Suspicious Minds (Harry Devlin)

by Edwards, Martin

  ‘Polystyrene.’

  ‘Perfect. A fire trap, waiting for a spark. All right - wait here out of harm’s way while I take a gander.’

  As the officer rejoined his men, a police car appeared, its lights flashing. One of its occupants raced towards the blaze, the other strode towards Harry and Finbar, waving his arms like a farmer directing sheep.

  ‘Move, will you? Don’t - hey, for Chrissake, it’s Harry Devlin! What are you doing here, pal? I thought you chased ambulances, not fire engines.’

  Harry nodded a greeting. He knew Roy Gilfillan of old.

  ‘Where there’s a disaster, there’s sure to be a solicitor. Finbar’s a client. We were having a pint in the Dock Brief, putting the world to rights, when some bloke burst in and said a building in Williamson Lane had gone up in flames. We dashed over and it turns out to be - ’

  Another siren interrupted him and he swung round to watch the arrival of the turntable while Roy Gilfillan marched over to his colleague, who was conferring with the fire officer outside the entrance to Finbar’s studio. Harry noticed the Irishman’s eyes slide away from the fire to a couple of girls in the crowd behind them, blondes en route for a nightclub who had paused to goggle at the inferno. Finbar winked at them and was rewarded by smirks of encouragement. Even at a time like this he was incorrigible.

  ‘Do you need to call Melissa?’ asked Harry, hoping to lead Finbar away from temptation. ‘Tell her what’s happened?’

  ‘No problem. She’s not neurotic, not like Sinead, doesn’t make a fuss when I tell her to expect me when she sees me. I’m not a train, I don’t run to timetables.’

  ‘Neither does InterCity, but at least it stays on the rails most of the time.’

  Finbar chuckled. ‘Truth to tell, I’ve a lot on my plate already, so far as the fair sex are concerned - even leaving Sinead and her bloody alimony demands aside. I bumped into a girl I used to know only this morning. A lovely lady. I reckon I might be able to persuade her to rekindle the flame - ’scuse the phrase, in present circumstances. And then there’s Melissa … Jases!’

  Across the street, the door which led to the tattoo parlour finally disintegrated in an explosion worthy of an Exocet. Awestruck, Harry and Finbar gazed at the wreckage. Above them, men in breathing masks were directing water jets from the top of the ladder down on to the blaze, while at ground level two more firefighters armed with axes moved towards the entrance. Safe behind the cordon, winos cheered as if on the terraces at Anfield. Oblivious to his audience, the fire chief pointed towards the building. The policemen stared obediently at something, then Gilfillan gestured for Harry and Finbar to approach. The two of them edged closer.

  ‘What’s up?’ asked Finbar. ‘Any closer and I’ll get scorch marks on Lady Godiva.’

  ‘Smell that!’ shouted Gilfillan, pointing towards the doorway.

  No mistaking the stink of petrol from close range. Harry exchanged a look with the policeman.

  ‘And see the inside of the passageway?’

  The fumes made their eyes water, but squinting through the hole Harry saw charred walls immediately beyond the space where the door had been.

  Finbar pushed a hand through his unruly dark hair. He was a stocky man, barely as tall as Harry but broader in the shoulder and a few years older; yet his wonderment was that of a wide-eyed schoolboy.

  ‘Are you telling me this wasn’t an accident?’

  The policeman shrugged. ‘The seat of fire seems to have been the other side of your front door - the burning is worse there than further up the stairs. Add that to the smell and there’s only one diagnosis.’

  ‘Arson?’ asked Harry. For all the heat, he felt a sudden chill.

  ‘Suspected malicious ignition,’ Gilfillan’s colleague corrected him primly, before turning to Finbar. ‘Is there anyone who might have a grudge against you?’

  Finbar looked nonplussed. After a pause for thought, he allowed a guilty grin to lift the corners of his mouth. It was a moment of self-knowledge.

  ‘Only everyone I’ve ever met.’

  The Making of Suspicious Minds

  Suspicious Minds was my second novel about Harry Devlin, although I finished writing it before the first, All the Lonely People, was published. I had a long-held ambition to write a detective series, and I’d enjoyed creating Harry and his world. In the first book, he had suffered the crushing blow of losing the wife he loved, and I was excited by the prospect of charting the way he strove to move on after bereavement, and blending the portrayal of his life with a complex murder mystery.

  A detective series has something in common with a soap opera. There is scope to explore the lives of the main characters over a period of time, as well as an opportunity to say something about their environment, and how it changes over time. From an author’s point of view, the infrastructure of the book is ready-made, so there is more of a chance to focus on making sure that the particular story is as powerful as can be. And in building on the existing foundations, it is important to vary the construction materials, so as to keep the reader interested.

  The mood of All the Lonely People had been dark and urban. I wanted to bring a few rays of sunshine into Harry’s life, literally and metaphorically. The story was set in summer, and the first few pages see Harry with his client Jock Stirrup in the seaside resort of New Brighton on the Wirral peninsula, across the River Mersey from his Liverpool home. For nearly eight years during the 1980s, I had lived in Wirral, a short distance from the coastline, and the book starts in New Brighton, a seaside resort I have always liked to visit. However, during the 20th century, its popularity declined steadily, as holidaying patterns changed, and by the time I knew it, the place had faded badly. The first draft of my opening chapter reflected this, but when I returned to New Brighton after an absence of a couple of years, I was pleased to see signs of improvement - and hastily revised what I had written. The process of regeneration has gathered momentum since then, and it gave me a good deal of pleasure to go back not long ago, to talk about crime fiction in the impressive Floral Pavilion, which did not even exist at the time of Harry’s conversation with Jock Stirrup. The Red Noses and the Yellow Noses, and the old stories of shipwrecking off the Wirral coast, were too appealing not to mention. As a means of bringing the story full circle, the main climax of the book also takes place in New Brighton, in a small oasis that has always appealed to me, Vale Park.

  Other parts of the peninsula were, and are, more conspicuously affluent, notably Caldy and West Kirby. I’ve often walked along the promenade where Harry talks to Gina Jean-Jacques, looking out, as they do, towards the small islands in the Dee. My aim was to write sensitively about Gina’s ordeal, having previously met a couple of people who had suffered in a similar way, and to convey the horror of her experience with economy, but with feeling.

  Towards the end of the book, I used for one scene a location even closer to my heart. Knutsford in Cheshire provided Elizabeth Gaskell with the inspiration for Cranford, and was also the town where I was born. It is a charming place, and a little while ago it formed the backdrop for a short story of mine featuring Gaskell and her friend Charles Dickens, “The Mystery of Canute Villa”. In this novel, my aim was to exploit, the plot reasons, the contrast between Knutsford and Liverpool.

  The law, and the legal profession, play a crucial part in this book - perhaps more so than in most of the other Devlin books, and not only because of Harry’s relationship with the young barrister, Valerie Kaiwar. My job had brought me into contact with several barristers, as well as a variety of other people who worked in barristers’ chambers, and I wanted to build on that inside knowledge to create a credible picture of a world that seems rather remote and strange - and also, sometimes, fascinating and even frightening - to many people. As a cautious lawyer, I scarcely need add that I also took enormous pains to make sure that none of the lawyers and their staff who featured in the story could be confused with anyone in real life Liverpool!

  Valerie Kaiwar, for instan
ce, was a character inspired by a young woman I noticed, but never spoke to, when my wife and I went out for a drink in Cheshire one Saturday evening. I made up a biography for her on the spot; it’s a technique I used a few times, mostly in the early stages of my career, and has the benefit of helping to minimise the risk of unintentional defamation (always a concern for a lawyer) as well as aiding the creative process. Julian Hamer was not even based in terms of physical appearance, let alone anything else, on a living person. However, his method of gently discouraging Jack Stirrup from pursuing libel proceedings reflects the view of most lawyers I know that - other than in extreme cases - litigation is an unsatisfactory means of protecting one’s reputation. But when an author sets a book in real locations, it is still a good plan to try to minimise the risk of upsetting people inadvertently. So, for instance, when it came to thinking up an original name for a Wirral guest house close to a crime scene, I borrowed the title of a likeable but little-known Bacharach and David song called “Hasbrook Heights.” Various other characters - Bolus,Buxton and Borrington amongst them - took their names from Derbyshire cricketers of the 1970s.

  The sub-plot of the book, involving poisonings in a supermarket, was influenced by a number of real-life cases that had been reported in the Press, but the details were of my own invention. The main focus of the story, in my mind, was the discovery of the identity of the Beast. A key clue to the solution is hidden away in an early scene in the book. My aim was to give the reader a chance of beating Harry to the answer, but to make the task a stiff challenge. In other books in the series, I’ve often been rather more generous in scattering around the clues, but I like to think that Suspicious Minds conforms to the notion of “fair play” in detective fiction, if at a bit of stretch.

  There is a further plot strand which I decided not to resolve in its entirety. I liked the idea of leaving a touch of uncertainty, and allowing the reader a chance to draw his or her own conclusions. The traditions of classic detective fiction make it plain that, in principle, a resolution of the central mystery is what the reader expects, and what the author should aim to deliver. But there are a good many excellent Golden Age mysteries which leave some things to the reader to work out, and this was the precedent I followed in this part of the book.

  As ever, this book gave me the chance to add texture here and there by mentioning favourite books, films and songs - such as Tragedy at Law by Cyril Hare, the marvellous Lawrence Kasdan film Body Heat, and Gene Pitney’s “Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa”. (That Pitney song, incidentally, provided the title for a very dark short story that I published a decade later.) I share with many other authors - the late, great Reginald Hill is a notable example - the belief that this sort of thing isn’t padding or mere self-indulgence. It adds to the fun of the writing as well as, one hopes, the reading.

  The themes of trust and suspicion seemed ideally suited to a detective novel, and it was fun to weave them into a story-line that advanced Harry’s life story. I enjoyed writing Suspicious Minds, and - although it is very hard for an author to judge these things in relation to his own work - I think the enjoyment shines through, even though the story deals, I trust not too superficially, with several serious subjects. After the hard work of my first novel, and countless re-writes, it seemed that I was starting to get into my stride.

  When I wrote this book, of course, I was learning my craft; mind you, twenty years on, I’m still learning my craft. Suspicious Minds contained more disparate plot elements than its predecessor, but it isn’t, by today’s standards, a long book. Keeping the story taut meant that I couldn’t explore all the characters and ideas in the story in great depth, but it also meant that narrative moved at a rapid pace. The “second book hurdle” that authors face is often seen as a major obstacle, but on its eventual publication, Suspicious Minds was well received, and the reviews helped me to feel more like a “proper” writer than simply a hopeful amateur. When I analyse the story today, inevitably there are some things that I would change; for an author, the process of revision is potentially endless, though, and one reaches a point where one has to let the manuscript go. Above all, I remember a precious feeling of growing self-confidence as I worked on this book, as well as sheer exhilaration that I was at last on the way to becoming a published crime writer.

  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)

  Whydunit? (1997)

  Past Crimes (1998)

  Northern Blood 3 (1998)

  Missing Persons (1999)

  Scenes of Crime (2000)

  Murder Squad (2001)

  Green for Danger (2003)

  Mysterious Pleasures (2003)

  Crime in the City (2004)

  Crime on the Move (2005)

  I.D.: crimes of identity (2006)

  The Trinity Cat and other mysteries (with Sue Feder) (2006)

  M.O.: crimes of practice (2008)

  Original Sins (2010)

  Best Eaten Cold (2011)

  Guilty Consciences (2011)

  Non-fiction

  Understanding Computer Contracts (1983)

  Understanding Dismissal Law (two editions)

  Managing Redundancies (1986)

  Executive Survival (two editions)

  Careers in the La
w (six editions)

  Know-How for Employment Lawyers (with others) (1995)

  Urge to Kill (2002)

  Tolley’s Equal Opportunities Handbook (four editions)

  Martin Edwards: an Appreciation

  by Michael Jecks

  Both as a crime writer and as a keen exponent of the genre, Martin Edwards has long been sought out by his peers, and is now becoming recognised as a contemporary crime author at the top of his form.

  Born in Knutsford, Cheshire, Martin went to school in Northwich before taking a first class honours degree in law at Balliol College, Oxford. From there he went on to join a law firm and is now a highly respected lawyer specializing in employment law. He is the author of Tottel’s Equal Opportunities Handbook, 4th edition, 2007.

  Early in his career, he began writing professional articles and completed his first book at 27, covering the purchase of business computers. His non-fiction work continues with over 1000 articles in newspapers and magazines, and seven books dedicated to the law (two of which were co-authored).

  His life of crime began a little later with the Harry Devlin series, set in Liverpool. The first of his series, All The Lonely People (1991), was shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey Memorial Dagger for the first work of crime fiction by a new writer. With the advent of his second novel, Martin Edwards was becoming recognised as a writer of imagination and flair. This and subsequent books also referenced song titles from his youth.

  The Harry Devlin books demonstrate a great sympathy for Liverpool, past and present, with gritty, realistic stories. ‘Liverpool is a city with a tremendous resilience of spirit and character,’ he says in Scene of the Crime, (2002). Although his protagonist is a self-effacing Scousers with a dry wit, Edwards is not a writer for the faint-hearted. ‘His gifts are of the more classical variety - there are points in his novels when I think I’m reading Graham Greene,’ wrote Ed Gorman, while Crime Time magazine said ‘The novels successfully combine the style of the traditional English detective story with a darker noir sensibility.’