Today I'm delighted to welcome
TREVOR WOOD
to share his BEST OF CRIME ...
... AUTHORS
Obviously there are loads I love but the well-known ones don’t need any help from me so I’d like to give a shout out to the next big thing, Dominic Nolan. His debut novel Past Life blew me away. Featuring battered cop Abigail Boone, who suffers from total retrograde amnesia after a savage beating and a fall, it’s dark and desperate but beautifully written and deeply moving. The sequel After Dark is even better. If there’s any justice it’ll be a huge hit.
... FILMS/MOVIES
I love Dennis Lehane’s books and the movie made from one of them, Gone Baby Gone is nigh on perfect. It provides all the thrills and twists the genre demands but at the heart of it is a moral dilemma that is utterly heartbreaking. The final scene, I’d suggest, is one of the best in crime movie history. It would be much better known if it hadn’t been shelved for a couple of years due to the kidnapped young girl bearing a startling resemblance to Madeleine McCann.
... TV DRAMAS
Line of Duty has been consistently brilliant from the start so that has to get a mention but surely everyone’s seen it now so I’ll throw Spotless out there. It’s a little-known Netflix series about a man who runs a crime scene clean-up crew. Funny, dark with a very scary bad guy. I love it.
... FICTIONAL KILLERS
Maurice Swift in John Boyne’s A Ladder to the Sky. He’s a bit like Ripley but with the extra twist that he’s a writer who will do anything to get to the top. Great book as well.
... FICTIONAL DETECTIVES
Back to Dennis Lehane for this one. Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro are a fantastic pairing of old-school private detectives and their on-off romance is beautifully judged. I read most of the series back to back and it flew by. Start with A Drink Before The War and go from there.
... MURDER WEAPONS
Carl Hiaasen is the master of bizarre murder weapons. On the grounds of taste I’m going to skip swiftly past the sexually-deviant dolphin in Native Tongue and opt for the stuffed blue marlin head that is used to impale an intruder in Skin Tight.
... DEATH SCENES
I love the scene in Final Destination 5 where a man is on an acupuncture table with umpteen needles sticking out of his face, torso and legs when an aromatic candle breaks apart and sets fire to some paper. In struggling to escape he flips over the table and falls face first on the floor, driving the needles in and knocking over a bottle of flammable liquid. Somehow he struggles up but the liquid catches fire and the whole room is now ablaze. Again he avoids death by throwing himself to the floor in the one bit of the room not on fire. Then a shelf above him collapses and a large statue of Buddha falls off, crushing his skull.
... BLOGS/WEBSITES
I was going to say Agent Hunter, which I found invaluable when looking for an agent. It was a comprehensive list of Agencies and Agents with a search facility that enabled you to find the right agent, i.e. one who liked the kind of thing you were writing. It also included links to interviews they’d given which was very useful in deciding who to submit to and what to put in your submission letter. You could also pay a small amount for a trial period which is all you really needed. However, in writing this, I looked it up and found it’s been taken over and is now called Agent Match and you have to pay £30 for a month. It’s still worth it, I think, so my only reservation is that I haven’t tried the new site so can’t recommend it from personal experience. I’m sure it’s still great but it’s probably best to ask around before trying. You can find it here https://jerichowriters.com/agentmatch/
... WRITING TIPS
The most on-point advice I ever heard was that you should ‘put your character up a tree and throw rocks at him.’ It’s been attributed to Nabokov but that seems highly unlikely to me.
My top tip would be to find people whose judgement you trust to read your work. As many as you like. I’m in a local group of five writers who meet every three weeks. We all submit 2000 words and offer constructive criticism of each other’s work and it improves my writing immeasurably. Obviously the key word is ‘constructive.’ If you can’t find a local group, form your own. The crime-writing MA I attended at UEA had a similar peer feedback model and that was where The Man on the Street came from so I can’t recommend it highly enough.
... WRITING SNACKS
Does wine count? If not, then fruit. Working from home, with very easy access to the fridge can be problematic so I try very hard not to snack on anything less healthy as I put on weight way too easily. Also coffee. Lots of coffee.
About TREVOR WOOD
Trevor Wood has lived in Newcastle for twenty-five years and considers himself an adopted Geordie. He's a successful playwright who has also worked as a journalist and spin-doctor for the City Council. Prior to that he served in the Royal Navy for sixteen years. Trevor holds an MA in Creative Writing (Crime Fiction) from UEA. The Man on the Street is his first novel.
Find Trevor Wood on Twitter - @TrevorWoodWrite
About THE MAN ON THE STREET
Publisher's description
Her head was bowed, and the hands braced on the chair arms were not like hands at all, but the dry dark claws of a bird ... The MacNamara sisters hadn’t been seen for months before anyone noticed. It was Father Timoney who finally broke down the door, who saw what had become of them. Berenice was sitting in her armchair, surrounded by religious tracts. Rosaleen had crawled under her own bed, her face frozen in terror. Both had starved themselves to death. Francesca MacNamara returns to Dublin after decades in the US, to find her family in ruins. Meanwhile, Detectives Vincent Swan and Gina Considine are convinced that there is more to the deaths than suicide. Because what little evidence there is, shows that someone was watching the sisters die ...
The Man on the Street was published by Quercus on 19 March 2020.
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