One London Day is an outlier novel in my career, the only one I’ve written – so far – that is both a crime novel and set in the present day. Well, 2018 anyway. Before that, and to the oft-expressed concern of agents and publishers, I’ve danced among the genres. Made my name (one of my names, C.C. Humphreys) in historical fiction with what I call ‘the intimate epic’: intensely personal stories set against vast canvases. A biographical thriller of one of history’s great monsters, the real Dracula (Vlad, The Last Confession). A disfigured mercenary seeking redemption during the siege of Constantinople (A Place Called Armageddon). The last great rebellion against Elizabeth 1st and the creation of Hamlet, narrated by a drunken actor (Shakespeare’s Rebel). I switched to fantasy, young adult to start (The Hunt of the Unicorn), high epic eventually (Smoke in the Glass). Ended up back in history, World War Two spy-romance (Someday I’ll Find You).

The common denominator in all my writings is, of course, me. My obsession, born from my other life as an actor, with character. Why someone becomes the person they are because of the choices they make around what happens to them. Why some become monsters – or at least do monstrous things – and some become reluctant heroes. How most are just people doing the best they can. Playing the hand they are dealt.

One London Day is many things – though what I would term straight ‘crime fiction’ is not one of them. Oh, crimes happen, trust me. It starts in murder (this is not a spoiler, it’s on the back cover copy). Moves from the world of high-end escorts, through the glamour of film and theatre, into the establishment bastions of the secret services. It dances among genres. Sure, it is a hit man story, a spy story, a sex-n-drug story. It even flirts with that dreaded sub-genre: ‘The North London Novel’ because it is largely set there, where I grew up. (God help me, that also makes it a semi-autobiographical novel!). At its heart though it is a study of characters ‘in extremis’. Ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances.

Its original title reflected that. In an old notebook that I rediscovered in a box about six years ago, (throw nothing out, that’s my motto) I found that ten years before I’d written some notes and the title ‘Ordinary Day’. Because the inciting incident (as the screenwriters have it) happened to a friend of mine who lived (and lives) in a quiet, middle-class street in Finchley. Who, one hot summer morning, saw her next-door neighbour – a family man and accountant – shot by an assassin on the pavement outside her house.

I’d been to the house often. You couldn’t get more ‘normal’ than that street. So what, I asked, had led to such extreme violence in such a place? Who was the victim, this quiet man who, by his actions, had somehow provoked it? Ignoring the real story – that involved rival London crime gangs in a turf war – I set out to write my own.

The novel developed as multi-protagonist/antagonist. The lives of six strangers colliding, their clashing agendas eventually intersecting in murder and mayhem over the course of a day in Finchley, Soho and Portobello. There’s Sebastien, head of a rogue MI6 outfit ‘The Shadows’, public school/Magdalen College boys using Secret Services’ intel to make illegal fortunes in drugs, sex slaves, people trafficking. There’s Lottie, an amoral jazz pianist and her Ghanaian boyfriend Patrick, an actor having ‘a moment’. He is obsessed by Sonya, a high-end escort (and ex-Russian Special Forces) in London for a year to make the big money she needs to pay for her daughter’s cancer operation in America. There’s Ellerby, who has broken through two glass ceilings at MI5 – she’s a woman and she’s black – determined to bring the Shadows down. Then there’s the enigmatic killer himself – ex-Para, five-years-sober Mr Phipps – bringing his own obsessions and quirks to the table… only to have it collapse under him!

At the story’s core though is its victim, Joseph Severin. Dedicated husband and father, pillar of the local business and Jewish communities, he has recently done something out of character. Dodgy. To help with the bills for his daughter’s forthcoming bat mitzvah, he’s agreed to do the Shadows’ books ‘old school’: double entry in ledgers – because the only trail you can’t trace these days is a paper one. Which would have been fine if his whole life isn’t suddenly undone by the tiniest of things: a glimpse of the small of a young woman’s back, filaments of hair caught in a ray of sunshine… and his instant, overpowering urge to drink a shot of tequila from it. A moment only, yet a life heads to ruin.

I said that this novel was almost autobiographical. Based on things that happened to me or to people I know. Well, it is, and it isn’t. I don’t know any hitmen. Nor any spies (though my mother was one for a time. Another story). I had lots of Jewish mates at my North London school who went on to become accountants, property developers, lawyers. I did know a jazz pianist… and I was stunned one day by the small of her back. I was at school with boys who could easily have gone on to form The Shadows. Obviously, I’ve known plenty of actors. And I did meet a Sonja once. A very beautiful, tough-as-nails Russian who had scrapped her way out of poverty and moved to the West but who had, in her youth, been this most amazing of things: the fastest Kalashnikov stripper in the Soviet Army! (That fact alone made me want to create a novel all around her).

There are other aspects of this novel that make it different from anything I’d written before it. Historical fiction and fantasy demand a certain style. Deep world-building is usually expressed in long sentences, epic action described in intense detail, with facts researched and laid into the story to add verisimilitude. Characters in them are often driven as much by big external forces – God (however they know Him), duty, loyalty to country, king or queen – as by any personal loyalties to love or family. Whereas the characters in One London Day are living very much in their own internal worlds and the stimulus of everyday life in the city. Their minds move swiftly from subject to subject, from desires to aversions and back. The writing reflects that. Shorter sentences, shorter chapters. A song leads to a memory which leads to a choice of clothing… which leads to a kiss, a slap, a panic. Even a murder.

I misled. I have written ‘crime’ once before. My novel, ‘Plague’ qualifies. It is a religious fundamentalist serial killer story, set during the Great Plague of London 1665. It even won Canada’s top crime award for Best Novel, the Arthur Ellis. It is a mystery, a whodunnit. One London Day, though sharing the setting of the same city, is quite different. No mystery, the crime is clear, the villains in plain sight and nary a conventional hero to be had. It is, therefore perhaps a whydunit: why is such an ordinary man assassinated in his Finchley kitchen on one of the hottest days in the hottest summer for fifty years?

The book is like a relay race – characters running in and passing on the baton of plot to the next character. Our view expands, like a camera pulling back in a scene, out and out, drawing away from the close-up of the cleft in a back… to the panorama of the streets in Finchley, Soho, Notting Hill. London is far more than a backdrop to this story. It is a character in its own right. Everything anyone does they do within the context of the city – and the city itself has consequences for them all. The novel’s actions occur in places I know well. Pubs I’ve drunk at, houses, flats and bedsits I’ve lived in or visited. Streets I’ve walked down a hundred times. They are all so ordinary. Until they are not. Until someone makes the wrong call and Pandora’s box opens and closes again, too late to trap the consequences.

I’ve decided I like writing crime. It is so personal. I am going to write more.

One London Day is published by Allison & Busby, and can be found here.