I am so excited to be welcoming the author Paul Gitsham onto the blog today. Paul is the author of Deadly Truths and today he is going to be talking about why he sends his authors to Coventry. First, a little about the book...
The Blurb
How do you solve a murder when you’re shut out of the investigation?
Young detectives, Robinson Ellington Foxe and Amy Kennard, don’t want to work at Coventry’s Moat Lane police station. Neither do their colleagues want them there. But it’s the last chance for two officers for whom doing the right thing has cost them their futures.
Despite a murder on their patch, they are lumbered with investigating a series of high-profile burglaries. But when a thief is killed in the house of an influential businessman, Foxe and Kennard are convinced it is linked to their cases and want in.
The official investigation is a whitewash, but Robbie and Amy keep investigating anyway. As they uncover a web of deceit and corruption, reaching to the very top of the force, their own difficult histories are weaponised against them, and they find themselves fighting for their careers and their lives.
Why send my detectives to Coventry?
Or rather, why aren’t more authors setting their crime fiction series in Coventry? This is the question I found myself pondering as I started planning my new Foxe and Kennard series. By the time I came to write the first in the series, Deadly Truths, there was no doubt in my mind where my two detectives would ply their trade.
Full disclosure, I’m a Coventry kid. I was raised here and lived with my parents until leaving for university in the mid-nineties. Since then I’ve lived in Bath, Cambridge, Manchester and even Toronto. You don’t have to look too hard to find crime novels set in and around those cities. But try the same with my hometown and there are slim pickings.
Which strikes me as really odd. Because Coventry has so much to offer a writer. Obviously, there’s the crime rate. Coventry is a mid-sized city and is plagued with the same problems as any of its contemporaries, such as Liverpool, Manchester or London. Once an engineering giant, and the heart of the UK car industry, the massive economic shifts in the 80s and 90s devastated the local economy, leading to a huge rise in unemployment and its accompanying social ills. Inspiration for any crime writers, whether historic or more recent is not hard to find. This is no Midsomer!
Then there is the city’s layout. Coventry has been rebuilt repeatedly since the medieval period. Littered all around the city are remnants of the city walls and ancient buildings, interwoven with the evidence of hundreds of years of building and rebuilding. Obviously, one can’t mention rebuilding without referencing the second world war, specifically the devastating blitz on the city centre that destroyed our beautiful cathedral and flattened the city’s heart. Since then there have been waves of regeneration, some more successful than others. Move out the city’s (in)famous inner ring road and Coventry is a patchwork quilt of areas of extreme wealth, the well-to-do middle classes and extreme poverty, with everything in between. Suburbs such as Tile Hill, Canley and Earlsdon feature large, expensive houses rubbing shoulders with mid-range terraces and “temporary” post-war social housing still occupied eighty years later. As any social historian or crime writer will tell you, those extreme contrasts are the perfect catalyst for crime.
The way I see it, if there can be terrific series set in Bradford (such as A.A. Dhand’s Harry Virdee and Liz Mistry’s Nikki Parekh to name just a couple), then why not Coventry?
I never cut my ties with Coventry, since I still had family and friends who lived here. But it was my Essex-born-and-bred wife who suggested we move back to Coventry a few years ago and this fully crystalised my decision to set my next books here. Not only would it now be easy to set my books in a real, living, breathing city – something which I have always admired about Ian Rankin or Peter James – but I was also starting to see Coventry through my wife’s eyes. My impressions of Coventry are now a mixture of thirty-year old memories, coloured with the emotions of a teenager, and the fresher memories of my wife who has only ever seen Coventry in recent times. Where I see the ghosts of shops and businesses decades gone, my wife sees attractive new developments with opportunities for young people and aspirations for the future.
Which led to the final piece in the jigsaw puzzle that became the Foxe and Kennard series. Posh-boy former London detective DS Robinson Ellington Foxe and proud, working-class Salford lass DC Amy Kennard had to be outsiders. Having left their previous forces under a cloud, they don’t want to be working in Coventry. Nor do their new colleagues want them here. And it is this pariah-like status that provides the necessary internal conflict that is the lynchpin of any good story. It also allows me to describe Coventry through fresh eyes.
Hopefully there is something for all readers, both Coventrians enjoying a book set in the city they love and newcomers visiting somewhere new through the pages of a book. Deadly Truths is out now, with book two, Home Truths, ready to preorder for November. Book three is due next May and book four is currently being written. The crime fiction world will be getting to know Coventry a lot better over the next few years…
Many thanks Paul for being on the blog today
Book Details
ISBN: 978 1068730535
Publisher: Straw Hat Crime
Formats: e-book and paperback
No. of Pages: 336 (paperback)
Series: Book 1 in the Foxe and Kennard series
Purchase Links
About the Author
Paul Gitsham is the author of the Foxe and Kennard British detective series, the DCI Warren Jones series and the standalone domestic thriller, The Aftermath.
Brought up in Coventry, he started his career as a biologist. After gaining a PhD in molecular biology, he worked in laboratories in Manchester and Toronto, before retraining as a science teacher. Along the way he had spells as the world’s most over-qualified receptionist and spent time working for a major UK bank, ensuring that terrorists, foreign dictators and other international ne’er do wells hadn’t embarrassed the institution by managing to deposit their ill-gotten gains in a Children’s Trust Fund.
Paul’s final school reports from primary school said that he would never achieve anything if his handwriting didn’t improve. A somewhat kinder note urged him to become the next Roald Dahl. If anything, his handwriting has got worse and unless Mr Dahl also wrote police procedurals under a pseudonym, he has failed on both counts.
Paul is a member of the Crime Writers Association and the International Thriller Writers organisation and lives with his wife in the West Midlands in a house with more books than shelf space.
You can also find Paul at:
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