Synchronicity

What makes us who we are? Nature or nurture? I don’t have any strong convictions either way, but I can identify pivotal points in my life – think Sliding Doors – when things could have gone either way. Not good/bad, or even particularly momentous, but just turning points.

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Winter Downs - Jan Edwards answers some pressing questions ...

Writer Jan Edwards launches Winter Downs, the first book in the Bunch Courtney Investigates series. I tracked down Jan in her writing cave in the wilds of the West Midlands and persuaded her to answer some really, really important questions:

Where would you hide the bodies?

Under someone else’s patio? In a volcano? Dissolve it in acid? This is a tricky question!

I guess the best way would be to destroy it as comprehensively as possible and dispose of the rest as far away as possible from the murder site – preferably in a different country.

To be more serious, modern forensics make things pretty tough if the body is found. The tiniest spot of bodily fluid or matter is potentially identifiable and CCTV and tracking on smartphones makes it hard to go anywhere unnoticed.

Winter Downs does not have those problems to the same extent. Reliable scientific/lab work in the 1940s, beyond fingerprinting and detection of poisons etc, was basic. In a time when few people had telephones, let alone tablets and smartphones, the emphasis was always weighted toward eye witnesses.

Crime: Poirot or Girl on a Train?  

There are only so many new stories and you can argue that every story has been done before. And yes, I do see that attraction of Girl on a Train. It’s a good read, but for me there were so many tropes shared with Rear Window, and or course Agatha Christie’s 4.40 From Paddington, that it didn’t feel it was fresh enough to become a firm favourite with me. So it’s Poirot every time. The classic whodunnit is always tough to beat. 

 

Do you have music playing when you write and if so what are your tracks of choice?

Not always but yes, I do often have something in the background. Usually something instrumental, or instrument heavy, otherwise I get caught up in the lyrics and lose track of what I am writing. Driving rock for the action pieces or psychedelia or folky based music for the more cerebral or quieter parts. I did get some 1940s CDs for Winter Downs to immerse myself in the period

I have a fairly eclectic taste in music generally, so choosing a few tracks would always be hard. But if I am following on from Q2 then I have a selection of albums – yes, I am that old fashioned – that I play when writing because they are often instrumental or are so familiar that I don’t need to listen to the lyrics. Muse (good driving rock for writing action); Rick Wakeman’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth – for the same reasons as Muse; Liquid Sound Company - psychedelic rock that allows me to drift  Garden; Tea Party; Kirsty McColl, Steeleye Span; Fairport Convention; Jethro Tull; Robert Plant; Shooglenifty... there are many more.  I don’t much like crooners or the pseudo soul that passes for R&B these days which means pretty much anything that might win X Factor is out for me :-) That and boy bands!

Romance: Pride and Prejudice or Fifty Shades?

Pride and Prejudice on every level that counts. I need say no more.

What one genre/plot cliché would you get rid of?

Genre: Zombies, if they can be seen as a genre? Because a/ real zombies are not re-animated corpses and b/ zombies that eat brains are rather limited in scope.

Cliche: ‘damaged’ cops (especially on TV). It’s come to a point where every cop is not just a maverick but a borderline basket case. They’d be on permanent sick leave in the real world!

Is there one subject you would never write about as an author?

Porn? Sports? Hunting Aardvarks in Antarctica?  I don’t think I could do Mills & Boon style romances any justice purely because that style of novel just isn’t my thing. I can see how it is a very hard thing to do well; i.e. without coming over as really cheesy. The same would apply to my writing a Western or a shoes’n’shopping novel. All genres have their invisible cloaks of verisimilitude and any readers of those books will always spot a faker.

But genres are not the same as subjects; of which few are totally off limits. Taboos can be dealt with if you approach them in the right way and do enough research so that what you saying is both correct and credible. There are a few subjects I would probably shy away from purely on the grounds that I don’t feel qualified to write about them with any authority

What was the first (*genre ) story you read and what kind of impact did it make on you?

That is almost impossible to answer. Taken at face value Noddy, whose best friend is a gnome would count as fantasy...

Looking at more adult fiction? Back in the late 60s fiction tended to leap from children’s to adult with little YA or Teen fiction in between so I read a lot of the westerns bought by my (elder) brothers, discovering Michael Moorcock’s Count Brass and Corum books, which sent me down the fantasy route. They were so very different from anything else I had ever read. The specific genre they came under at the time was Science Fantasy, which is not a term you hear any more.

Other books that made an impact at the time were Tolkien’s LOTR and Carrol’s Alice, which are both technically fantasy, though Alice would probably be called Urban Fantasy had it been written now as the contemporary fiction it was in 1865.  These books were all required reading for the budding hippy circa 1968!

That said I also read huge amounts of classic crime and devoured all the usual suspects; Poirot, Wimsey, Marple and the rest of the band. But I have also read a lot of 19thc and early 20thC fiction. Austen’s Pride and Prejudice being a firm favourite, as is Du Maurier’s Rebecca, all of which has put me in good stead for writing Winter Downs, set in 1940!

****

Thanks, Jan! So what's Winter Downs all about, then?

In January of 1940 a small rural community on the Sussex Downs, already preparing for invasion from across the Channel, finds itself deep in the grip of a snowy landscape, with an ice-cold killer on the loose. 

Bunch Courtney stumbles upon the body of Jonathan Frampton in a woodland clearing. Is this a case of suicide, or is it murder? Bunch is determined to discover the truth but can she persuade the dour Chief Inspector Wright to take her seriously?

Winter Downs is published on 3rd June 2017, by Penkhull Press in paperback and ebook format.

ISBN 978-0-9930008-6-7

For further information please contact Penkhull Press 

Ebook sale

Checkout Smashwords sale page for lots of ebook deals - March 3rd - March 11th. My entire series will be available at a reduced rate.

But then you've all bought them already, haven't you?

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Blog Party!

I'm guesting at a blog party over at http://www.sueshepherdwrites.co.uk/welcome-to-sues-blog-party/ for the next week or so - hop on over to see what's going on and have a virtual cocktail....

Comfort Zones

We all have comfort zones and they expand and contract at different times in our lives. Way back in the when, I used to thrive on conflict and it was all part of the day job. If we didn’t have at least one letter of complaint each week, the boss would say we weren’t doing our jobs properly, and arresting people for drug-smuggling was never going to be a calm and peaceful day in the office. Those who know me may say I still love an argument and that’s probably true, but in reality I’m way more conservative than I used to be.

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Crime Pays

What is it with crime? We’re obsessed with it – or the people committing it. I admit I’m probably slightly biased in that I work in law enforcement and so my day job usually concerns crime in one form or another, but at least I have an excuse to be a crime writer! My first crime novel was inspired by the day job; having spent a few years investigating heroin importations, I wanted to look further down the chain at street drugs and how they might affect lives. And so I found my teenage Michael, dumped by his girlfriend in a club on his seventeenth birthday, and I needed to tell his story …

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But Where Will I Put My Books?

I grew up with books. I remember my dad bringing home a Famous Five book every Friday – I used to be ready and waiting for him to come home from work and I’d have finished the book by the end of the weekend. The newsagent would deliver my comic on a Saturday and I’d lie in bed listening for the clink of the letter box; I’d scurry down and take my comic back to bed to read.

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