Writing a novel set twenty-five years ago has much to be said for it – it is certainly a joy to write about a crime being investigated without your cops being almost wholly reliant on email trails, mobile phone cell-site triangulation and CCTV – but it was also a somewhat bizarre experience. I remember the mid-nineties well (most of it, anyway) but quickly realised that I was actually writing a piece of historical crime fiction, albeit one that features A-Zs, video recorders and smoking in pubs, as opposed to hansom cabs or Roman vases. As history has never been my strong point, it will come as no surprise that I needed a great deal of help to combat both the vagaries of memory and my all-but-total ignorance when it came to matters of police procedure a quarter of a century ago.
Sometimes, old episodes of The Bill are simply not enough.
I am far from being the first crime writer to be grateful for the advice and expertise of retired detective Graham Bartlett. His help has been incalculable, and if you want proof that Graham knows what he’s talking about, I can thoroughly recommend his own non-fiction book, Babes in the Wood (co-written with Peter James). The very different expertise of forensic pathologist Dr Stuart Hamilton was equally valuable and I am indebted to him for providing fictional colleague Phil Hendricks with his revelatory moment of lateral thinking. Professor David Wilson’s book, My Life with Murderers, was enormously useful and the prison scenes in Cry Baby – including the nicknames of the special units – were largely inspired by Professor Wilson’s writings about his work at HMP Woodhill.
This is my twentieth novel in as many years, and among any number of things that make me realise how lucky I have been over the past two decades is the fact that so many of the people I need to thank have featured on the acknowledgement page of almost every single book. So, thank you, yet again, to my amazing agent, Sarah Lutyens (and Juliet, Francesca and Hana), my eagle-eyed friend Wendy Lee and my partner in crime Mike Gunn.
Thank you, Hilary Hale and David Shelley, for so much.
Thank you to the team at Little, Brown which has been my publishing home, and family, for twenty years: Catherine Burke, Charlie King, Robert Manser, Hannah Methuen, Callum Kenny, Thalia Proctor, Tom Webster, Gemma Shelley, Sean Garrehy, Sarah Shrubb and Tamsin Kitson. Thank you again to Nancy Webber for a brilliant copy-edit, and for the stickers!
Thank you to my brilliant editor Ed Wood and to Laura Sherlock, the best publicist in the business.
Thank you to all those at Grove Atlantic who continue to fly Tom Thorne’s tatty, beer-stained flag on the other side of the Atlantic – Sara Vitale, Morgan Entrekin, Justine Batchelor and Deb Seager – and to all those at assorted publishing houses worldwide who keep my children in shoes. Danke sehr, Toda, Grazie, Tak, etc . . .
I want to thank all those writers whose friendship and support has meant and continues to mean so much. The only reason I’m not going to list them is that I’m bound to forget someone and several of them can be touchy, not to say extremely vengeful. But I hope they know who they are. I will name the five who, as fellow Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers, have made the last couple of years so much more fun than they would otherwise have been. So, thank you Val, Chris, Stuart, Doug and Luca. We will always have Glastonbury.
Lastly but not leastly, I need to thank those without whom I would not be sitting down to write these stories at all. I’m talking, of course, about . . . Nando’s, Brewdog and Cadbury’s. Please forgive a cheap joke, made solely in an effort to undercut what some may regard as the cheesiness of this final acknowledgement. I don’t care. Those familiar with my love of country music will know I’m a sucker for the cheese, so just imagine my beloved George Jones breaking your heart, his backing singers in perfect, angelic harmony and the strings swelling behind him as I say a heart-felt thank you so bloody much to all those readers who have stuck with me, and with Tom, for all these years.
Seriously, without you, there wouldn’t be any point.
Cry Baby Page 36
