This week we have another interesting article on sources of inspiration. This time from Crime Cymru’s Graham Miller.

In June I released my latest Angel & Haines book, The Way to Hell, number four in the series.

In this post, I thought I’d give you a brief insight into what inspired me to write the book and what big underlying message it’s attempting to convey. (Hopefully without too many spoilers!) The germ of the idea started with a news article about the July 2016 shootings in Spalding, Lincolnshire. Mother and daughter Claire and Charlotte Hart were killed by their father and husband who then committed suicide. It was a tragedy, but unfortunately one of those that flits across your news feed and fades as soon as the next story comes along.

But, this kept avoided that fate because the surviving two sons of the family, Luke and Ryan Hart, were determined to tell their story and not let the interest tail off. It is largely thanks to these two courageous men that the concept of coercive control entered our lexicon at all.

Once my interest had been piqued, I followed up and did some research, finding out that there was a book – Remembered Forever by Luke and Ryan. I’m a great believer in supporting other writers and especially so in this case, so I bought the book. It was a fascinating insight into the kind of quiet abuse that is being played out in houses up and down the country every day. It was nearly invisible. Terrified into compliance by their father, Luke, Ryan and Charlotte never gave any cause for concern at school or any other setting. Indeed, the effect of the abuse was quite the opposite. The children were scared into compliance, so their marks were excellent, as was their attendance and behaviour.

Once I’d latched onto this, I thought the concept would make an excellent rationale for the villain in the next book in my series. It had that one thing every writer looks for – character progression. I could write a villain who would start off, from the outside, appearing to be a good guy. As the book progresses, the monster beneath the surface would be revealed.

I made some changes for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I have enormous respect for Luke and Ryan and the work they’re doing. And it felt wrong to just take their story wholesale and make my own book out of it. It’s not my story to tell. I think this is something most writers do, they take inspiration, but change it in a way to create a bit of distance from real life. I think of it as extracting the essence of an idea.

The second was that I like the format of the modern crime novel, where there are a series of murders, each one adding more clues to the overall mystery. (And yes, I am aware that in real life very few murders follow this convenient narrative pattern.) The Spalding shootings did not follow this pattern – there were three deaths at once and no mystery at all as to who the perpetrator or victims were. (That might be a whole other book – a Whydunnit – where I explore the why of a murder rather than who did it.)

The series is written so that there’s two protagonists, Detective Constable Emma Angel and a retired Detective Chief Inspector, Rob Haines. Emma was a good fit to be investigating the murders, but I needed something for Rob to do. So, I tapped into a fear that I think is mostly felt by the male half of the population. He befriends a teenage girl and is then accused of grooming her.

Once I had these two elements, with a good helping of the dangers of modern technology (which seems to feature in all the Angel & Haines novels), I knew roughly what I was doing.

I know some people think that commercial genre fiction, is easier to write compared to say, literary fiction. (It’s not!) But I’ve found that if I treat it like literary fiction, get the big ideas, the concepts, sorted out first, then the book comes out better. It also give me something to keep in mind as I write, so the whole book is going in the same direction.

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To read the book itself, go to this link https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0C5RL4STN and if you want to start at the beginning of the series, here’s the link for The Retirement Party https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07RSXVHHH And to find out more about Graham, you can go here – https://grahamhmiller.com