Today I'm delighted to welcome
ALEX REEVE
to share his BEST OF CRIME ...
... AUTHORS
Gosh, it’s so hard to pick just one! If you asked me tomorrow, I might have a different answer, but today I’ll say Sarah Waters for Fingersmith. She writes with huge compassion and authenticity, and was an inspiration for The House on Half Moon Street. She also shows why crime writers shouldn’t set out to write formulaic crime novels; we should create engaging characters, settings and plots that happen to involve a crime.
... FILMS/MOVIES
Fargo, directed by the Coen brothers, is a movie I can watch again and again. Marge Gunderson (Francis McDormand) is a heavily pregnant police officer in frozen Minnesota investigating a bungled homicide. The story works like clockwork and everything that happens, however awful and horrifying, is driven by the fears, desires and flaws of the characters.
... TV DRAMAS
I’m a massive fan of police procedurals, but I’m still going to pick Breaking Bad. I love the relentless descent of Walter White (Bryan Cranston) from mild and desperate to utterly ruthless. I believe that a propensity for violence was always within him, but it needed the right trigger, making him a great example of why ‘because he’s evil’ never works as character motivation. We all have the capability to do good and bad things.
... FICTIONAL KILLERS
Steerpike from Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy is charming, manipulative and callous. The world in which he lives is rigidly hierarchical, and no-one understands its intricacies better than Steerpike. He is its natural product, and so feels entirely organic within the fantastical setting. He shows how crime stories can stretch into any genre or style.
... FICTIONAL DETECTIVES
Easy Rawlins from Walter Mosley’s novels is one of the all-time greats. He shares features of other hard-boiled detectives such as Philp Marlowe and Sam Spade, but his combination of weary humour and duty to his neighbours is unique. The Los Angeles setting, social complexity and sense of time passing make the characters feel like real people. And, of course, Easy has one of literature’s most appealing (and terrifying) sidekicks in Mouse, who can insert random violence into any situation.
... MURDER WEAPONS
Spoiler alert! In Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, the murder weapon is the ink in a book of Aristotle’s Poetics. Victims are killed when they lick their fingers to turn the pages – punished for their philosophical curiosity. It provides the perfect example of a weapon connecting both to the motivation of the murderer and a key theme of the novel.
... DEATH SCENES
The movie Reservoir Dogs directed by Quentin Tarantino contains a killing shocking for its contrariness. In a famous scene, a police officer is tortured and doused with petrol, but at the last second, his tormentor is shot. The audience, having rooted for the police officer, is relieved and expects him to be freed, but moments later he is dismissively murdered by another character. The scene disrupts the comfort of narrative flow. It tells the audience that anything can happen.
... BLOGS/WEBSITES
My absolute favourite is www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk, which contains thousands of archived newspapers. It’s the best place to get contemporaneous accounts of Victorian history, and also get a feel for the phrasing and intonations of that time. Many are brilliantly written, putting much of today’s journalism to shame, and some are hilarious. It’s a wonderfully human connection, I think, to laugh out loud while reading an article written in 1880.
... WRITING TIPS
Write, write and then write some more. Write headlong and free, with no brake or throttle. And then edit brutally with your reader in mind.
... WRITING SNACKS
A strong cup of Yorkshire Gold tea with milk – absolutely not the awful ‘Biscuit Brew’ flavour, which is a crime greater than anything I could think up.
About ALEX REEVE
Alex Reeve lives in Buckinghamshire and is a university lecturer, working on a PhD. The House on Half Moon Street is his debut, and the first in a series of books featuring Leo Stanhope.
Find Alex Reeve on Twitter - @storyjoy
About THE HOUSE ON HALF MOON STREET
Publisher's description
Everyone has a secret... Only some lead to murder. Introducing Leo Stanhope: a Victorian transgender coroner's assistant who must uncover a killer without risking his own future
When the body of a young woman is wheeled into the hospital where Leo Stanhope works, his life is thrown into chaos. Maria, the woman he loves, has been murdered and it is not long before the finger of suspicion is turned on him, threatening to expose his lifelong secret.
For Leo Stanhope was born Charlotte, the daughter of a respectable reverend. Knowing he was meant to be a man - despite the evidence of his body - and unable to cope with living a lie any longer, he fled his family home at just fifteen and has been living as Leo ever since: his secret known to only a few trusted people.
Desperate to find Maria's killer and thrown into gaol, he stands to lose not just his freedom, but ultimately his life.
The House on Half Moon Street was published in paperback by Raven Books on 27 December 2018.
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