A Killing in November

"I know Simon—he’s a lovely man and a really good writer. The third novel in the series, Lost and Never Found , came out this month. A Killing in November is the first, so I’ve chosen that one. What he’s done is to modernise Morse. He’s got two main male characters for a start, so that’s a Morse and Lewis echo. They’re both called Wilkins but they’re very different. One’s very highly educated and self-confident; the other comes from the wrong side of the tracks. So Simon has got that contrast going on, which, again, is a bit Morse-like. Simon also has the Morse milieu of the colleges. A Killing in November starts with the discovery of a body in a provost’s study: it doesn’t get much more Oxford than that. Let’s face it, most people outside this town wouldn’t even know what a provost is! The books also have the same feel as Morse, in the sense that they’re quite traditionally written. I mean that in a good way. He’s harking back to the good old days of the Victorian novel. Simon is a beautiful writer and it’s very well observed. If you look at the covers of the books, they all have black-and-white photos of very recognisable Oxford buildings. One of them is of the Bodleian Library. It’s a traditional photo but with a slightly interesting angle looking upwards. That’s the way Simon does his books, too. They’re traditional but with a slightly different angle, and stylish in the same way the photos are—the photos are a good reflection of what the books are like inside. He’s not trying to play Dexter at his own game, but it’s in the same tradition. In my books, I take a different approach. I only have one central character, not a pair, and that was a deliberate choice (partly because British policing isn’t done in pairs—that was always a fiction). My central character, DI Adam Fawley, developed almost like a photographic negative of Morse. He’s not grumpy. He doesn’t like classical music. He doesn’t drive the same car. He’s a married man, with a happy marriage. He and Morse are opposites and I play around with that as well. At one point in the first book, Fawley says, “The car’s a Ford, and I don’t do bloody crosswords.” He’s joking with the reader about the fact that he’s not Morse. Also, the way I’ve structured my narratives is through ‘mixed media’, as they call it now. All of that is so not Morse—it could not be further from the way that Dexter structures a story. Dexter has proper chapters, often grouped as ‘books’, and he even has epigraphs. It really is like George Eliot . So my approach and Simon’s are very different. I’m very hot on authenticity of procedure. I don’t think Simon would be upset if I said (and he’s said it to me before) that that isn’t really his first priority, which is very much in the Colin Dexter tradition. Early in her career, Val McDermid was talking to Colin Dexter about writing crime, and he said ‘I had written five Morse novels before I had even set foot in a police station.’ He just wasn’t interested in the nitty-gritty of how investigations work, but I’m really concerned to get that right, and I have a Detective Inspector who helps me do that. It’s a good question. When I first wrote Close to Home , I thought, ‘I’m just a wannabe. I haven’t published this thing. It may never be published. Can I justify asking someone like that—a hard-pressed person who has a job that takes a lot out of them—for their time?’ So, I didn’t. I did all my research online. It’s amazing what you can find if you’re looking for it! When I got the deal with Penguin, my editor said, ‘Oh, it’s so authentic! Did you speak to a lot of police officers?’ I hadn’t spoken to anyone (!) and she thought I should, just in case. So, I did. My local councillor introduced me to the former area inspector for North Oxford. He’s worked with me all the way through, and he’s fantastic. He’s learned a bit about how to write novels, and I’ve learned a lot about how to do investigations. I’ll be doing a session at the Oxford Literary Festival with him and my CSI advisor . We did a session last year and it was a riot. Everybody loved it. They were so brilliant, funny, and informative. Those two guys are well worth coming to see. I’ll also be doing a session on true crime with Victoria Selman, whose latest book draws to some extent on the Manson murders. We’ll be talking about true crime, in terms of the form and the subject matter, and how that informs the sort of fiction we write."