I am a former barrister who was published here and in the US 30+ years ago (WH Allen, Grafton and St Martins Press). I turned to full-time writing when I retired in 2016, since when I have had a series of six legal crime thrillers published by Sapere Books, the seventh due out this autumn. They feature my barrister anti-hero, Charles Holborne, a man who has a complex relationship with the Kray twins.
My unpublished MS, The Semi-Detached Women, which I am entering for the Writing Award, is very different. It is set in 1963 and involves the relationship between two damaged women, previously in heterosexual relationships, who move with their children into the two halves of a remote stone cottage in the High Peaks of Derbyshire. The book explores the institutional prejudice of the time and the tentative friendship, and then sexual relationship, that develops between the women. Its themes are kindness, acceptance and redemption. Coincidentally, it raises the very issues now in the press about the way single-parent mothers were pressurised in the 1960s to have their children adopted.
I have also just completed a spec fic MS set in a post-global warming world where sea rises have wiped out most of eastern Britain, leaving an archipelago of semi-tropical islands. That book (Of Men and Gods) counterpoints the bulk of mankind - hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers - with the technological elite who escaped the rising seas by moving into shielded domes. Homo sapiens has divided into two sub-species. The book explores the part that myth and story play in our understanding of who we are.
Finally, I am starting work on book 8 in the Charles Holborne crime thriller series. Thus, since retiring in 2016, I have completed nine manuscripts. Many more will follow!
I am the organiser of the Manchester Group of the Society of Authors and on the board of the Crime Writers' Association.
