Peter Bartram's Blog

One of the joys of writing fiction is that you can invent characters and events which have never happened in real life. Or have they? I received the biggest shock of my fiction writing career when I completed the first draft of my latest Crampton of the Chronicle adventure, The Mother’s Day Mystery.

I don’t think I’m giving too much away if I tell you that one of the characters in the plot is a schoolboy who blackmails one of his teachers. I thought this sub-plot worked very well in the story although it was unlikely to happen in real life. So, I was astonished to read in the papers the day after I’d completed the last page of the first draft of my book that a schoolboy at a well-known English public school had done just that.

The bad boy had actually been sent to prison for four and half years for making firebombs and throwing them onto a British motorway. But the sentence also covered eight burglary and two blackmail charges – with a couple of thefts from supermarkets also taken into account. The lad stole £52,000 of goods and equipment from his school. Then he had the brazen cheek to ask the headmaster twice for £10,000 to stop doing it. He wanted the money paid in the cryptocurrency, Bitcoin.

What made the coincidence with my book even stronger was the fact that the young criminal was described by his trial judge as “very intelligent” and “possibly the most able chemist the college has produced in recent years”. The judge lamented: “He’s a very bright boy and for some reason he takes to burgling the school, blackmailing the headteacher and making incendiary devices and throwing them off motorway bridges.” In The Mother’s Day Mystery, my schoolboy is also something of boffin in the chemistry lab.

I expect, like me, you’ve heard that old saying: truth is stranger than fiction. I’m not sure it’s right all the time – especially when I see some of the fantasy books that are out there these days. But if we’re keeping the action limited to people and rooted on planet Earth, then it could be right. My recent experience certainly suggests so.

I've written a Crampton of the Chronicle short story called The Mystery of the Ice-cream Parlour. If you're familiar with the books, you'll know that Colin Crampton is the crime reporter on the Brighton Evening Chronicle. His only reliable contact at the police station is Detective Inspector Edward Wilson - Ted to his friends. This story tells how Colin met Ted for the first time. It's free to read right now on my website. If you enjoy the story please share this post with your friends. Thank you.

https://www.colincrampton.com/mystery...

Someone at the Headline Murder launch party last Thursday asked me how I came to write the book. It happened like this. Jackie and I were going on holiday and choosing our books to read. I was looking for a light crime novel but the only ones I could find that I hadn’t read were gory tales with a lot of violence.

There’s a time for graphic realism - but it’s not necessarily when you’re lounging in a deckchair, hopefully without a care in the world. So I thought: if I can’t find a good holiday book to read, perhaps other people can’t either - so I’ll write one.

Headline Murder is the result. The Crime Readers’ Association has a light-hearted way of classifying the goriness of crime novels. They call it the “platelet counter” and it runs from “spotless - not a drop is shed” to “whoah - you’ll need a raincoat to read this”. Headline Murder comes in at “eek - nothing a plaster couldn’t fix”.

So if you’ve got a holiday coming up - or even if you’re staying home - and you’re looking for a light crime novel with a humorous touch, please consider Headline Murder. You can buy it in paperback or e-book formats online at Amazon’s sites in the United States and UK and at all good book shops.

If you look at the biographies of crime writers, it’s surprising how many have been journalists at some point in their lives. Or, perhaps, not surprising because there are remarkable similarities between the kind of mind you need for crime writing and newspaper reporting.

When you train as a journalist, practically the first thing you’re taught is to ask what Rudyard Kipling called the “six honest serving-men” questions - what, why, when, how, where, who? You have to ask exactly the same questions when you’re constructing a crime mystery. What was the crime? When and where was it committed? How was it done? Why was it done? And, most important of all, whodunit?

Edgar Wallace, one of the crime writing legends, was a crime reporter for nine years. Later, when he’d become famous for his novels, he maintained he was still a crime reporter at heart. “I shall never be anything else.” But most of the former journalists who turn to crime writing weren’t crime reporters. They could have been writing about any subject. It’s not the subject matter that’s important, it’s the experience of asking questions and seeking answers which prepares journalists for crime writing.Headline Murder

The question writers most often get asked is: where do you get your ideas? In my case - and remember I’m writing crime mysteries - it starts by asking a question. So, in the case of Headline Murder (my first Crampton of the Chronicle novel) I asked: what would happen if somebody committed a murder, somebody else was blamed for it, but then a few years later something was going to happen that would point the finger at the true killer? Of course, that’s just the bare bones of an idea.

You then need to think of ways to build it into a satisfying story. In a crime mystery, that’s a story with some well-defined characters which works at a number of levels. There will be a central mystery - which is the one that’s finally resolved towards the end of the book. But, then, there will be smaller mysteries which are solved as the story progresses.

I’m a great believer in planning. And I think you have to in crime mysteries because there are things that happen later in the plot which have to be signalled earlier on. It’s not very satisfying just to spring events on readers without at least giving them the chance to have worked it out for themselves. When they’re surprised, they need to say “Ah, yes, that’s why so-and-so did such-and-such in chapter three.”

So I plan my novels in scenes. I’m currently writing the sequel to Headline Murder which has 72 scenes. A scene can be anything from 250 words to 3,000 words in length. In each scene I’ll plot what’s going to happen but I won’t necessarily work out how it’s going to happen until I write the scene. So when I’m writing I’ve got a clear road-map of the plot and I know what I’ve got to achieve in each scene. There’s another reason I work this way. I’m writing humorous crime mysteries, so there need to be jokes. I’m simply not clever enough to be thinking about complex details of plot and making up funnies at the same time!

Someone asked me the other day whether I’ve used any of my own experiences as a journalist in Headline Murder. The answer is many and here’s just one example.

Three weeks into my first job as a reporter on the Worthing Herald, I was threatened with a duffing-up. I was 18 at the time and fresh out of school. I’d been sent to cover proceedings at the magistrates’ court.

One of the cases concerned a local man who’d been fined five pounds for being drunk and disorderly. He’d eyed me balefully during the case as I made notes at the press bench. Afterwards, he tracked me down outside the court. Told me that if a word appeared in the paper I’d better watch my back.

Even after three weeks I knew his pathetic story didn’t even merit a nib - a “news in brief”. But I told the chief reporter what had happened. He mentioned it to the news editor. Who passed it upstairs to the editor. And the word came down that I was to write the story “from the wrists” - give it some length. Great, I thought, I’ve only just joined the paper and already they’re trying to get me killed.

But, I was told, nobody threatens the Fourth Estate. My story appeared the following day on the front page. By then, I’d already worked out how to throw an attacker off my tail. In those days, Worthing had plenty of seafront hotels. I knew that if I walked through the front door of one of them, I could pass through some winding corridors and pop out of the back door into a different street.

At one point in his adventures, Colin Crampton uses a similar trick to throw a follower of his tail. And, by the way, my real-life drunk was never heard of again.

I had a big surprise the other day when I turned to the letters page of The Independent and saw a letter from a real live Colin Crampton.

When I chose the name for the principal character in Headline Murder, I ran a quick check and couldn’t find any in the Brighton area. The letter writer comes from Scotland.

But the experience made me wonder how many real people find they share a name with a fictional detective. So after intensive research (20 minutes on LinkedIn!) I can reveal some shock findings.

If you were born with the family name Holmes, you’d think your parents would avoid the obvious wouldn’t you? Not all do. Two sets of parents have condemned their sons to a lifetime of quips: solve that one Sherlock. One runs a US company, the other is an electrical engineer.

A quick run-down on other fictional detectives with the number of real people in brackets is: Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe (5), Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade (5); Agatha Christie’s Jane Marple (4); Dorothy L Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey (3, although none of them a lord); Georges Simenon’s Jules Maigret (1, a warehouseman in France) and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot (3).

But one Hercule lists his skills on LinkedIn as “private investigation, train journeys, men’s grooming and Cluedo”. So, perhaps, not all of the names are as real as they seem.

The front cover of my first Crampton of the Chronicle mystery, Headline Murder, features an old-fashioned sit-up-and-beg typewriter.

It reminded me of the time I had an interview for my first job on a newspaper. The editor asked me whether I typed. Naturally, I replied “yes”. (I mean, how hard can it be? All the little keys have letters printed on them.)

When I arrived in the newsroom on my first day, I was somewhat nonplussed to discover the typewriter I’d been given - not unlike the one of the front cover of the book - was so old the letters on the keys had worn out.

The only way I could find which key belonged to which letter was to press it gently and sneakily peek at the letter on the end of the typebar which came up to hit the carriage. I thought I was pretty subtle about it, but I suspected there were a few sniggers around the newsroom.

I’ll say this, though: it was a great way to learn in double quick time how to type.