My New Crime Fiction Project
Why crime fiction? Although all my books are in the sci-fi genre I also read a lot of crime fiction, and in particular murder mystery in the sub-genre of regional crime in the UK. I say read, but I have a problem reading as for some weird reason it sends me to sleep, so all my ‘reading’ is done with audible books and I have consumed over 200 titles in the last two years.
Why audio? Because it doesn’t see me nodding off and it allows me to do other things such as drawing (I am a also a professional cartoonist), walking and gardening. A physical or electronic book is a fantastic thing but for me I need to stay awake! It’s just one of my quirks – reading text makes me fall asleep!
I have had the urge to write a crime series based locally here in Wales and started to outline the first in the series based in the fictitious Monnow-Wye Constabulary with a female Detective Inspector, Ruby Flint, as the lead protagonist. I wanted to give her a challenging role from the off and one way was to have her promoted to Monnow-Wye from the Met, namely from Hackney in north east London. Any outsider into a close knit team will have repercussions and resentment and I wanted to give her new appointment some edge over and above the norm’.
I chose Hackney as her former stomping ground as I know that particular London Borough like the back of my hand, having worked there for four years between 2010 – 2014 doing fire risk assessments on Hackney Borough Councils building stock (I am a former fire officer, and set up a fire safety consultancy business after I retired from South Wales Fire service). I intend to use her former workplace in future stories as I believe it will make an interesting contrast to the more rural areas of her new patch in and around Monmouthshire, which I also know really well as the Wye Valley and surrounding Monmouthshire is one of my favourite haunts and on the doorstep.
I have written half of the first book and have already began developing DI Flint’s team and the senior officers. Ruby has an interesting background, with her family roots based in the criminal underworld in the East End of London, in stark contrast to her morals and ambitions as a crime fighter with the police.
Monnow Wye had been a quiet spot with relatively little criminal activity compared to the seven square miles of Hackney, but, as you can imagine this had to change to fill the story lines with far more challenges than the team had experienced before Ruby’s arrival.
For those of you who also like crime fiction I hope to bring compelling stories, interesting plots with vibrant personalities, in a similar vein to my sci-fi writing. For those of you who don’t have the enthusiasm for the crime genre, I will be continuing with sci-fi and have no intention of pausing the Moreton Scientific Investigation series, which I believe has a lot more mileage.
The timescale for the new crime fiction series will be early 2026 for the publication of the first in series ‘The Medusa Murders’ which I am aiming for February 2026, followed closely on its heels by books 2 & 3 to give the series a good kick start. I’ll also be adopting a slightly different author name using just my initials – just to keep some distance between the two genres.
If you would like to be kept up to date with the publication dates and future sci-fi books just sign up for my newsletter and I will keep you updated.
