Stephen arrived at serious writing rather late in life, though he has always maintained that his fondness for words and the English language was there all along, quietly waiting for its moment.
Growing up in the deepest, darkest reaches of Northamptonshire (a place so long ago that television was in black and white and phone lines came out of the walls), entertainment options were limited. Social media meant meeting your mates on the corner of a street, usually gathered around the local chippy or the phone box with precious little to do. Teenagers had to improvise. Stephen wrote. Not brilliantly, not consistently, but enthusiastically enough to convince himself that he might one day be a writer or even a journo, just not yet.
None of those early efforts has survived, which is probably for the best. Thirty years in the police taught him to write about facts, not fiction—although anyone familiar with police paperwork may dispute that distinction. Leaving school with few academic qualifications, Stephen remains mildly astonished that he later collected both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. Academic ability, it turns out, only kicked in after he’d left school. A late starter, as his mother never tired of reminding him. Years of writing grammatically correct police reports (followed by a brief spell writing policy for senior officers, some of which even went higher than the Chief Constable) slowly sharpened his writing skills, whether or not he liked it.
During his service with Northamptonshire Police, the so-called ‘life skills’ arrived thick and fast. Even as a young officer, he felt you couldn’t write convincing fiction without first experiencing real life, preferably the messy, complicated kind.
Towards the end of his service, an idea returned to haunt him, one that had first appeared at his very first murder scene. It never really went away, instead sitting quietly at the back of his mind, fermenting like something forgotten in the fridge. When his urge to write fiction finally resurfaced, fuelled by decades of experience in ‘the job,’ the decision was unavoidable. The book (Blind Murder) had to be written.
That decision led him to a Master’s degree in Creative Crime Fiction at the University of East Anglia. Two years later, he graduated, having completed his second Jake Jordan novel, Driving Dead (a 2021 Page Turner Award finalist) and written a third, Crimson Dragon, for his degree; proof, if any were needed, that it’s never too late to start, restart, or completely change direction.
And so here we are, now twenty years away from a job he loved and one that gave him everything towards a future where he may sink gracefully into obscurity… unless, of course, you buy his books.
