The Crime Warp

Today, I am absolutely delighted to welcome  Sarah Hollister onto The Crime Warp. Sarah is one half of the Reavill and Hollister duo whose book, featuring Detective Veronika Brand, This Land Is No Stranger,  has recently been released. Today Sarah tells us all about how the inspiration for the novel came about. Dear Reader   One night as I wandered through a heavy snowfall in the city of Stockholm, Sweden,   feeling lost and at loose ends in my adoptive country. I came upon a scene that stopped me dead in my tracks. A woman sat on the sidewalk, wrapped in a mound of blankets. She leaned against a storefront surrounded by other women, as if they were her ladies in waiting. Some held paper cups of steaming coffee. They noticed me staring and smiled. One of the women extended an empty paper cup and I put a 20- kronor bill in it. I asked where they were from. The queen mother of them answered, Bulgaria. It was the year 2007 and this was the first wave of Roma mend...

Dear Reader ... My current book is entitled The Girl I Used to Be and is based around the life of a teacher, Stella Ingledew, who has managed to forge out a decent life for herself despite a tough upbringing. However, Stella has secrets hidden deep in her past, some of them buried so far down that she had forgotten they even existed until a series of sordid events forces her to delve back into her childhood to work out who is intent on wreaking revenge and trying to ruin her reputation. I think it is every author’s dream for one of their books to be made into a film or television drama and from the very outset I have always had one actor in mind to play any of my characters from any of my books and that is Tilda Swinton. She has such presence and can play a range of parts from feisty (The White Witch in the Chronicles of Narnia) to vulnerable (Eva Khatchadourian in We Need to Talk about Kevin) such is her adaptability and talent. Available here In The Girl I U...

Dear Reader,  The Character of Marshal Sweeney Delaney   I wrote Gangster in Our Midst (2017) to tell the neglected true Iowa story about the Italian man who came to my hometown in the 1920s—where he remained off and on for the next 60 years.  This was my first historical novel, and creating three-dimensional characters was new to me: Developing men, women and children whom the reader could visualize; plus, defining their back stories, what brought them to this stage of their lives.  I knew the town marshal would be the protagonist in the story, and his character would be based on William (Bill) Hahn, who had served as town marshal for over 30 years. (The antagonist, of course, would be the gangster, Louie La Cava.)  I recall the surge of excitement I felt realizing  Verlie , Bill Hahn’s eldest daughter, was still Betty with Verlie living. She had been born in the town in 1916 and never left—and a decade earlier, she had wri...

Dear Reader,    I’ve been doing quite a bit of publicity lately for my genre releases, like the Cursed anthology, my short monster novel The Storm , my novella Blood Red Sky and The Colour of Madness movie tie-in – yes, there’s a feature coming soon based on something I wrote, it’s all very exciting! But when Liz kindly asked if I’d do a piece for Crime Warp I figured it was an opportunity to pen something about being a new crime writer who is not only launching crime novels in lockdown, but currently writing my third thriller.               When all of this chaos was kicking off, my better half Marie and I were down in London dealing with a family emergency I won’t go into here. We’d just done a signing at Forbidden Planet for Cursed , and my first crime novel as PL Kane – Her Last Secret , which Liz has said some lovely things about… thank you again, Liz – had just come out in paperback. We were lo...

Dear reader, I have a confession to make, I don’t think my family are blessed with great brains. In fact I’m sure we are not. I first began to think that when I was a kid of fourteen watching my grandma throwing bread crusts into the street for the pigeons and the Vicar came by and said, ‘Such a waste when you think of all the starving children in Africa.’ Grandma thought for a moment and replied, ‘Well I’ll have a go but I don’t think I can throw that far.’ It was apparent that grandma’s brain was....well...limited. We come from the East End, dad’s a docker, his dad was a docker in fact all the male members of the family were dockers. You didn’t need much brain power to unload a thousand Japanese colour televisions off a boat. The brain power was needed in working out how to smuggle one of them past the security gate. There was an upside of course, Xmas was fun. I had three brothers and two sisters and we always got what had come in on the last ship to doc...

Dear Reader,  Mastering the clue-puzzle mystery Like all literary genres, crime fiction has many subsets attached to it. These range from the cosy mysteries set in quaint English villages to gritty police procedurals touching upon politically charge topics such as terrorism. Yet, the origins of crime fiction lie in humanity’s innate need for reassure. In other words, for every crime committed there’s a detective able to solve it. This, in turn, restores order to the world and reassures the reader. In his book, Writing Crime Fiction , HRF Keating refers to the clue-puzzle mystery as the “Classical Blueprint”. It was perfected by writers, such as Agatha Christie, in the golden age of crime fiction in the 1930s and 1940s. According to Keating, “crime writing is fiction that puts the reader first, not the writer.” In other words, the crime writer puts the readers’ enjoyment above any deeper meaning they may want to present. This enjoyment comes from the satisfaction of solv...