Where Did That Come From?

A Poison Tree is the first of my new crime thriller series. Like most writers, I didn’t have one breakthrough moment that brought the story screaming into my head. One thread started off when I was volunteering in a charity shop but more of that another time. The roots of this go back much further; fourteen years in fact.

In 2006, I was teaching English and doing a lot of running as a way of dealing with the stress. Running is one of those repetitive activities that puts you into a weird alpha state and I ran, a character started talking to me: Josie Chrimes.

DI Josie Chrimes.

But she was not any old detective; she travelled through space and time. Unwillingly. She would wake up in random places with no knowledge of how she got there or even who she was at first. She had a huge coat whose pockets provided everything she needed (not necessarily what she wanted). Once she had established who and where she was, DI Josie Chrimes would set about solving the crime.

There were elements of the supernatural mingled with the investigation and, gradually, Josie found herself in a gothic Victorian London. She became a twelve-year-old girl and her guardian, a stage magician with a dark secret, appropriated her coat. Then the coat disappeared altogether.

After four years of rewriting and alteration, in 2010, that story became Mortlock, a gothic novel for eight to twelve year-olds. Published by Bloomsbury, it won all kinds of prizes and still sells well.

In it, Josie Chrimes is a stage magician’s assistant, constantly trying to find out what happened to her parents. Her mother died but something sinister happened to her father. It is that mystery that she sets out to solve, discovering a twin brother along the way. It’s also a murder mystery with a twist at the end.

So I guess, in some ways, this isn’t a new foray into crime for me.