First Cut is the Deepest (Harry Devlin)

by Edwards, Martin

  Eventually, she said, “Well?”

  “What are you asking for, Liz?”

  She stifled an exclamation of impatience. “Your advice, of course. That’s your job, isn’t it? Giving the lawyer’s impartial view. Solving problems. I don’t know why you never made more money.” She flushed. “Sorry. Me and my big mouth. But I do need your help. I trust you, Harry, always did. Tell me what to do.”

  He made a don’t-care gesture with his shoulders. “If you’re worried about Coghlan, move in with your new fancy man. He’ll protect you.”

  “That’s difficult.” She licked the tip of her forefinger; an old, unconscious mannerism. “Trouble is, he’s married.”

  Typical, Harry reflected. Aloud, he said, “And his wife?”

  “His wife is - well, let’s just say she’s neurotic. He needs to pick his moment to break the news that he’s walking out.”

  That struck a chord. He recalled the slow torture of those last few days before she finally left him one winter’s evening. The skirting round of conversational no-go areas. Meaning less small talk at the dinner table. Silence in bed. And the awareness of a marriage rotting like so much dead grass.

  “I get the picture.”

  She averted her face. “Mick’s away at present. Down in London, or so he says. All the same, I can’t go back to that house tonight, can’t take the risk that he might turn up. Harry, he’s violent! Dangerous. I daren’t imagine what he intends to do. It’s best to hide until everything’s worked out. So - it occurred to me - I mean, would you mind if I stayed here for a day or two?”

  Only Liz would have the nerve to ask, he thought. Her gift for making an outrageous request seem logical would be envied by any lawyer who ever made a speculative application for bail. The darkness of her hair, the height of her cheekbones, were the only clues to her Polish ancestry: in her instinct for the main chance, she was Liverpudlian through and through.

  Wryly, he said. “Are you sure you’ll be safe here?”

  She treated him to her best knee-melting smile. “As safe as anywhere in the world. And I won’t give you any hassle. I’ll be out of your hair soon, I promise.”

  He stubbed out his cigarette and immediately lit another. She frowned and asked, “When did you start smoking again?”

  “Day after you last saw me.” He blew a smoke ring and waited for her to make a know-all comment about lung cancer or the nicotine stains on his hands. But for once in her life she had the sense to keep quiet and eventually he said, “Okay, you can stay.”

  “Thanks. That’s wonderful.” Almost to his surprise, he sensed that her gratitude was genuine.

  “Where are your things?”

  “I travel light, remember? I have a bag with me. Tomorrow I’ll pick up the other odds and ends, if I’m sure Mick’s still out of town.” She smiled. “Let’s talk more in the morning. I’ve so much to tell you, you wouldn’t believe it. But there’s plenty of time. Tell you the truth, right now, I feel as if it’s my birthday, not yours, and there are a hundred candles on the cake.”

  Yawning, she stood up. Even her simplest movement was invested with that feline grace. He couldn’t help saying, “You look no different from the woman I married.”

  “Flattery will get you anywhere.” Their eyes met for a moment, before Liz moved away and said, “Well, maybe not everywhere. I went on a tour whilst you were out. You only have one bedroom.”

  The bed was their old kingsize. “It’s all I need.”

  An I’m-not-to-be-tempted look flitted across her face. Her tone was gentle but firm. “The last few weeks have been hell for me, Harry. Truly. I must have a good night’s rest. So what are the options?”

  He weighed up her expression for a moment and then said, “The sofa folds down.”

  “Would that do for you? I mean - you know how it is?”

  When he didn’t reply, she leaned forward and kissed him lightly on the cheek before disappearing into the bathroom. Already she was at ease with the geography of the flat, gliding around as if it were home. He heard the shower running and said to himself: That’s your wife in there, this is your chance to make it happen again. But he knew that he, too, was in danger of succumbing to fantasy and all he did was pour himself a whisky and settle back in his chair.

  Soon she re-emerged, a towel wrapped round her hair. She had stripped off the jeans; her bare legs were as smooth as ever. “I’d forgotten what a mess you make of the toothpaste,” she said. “You need a woman to take charge.”

  “My trouble is, I attract the wrong type.”

  She laughed. “I deserved that.”

  “You deserve much worse.” He couldn’t help grinning. For all her faults, Liz had always been able to make fun of herself, as well as of those around her.

  “I like this flat,” she said gently, “but it’s lonely. You don’t have anyone special?”

  Only you, he wanted to say.

  “No.”

  “That’s ridiculous. You’re not a bad-looking feller in a poor light.”

  Reaching for an ashtray, Harry said dryly, “My next door neighbour thinks all I need is a little female company. She keeps inviting me round for coffee and I’m running out of excuses.”

  Liz beamed encouragement. “Get together with her. It’ll do you good. The bachelor life is fine, but if you don’t relax, you’ll never make it to thirty-three.” Her left arm reached out and stroked the heavy stubble on his chin. For a short while, neither of them spoke, but at last she said, “Goodnight, Harry.” Her tone was soft, almost tender, and the words hung in the airless emptiness of the room as the bedroom door shut behind her.

  Harry remained motionless, staring through the picture window into the darkness outside. Despite the heat of the room, a chill of fear had suddenly touched him for when he had looked down at her slender wrist, he had seen the angry red stitch marks which criss-crossed it - marks that he recognised as the stigmata of a failed suicide.

  The Making of First Cut is the Deepest

  By the time I came to write First Cut Is the Deepest, the seventh book in the Harry Devlin series, I felt I’d come to know the character of Harry, and his world, pretty well. The success of the earlier books in the series had also given me a great deal of confidence as a writer, and I had more than enough energy and enthusiasm to set myself fresh challenges.

  Writing a series has many benefits, but it also carries risks – above all, that you start producing the same-old, same-old. There are attractions in sticking to the tried-and-tested, and it is certainly easier, and less likely to trouble one’s publishers, who tend to assume that loyal readers don’t want their expectations to be confounded in any way. After all, people keep reading a series because they like what it has to offer. But I cling to the belief that they also like an author to vary their diet from time to time, as long as the qualities that attracted them to his or her writing in the first place are not diluted.

  One “given” in a crime series is that, whatever trials and tribulations the hero or heroine may face, he or she will live to fight another day. Of course there are exceptions – Conan Doyle tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes, Nicolas Freeling disposed of Van der Valk, and so on – but it’s an extraordinarily bold step to take; I once heard P.D. James say in an interview hat she thought it was very foolish, and many writers would agree.

  This means that series authors face a challenge: how to keep readers on the edge of their chairs, when they are well aware it’s overwhelmingly likely that the protagonist will survive - in contrast to the fate of protagonists in stand-alones written by, say, Cornell Woolrich or Barbara Vine. I decided to face up to that challenge in this book by putting Harry in jeopardy in not one but three different ways.

  First, he’s embroiled in an affair with Juliet May that threatens his well-being because she is married to a dangerous and ruthless man. Second, while engaged in a tryst with Juliet, he encounters a decapitated corpse, and finds himself plunging head-first into an elaborate murder mystery. An
d third, he is being stalked by the enigmatic Daniel Roberts. I won’t say any more about the Roberts sub-plot, except to say that the idea behind it didn’t occur to me until I started plannng this particular book. The idea appealed because it gave an extra dimension to Harry’s life. That’s one of the joys of a series – rather like a soap opera, characters’ lives and backstories develop in all kinds of ways that were never part of the original concept.

  Not long before starting to plot the story, I read Dracula, and found that Bram Stoker’s original novel far surpassed in merit the various film versions that I’d seen. The first part of the book in particular strikes me as a superb example of exciting popular fiction that has stood the test of time. The fact that Jonathan Harker is a lawyer, and that the Count is versed in English law caught my fancy, and I thought up a potential link with an idea for a mystery plot about a series of murders of Liverpool lawyers. As a Liverpool lawyer myself, the notion appealed to my (no doubt warped) sense of humour, but I hasten to add that there wasn’t an element of wish fulfilment in disposing of professional rivals – honest! In fact, as I mentioned in the acknowledgments in this and other Devlin books, fellow lawyers in the city have always been astonishingly generous in supporting my literary efforts – not least in contributing the occasional joke or snippet of legal lore. I did think, though, that readers might be entertained by a story which linked lawyers and bloodsuckers. As Harry reflects, the mountains of Transylvania are a long way from Toxteth, but when my researches drew my attention to “living vampires”, I realised I’d discovered another ingredient to put into the mix.

  The settings of the key scenes needed, I felt, to be as vivid as possible, and I wanted many of them to differ from those used previously in the series. Again, this is part of varying the diet. So the story opens on a wild night on the edge of Wirral, above and below the river that divides England from Wales. I lived in Wirral for seven and a half years before moving back to my native Cheshire, and the peninsula’s many contrasts fascinate me. Later in the story, Harry’s travels take him to such diverse spots as Birkenhead Priory – ancient remains reeking of history, cheek-by-jowl with a dockyard and modern urban life – and the rather charming former port of Parkgate.

  I was also keen to set a scene underground in the centre of Liverpool, and I consulted a group of fellow writers – ‘”The Liverpool Scribblers”, who dined convivially at a different city restaurant each month. The group included several crime writers (Margaret Murphy, who has kindly written an introduction to the new e-book publication of I Remember You, was one of them) as well as horror writer Ramsey Campbell and the late Jim Hitchmough, a TV sitcom writer. I asked if anyone knew of a fascinating subterranean location in the city that hadn’t been used in fiction before, and John Owen, who wrote crime short stories and radio plays, suggested Williamson’s Tunnels. Nowadays, the Tunnels are well known, and a road sign directs tourists to the entrance, but it wasn’t so at the time I started writing this book and I wasn’t familiar with them. However, the more I discovered about the Tunnels, the more intrigued I became, and I was lucky enough to manage a visit in person before writing the scene in question. I also found the website of the Friends of the Tunnels a mine of useful information, and an excellent example of how the internet can assist a writer’s researches, as long as it doesn’t become a complete substitute for personal experience.

  The plot and structure of the book were complex, and the story was the darkest I had written, something which reviews, for instance in The Times, highlighted. I set out to enrich the texture of the story, and add some light relief, by including a miscellany of jokes and references to books and films. The opening line, for instance, comes from the opening line of Pulp Fiction. Few people will confuse my work with that of Quentin Tarantino, but it amused me to tip my hat to the legendary director while kicking off a story which, for all its embellishments, is at heart a detective mystery that seeks to respect the classic values of the genre while holding up a mirror to a group of people and their society at the end of the twentieth century.

  I thought – and still believe – that the book is a taut, fast read, but so much is crammed into it that, unavoidably, it became the longest novel I’d written up to that time. When my Italian publishers, Mondadori, made an offer for it, they laid down a condition that, to fit in with their requirements, the book should be cut down in length. I agreed, but left it to people at Mondadori to do what was necessary, as I was reluctant to take a hatchet to the text. How successful the editing was in artistic terms, I still don’t know, as I can’t read Italian. Better to remain in blissful ignorance, perhaps. Mind you, the Italian editions all sold very well, which did make me appreciate the skills of the translator.

  When I came to the end of the book, and it was accepted by Hodder, my UK publishers, they proposed a deal for me to write another couple of books in the Devlin series. I’d thoroughly enjoyed writing First Cut is the Deepest, and I was excited to have found an American publisher at last for the Devlin books (though oddly, they started with the fifth book in the series, and the books were subsequently taken up by another publisher). But I wanted to stretch my talents as far as I could, and I had an idea for a non-series book which excited me enormously (this later became Take My Breath Away). Because I was working full-time as a partner in a law firm as well as writing novels and legal books, it didn’t make sense to commit to writing three brand new novels at that stage, and I opted to take the risk of putting the Devlin series on hold for at least a couple of years.

  As things turned out, my writing career changed course unexpectedly after that. My editor left Hodder, and Take My Breath Away, a book whose complexity meant it took a couple of years to write and went through countless revisions, eventually appeared under the imprint of Allison & Busby. By that time, I’d also completed the last novel by the late Bill Knox, The Lazarus Widow, for yet another publisher, and started work on a historical novel featuring the life and misadventures of Dr Crippen – Dancing for the Hangman – which did not see the light of day for another five years. My new editor at Allison & Busby, David Shelley, proposed that, rather than resuming the Devlin series, I should write a new series set in rural Britain; this led to the first of the Lake District Mysteries, and the success that The Coffin Trail and later books in the series enjoyed meant there was little time for writing about Harry. However, when Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture was approaching, I decided to seize the opportunity to bring Harry’s career up to date, and to tackle the changes in both his life and in his native city since the events of First Cut is the Deepest. The result was Waterloo Sunset, a book which proved to be a joy to write. It appeared in 2008, ten years after this book’s first appearance, and Harry’s return gave me, as well, I hope, as plenty of his fans, a great deal of pleasure.

  Will Harry return again? It’s a question I’m often asked. And the answer is: I hope so. He’s someone I like a lot, and I would love to find out what happens to him next.

  Meet Martin Edwards

  Martin Edwards is an award-winning crime writer whose fifth and most recent Lake District Mystery, featuring DCI Hannah Scarlett and Daniel Kind, is The Hanging Wood, published in 2011. Earlier books in the series are The Coffin Trail (shortlisted for the Theakston’s prize for best British crime novel of 2006), The Cipher Garden, The Arsenic Labyrinth (shortlisted for the Lakeland Book of the Year award in 2008) and The Serpent Pool.

  Martin has written eight novels about lawyer Harry Devlin, the first of which, All the Lonely People, was shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey Memorial Dagger for the best first crime novel of the year. In addition he has published a stand-alone novel of psychological suspense, Take My Breath Away, and a much acclaimed novel featuring Dr Crippen, Dancing for the Hangman. The latest Devlin novel, Waterloo Sunset, appeared in 2008.

  Martin completed Bill Knox’s last book, The Lazarus Widow, and has published a collection of short stories, Where Do You Find Your Ideas? and other stories; ‘Test Drive’
was shortlisted for the CWA Short Story Dagger in 2006, while ‘The Bookbinder’s Apprentice’ won the same Dagger in 2008.

  A well-known commentator on crime fiction, he has edited 20 anthologies and published eight non-fiction books, including a study of homicide investigation, Urge to Kill .In 2008 he was elected to membership of the prestigious Detection Club. He was subsequently appointed Archivist to the Detection Club, and is also Archivist to the Crime Writers’ Association. He received the Red Herring Award for services to the CWA in 2011.

  In his spare time Martin is a partner in a national law firm, Weightmans LLP. His website is www.martinedwardsbooks.com and his blog www.doyouwriteunderyourownname.blogspot.com/

  Bibliography

  Harry Devlin Series

  All the Lonely People (1991)

  Suspicious Minds (1992)

  I Remember You (1993)

  Yesterday’s Papers (1994)

  Eve of Destruction (1996)

  The Devil in Disguise (1998)

  First Cut Is the Deepest (1999)

  Waterloo Sunset (2008).

  Lake District Mysteries

  The Coffin Trail (2004)

  The Cipher Garden (2005)

  The Arsenic Labyrinth (2007).

  The Serpent Pool (2010)

  The Hanging Wood (2011)

  Other Novels

  The Lazarus Widow (with Bill Knox) (1999)

  Take My Breath Away (2002)

  Dancing for the Hangman (2008)

  Collected Short stories

  Where Do You Find Your Ideas? and Other Stories (2001)

  Anthologies edited

  Northern Blood (1992)

  Northern Blood 2 (1995)

  Anglian Blood (with Robert Church) (1995)

  Perfectly Criminal (1996)