems administrators, too, for their access to networks and servers full of secrets. Intelligence agencies have become huge, expensive bureaucracies reliant on the private sector for digital infrastructure and support. But there are still agents and handlers: that world still exists, and will for a long time to come, I think.

How did you start writing?

With difficulty. I was a journalist for more than twenty years, and only through the daily grind of writing dispatches and news stories did I begin to get any sort of feel for good writing. I never planned to write fiction. It just sort of crept up on me in my forties, and now here I am, stuck with it.

What’s the hardest lesson you ever had to learn about writing?

I think it was learning to grit my teeth and take the edit administered by, well, whoever happened to be editing that day. And then learning to appreciate the edit. And then learning to value it, and to love the rewrite.

Who are the authors you admire, and why?

Le Carre, of course, because he both defines the genre and transcends it. Alan Furst for atmosphere and economy; his Dark Star was the book that really made me think about attempting to write fiction. William Boyd for his complex, flawed characters and his understanding of how stories about spies speak to all our fears and anxieties. Hilary Mantel because, well, Hilary Mantel. Thomas Cromwell was an intelligence operative, remember.

Give me some advice about writing…

Only if you give me some back. In truth, I hate giving advice. Someone might follow it. I’ll pass on some advice which helped me. It’s from Will Self: ‘You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.’

What’s next for you and Philip?

A third, and final, descent into darkness. In which Philip Mangan must decide if he wishes to fight his way back into the light.

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Spy Games by Adam Brookes is published 10^th March by Sphere, price £7.99 in paperback.

Crime Thriller Fella

Crime reviews, news, mayhem, all the usual

Category Archives: Blog Tours

The Intel: John Sweeney

Guest Post: J.S. Law

The Intel: Isabelle Grey

The Intel: Kate Medina

Guest Post: Amy Stewart

The Intel: Adam Brookes