“EVERYONE has a novel in them,” so they say, often followed by: “And that’s where it should stay.”

In this case, mine has escaped and become the novel Dead on Time. My first two books, both non fiction, were An Actor’s Life for Me (a compilation of over 100 articles that I wrote for the Brighton Argus) and The Baby Trail (the story of our seven-year struggle to conceive, before IVF gave my wife, Andrea, and I our twins, Harry and Jack). Both books were, to a large extent, autobiographical.

Dead on Time, however, is fiction and is the first in a trilogy of novels about Detective Chief Inspector Colin Crowther’s three basic problems: 1) Getting cases solved; 2) Getting his wife, Allyson, pregnant and Getting 1) and 2) in the right order.

The second two novels in the trilogy, Dead Eye and Dead End, are in the process of being written and will appear, or rather ‘escape’, in the next few months..

One of the reasons for writing them was that I was getting fed up with slogging my way through crime novels that seemed to rely entirely on totally bizarre violence, unbelievable coincidences, twists and turns and a detective who wore the same old coat, drove an antique car and had a penchant for music nobody had ever heard of. All of which was probably my narrow-minded fault, granted. 

Nevertheless, I decided that the detective novel, as we know it, had stripped reality of its comforting familiarity and cosy half-truth, and that it was my job to put it all back again. I would drag the genre kicking and screaming back to normality and to my version of reality. Okay, I’ll come clean, the books do contain some violent murders and a few knotty little twists, so that’s my nod to conventional detective story telling. Also, I admit my knowledge of police procedure is pretty skimpy, to say the least. Not that I’m on my own, because I’m convinced that all self-respecting coppers regularly laugh their regulation socks off at most of what’s portrayed, in books and on TV, as a representation of goings-on in the real world. “It just isn’t like that!” they no doubt scream at the telly. I’ll inevitably be in the company of many a writer then. Sorry, lads.   

Dead on Time has a major crime plot and a crime sub-plot, alongside biographical details of DCI Crowther’s personal life. The major plot in all three books is a kind of puzzle: Who did it? How did they do it? Why did they do it? So far, so normal, you’ll no doubt point out.  Mea culpa.  The thing is, though, these puzzles really are insoluble until Crowther, or in one case his daughter, Helen, discovers how to solve the ‘Rubik’s Cube’ of a case in a few simple moves. The sub-plot revolves around an intriguing set of circumstances that gradually unwinds into a totally unexpected, yet totally believable explanation.

The question most people ask is: “Where do you get the ideas from?” The answer in my case is that I see and hear them all around me. The major plot in Dead on Time is loosely based on an old black and white film I saw that prompted the thought that the perfect murder is forever betrayed by the imperfect alibi.

Also, the sub-plot in Dead End, as another example, is my version of a car crime scam told to me by a mate in a Battersea pub one Sunday lunchtime years ago. He wasn’t involved in the crime, needless to say, but he knew a man who was.

These three crime books were originally written by me as TV plays.  I presented the first one to Sky, who were fascinated by the major plot but said their ‘demographic’ was 18-35, and they felt I was appealing to an older age group. I also submitted it to the Commissioning Editor for ITV who wrote me a very complimentary letter and said it could easily have spawned another Morse or Frost, but he wanted something ‘different’. You can’t win can you?

Anyway, I hope you will enjoy ‘the novel that was in me’ and be glad that it managed to escape.

* Dead on Time is available on Kindle and Amazon Books.