I’m the author of twenty-seven crime novels, the latest being COLD BLOODED KILLER, written under my Alex Pine pseudonym and published by Avon/Harper Collins on October 23.

For years I’ve been pulling together storylines filled with mystery, mayhem and murder. But until very recently I didn’t know that lurking in my own family history is a story that is as shocking as any of the plots I’ve created.

It came to light after my niece employed a professional genealogy company to research our ancestry.

I’m aware that such searches are growing rapidly in popularity, fuelled by various factors, including easier online access to historical records and the influence of TV programmes.

Naturally I was very keen to know what they would turn up, especially in regard to my late father’s side of the family. You see, for reasons I’ll explain he grew up in an orphanage. He never spoke to my brother and I about our grandparents, and I’m not sure he even knew them that well.

Anyway, what I’ve discovered has been a real eye-opener and might help explain why I’ve always been fascinated by crime stories, both real and fictional.

Let’s begin with my dad’s mother, my grandma, who was born in 1900. Her birth name was Etheldreda, but she shortened it to Ethel later in life. She lived in London where as a young woman she worked as an assistant cook. And it turns out that she made plenty of mischief during her spare time. She was a prolific thief and had quite a long criminal record, mostly for shoplifting.

However, that didn’t stop a man named William Raven from falling for her in 1928 and getting her pregnant with my dad Patrick.

At the time William lived in Lee, South East London and later, after my dad was born, they were residing in Blackheath.

The couple went on to marry in April 1929 when he was 35 and she was 40. But what Ethel didn’t know was that William was keeping two big secrets from her.

Firstly, he was already married and had therefore committed bigamy, which was not an uncommon offence in those days. And secondly, he was bisexual.

The records show that by the time it all came out William’s first wife Muriel had given birth to two of his sons. He eventually got divorced from her and she moved away from London with the two boys.

Ethel continued to commit crimes and when my dad was two months old, she was jailed and he was placed in care. In those days it was apparently hard for a convicted woman to get their children back. She might have tried, but we’ll never know for sure. And we don’t know why his father didn’t assume responsibility for him.

That information was enough to set my heart racing, but the shocks didn’t end there.

I then went on to discover that my granddad separated from Ethel, but never divorced her. He then moved into an upmarket flat at the top of Chalfont Court in London’s Baker Street, close to Regents Street where he was joint owner of a clothing store.

By then he was openly gay and frequented pubs in Soho where he enjoyed meeting other gay men. He was apparently quite well off and described as a smartly dressed, sociable man. But one night in October 1942 he met two Canadian soldiers who he invited back to his sixth floor flat.

The three men spent most of the night drinking together before things turned nasty. Then in the early hours the two soldiers exited the flat in a hurry, most likely out of shock and panic, leaving behind their fingerprints, a dirty uniform and a pair of boots. The following morning William was found close to death on his bedroom floor with severe head wounds. He’d apparently been beaten with a wine bottle and punched repeatedly in the face.

He was still breathing when discovered and was rushed to hospital, but died of a brain haemorrhage within hours without regaining consciousness.

The post-mortem concluded he’d been the victim of a fast and vicious attack in the flat between twelve and fourteen hours before he was found.

t then took nine months for police to track down the two soldiers who had remained in the UK. They were both charged with his murder and appeared at the Old Baily in September 1943. But one of them (Henry Smith, aged 20) was acquitted and sent back to Canada while the other (George Brimacombe, aged 21) was found guilty of manslaughter. He admitted killing William with a bottle, claiming he was provoked because William made a pass at him. He insisted that the attack was not pre-meditated. He went on to serve three years in Wormwood Scrubs prison and when released he returned to Canada.

While I was processing all of this information, I was in for another shock. It was brought to my attention that my granddad’s death had actually been the subject of a popular true-crime podcast back in 2020.

Entitled ‘The Elementary Murder of William Raven,’ it was put out as part of the award-winning MURDER MILE podcast that explores forgotten and unsolved crimes committed within one square mile of London’s Soho and the surrounding West End. The narrator, Michael J Buchanan-Dunne, presents guided walks with video descriptions of what happened.

And thanks to that podcast I got to see what my grandfather actually looked like because they managed to dig up a photograph of him.

I have to say it’s been fascinating finding out who my grandparents were on my father’s side. But at the same time, it’s also been quite upsetting to know what happened to them all those years ago. It was like something you’d read in a crime novel.

So, my advice to anyone who decides to delve into their family history is to be prepared to discover something that you might not like.

Crime author James Raven writes under his own name as well as pseudonyms Alex Pine, JP Carter, Jaime Raven and Ali Blood. (Website at www.james-raven.com