Stephen came late in life to serious writing, although he can say that he always had an interest in writing and the English language.
Of course, back in those days in deepest, darkest, Northamptonshire, there was no social media, no mobile phones and even the TV was in monochrome. Teenagers needed to find other ways to entertain themselves. And for Stephen, writing was one way. He continued to write on and off (more dabbling really,) right up to joining the police.
Nothing of what he’d written back in those early days has survived and if it has, he really wouldn’t want it to see the light of day. Spending thirty years as a police officer taught him to write about FACTS and not FICTION (although he knows some would probably disagree!)
Leaving school with little in the way of academic qualifications, it is a surprise to him now that he has managed to gain both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree and would concede that his ability in academia probably only started after he left school. A late starter, as his mother was fond of saying. Writing grammatically correct police reports kept pace with his desire to write and a short period where he wrote policy for senior officers enhanced that ability to write something that occasionally went higher than the Chief Constable.
Service with Northamptonshire Police continued for thirty years. During that time the ‘life skills’ came thick and fast. As a young man he’d always felt that writing a fictional tome was not something you could do without seeing real life.
It was only towards the end of his service that he began to wonder whether the formation of an idea he'd had in his early career, at his first murder scene, came knocking at the door of his mind. The idea probably never went away and fermented in the back of his mind until a rekindling of a desire to write fictional stories, mostly based upon those earlier life skills in ‘the job,’ made his mind up. The book had to come out!
His desire to write well coalesced into accepting an offer to do a Masters Degree in Creative Crime fiction writing with the University of East Anglia. Two year later he graduated also completing his second book in the Jake Jordan series (Driving Dead) and writing a third for his degree - Crimson Dragon.
So here we are, moving further and further away from a job that he loved and literally gave him everything, to a point where he can sink into obscurity, unless of course, you buy his books.
