My first trilogy, The Comeback Trail, was based in the music business in America. It was a simple tale of a washed-up singer who accidently kills his girlfriend and discovers that the act of killing enables him to write a hit song. To give this some context, I own a record label in the States called Gulf Coast Records, they say write about what you know. If I could just clarify, I am talking about music not murder, if that were the case this would be a confession not an article. I digress. The third book in this trilogy was called All the World’s A Stage. The clue is in the title, the Bard was calling. I wanted to write a series based in my own back yard and Stratford seemed the perfect place. It’s home, in my opinion, to the greatest writer ever born. A man who truly understood the human condition. William Shakespeare.
Since I had become interested in Crime Fiction it had always surprised me that nobody had really set a crime series in Stratford. Oxford has Morse, Edinburgh has Rebus and Hastings had Foyle, why nothing for Stratford, a pilgrimage for lovers of the written word from all over the world. It made sense to me, but to be fair, at that point I hadn’t really thought it through. The idea was to take two local detectives and write them into a series of novels based around some of the tragedies of Shakespeare. Dangerous ground, messing with the classics is like juggling with knives. When I ran the idea past an actor friend of mine he thought it was a great idea. “That’ll save you having to work out any plots then.” He wasn’t so sure when I told him that the first in the series would be based on Hamlet. He pulled a face that implied doubt and pain at the same time, like I said, he’s an actor. “Overly ambitious maybe?” That was his only comment, after that he swiftly moved the conversation onto the new menu at the Vintner. This left me wondering if it was such a good idea.
Having the plot of Hamlet wasn’t such a godsend as I soon realised that I had to work my plot around it, not so easy. However, I stuck to the task and The Croaking Raven emerged six months later, introducing DC Toby Marlowe and DS Fred Williams, to a totally unconcerned public. I wanted to tell the opening story over a series of books, just like Holmes and Moriarty, and so Oliver Lawrence would be my Moriarty. In this quartet I covered Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth, I also threw in a prequel for book two, All Our Yesterdays, which planted some bombs to be set off later in the series.The final book in the opening quartet is out in October and then Williams and Marlowe will continue, there are another four books planned. At this point the good people of Stratford seem to be in favour and reviews have been good. Maybe there is room in Stratford for another Crime writer, obviously less talented than William, but at least local.
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Image: BatyrAshirbayev98, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
