Up until a few years ago, I would never have considered that I suffered from writer’s block. I still view my work as a craft not an art, and whilst I always strive to become a better craftsperson/crafter/more crafty, that doesn’t mean I can get away with sitting around waiting for the muse to strike. Putting arse in chair and putting fingers on keyboard generally works for me. This is a job, after all, no longer a hobby. As Lee Child famously once said, lorry drivers don’t get lorry driver’s block—they simply get up in the morning, get in their lorry, and drive.

In the past I thought of writer’s block as being a dreadful case of staring at a blank page and not being able to get a word down. But according to the online definitions, it can go much further than that. It also covers being able to write, but being convinced that everything you produce is utter rubbish.

If that’s the case, I’m a chronic sufferer.

One of the best blogs I ever came across on the subject was penned by Charlie Jane Anders going back ten years ago. In it, she explored the different types of creative shutdown that form WB, and how to overcome them. The blog itself is well worth reading, but here are the highlights:

You can’t come up with an idea
This has never been my problem. I have so many novel ideas they’re falling out of my ears. Unless, of course, we’re talking about blog ideas, or short story ideas, and then yes, I do stare holes in the walls. These days, if I’m stuck I try writing up any kind of scene for which I have half an idea, regardless if it might fit with a current project or not. The CJA blog recommends you do a ton of exercises to get your creative juices flowing, from writing a random scene in which somebody dies, or falls in love, to writing a scathing satire of someone you hate. (Of course, just be careful not to accidentally email this one out to your writing class buddies…)

You have plenty of ideas, but none of them seem to go anywhere
This is a tougher one to get around and I admit to it being an issue with me. Until I have the starting point of a story of any kind nailed down I feel I can’t proceed further. CJA suggests working out the purpose of a project—that the novel idea you’re losing a grip on is actually a short story, for instance—which may rescue it. Saving them for a later date is often the only thing you can do, and come back to them later—and by that she means sometimes years later—when any reservations surrounding them have had time to disperse. Instead, look round for something fresh. If your creative mind is working so hard on reasons to reject the current crop, the chances are it will soon produce something that works here and now.

You can’t make progress even though you have an outline
This always happens when I’m in the middle of a novel. I’ve carefully worked out my outline beforehand, but there will always be sticky bits, and they’re usually where things have got a little vague. I tend to think of working from an outline as like driving along a road at night. Your headlights are on and you can see the road immediately in front of you in stark detail, but beyond that things are hazier. You know ultimately where the road leads, but that doesn’t mean a deer isn’t going to leap into your path, or an oncoming driver will career into your lane and you have to be prepared to react to that. If I’m trying to shove a story forwards and it won’t go, there’s usually a good reason. The best bits—to my mind at least—are the ones that arrived easily and fast.

CJA points out there could be a couple of reasons for getting stuck in this way. Either your outline has a major flaw and you won’t admit it, or there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with your outline, but you just can’t see a way of getting from one high-point to the next. In either case, she suggests going off on a bit of a tangent and seeing what happens.

You have no idea what happens next
This can quite often happen if the night before I didn’t stop writing until my forehead kept nudging the space bar. The next morning I’ll open up the document and discover that not only have I stopped in mid-sentence—occasionally in mid-word—but I have no idea where I was going with it. Sometimes the bulk of the previous paragraph makes very little sense either, but that’s another thing altogether. This is why I try never to end the day’s work at the end of a scene or chapter, so I do know what’s supposed to happen next when I pick up the thread again, and I re-read the previous day’s scribblings as well to get me back up to speed. CJA suggests, if you’re really stuck, to have something unexpected happen. To have Huck and Jim take a wrong turn on the river and get lost, or to drop a grand piano on someone. Or, as Chandler would say, to have a man walk into the room with a gun.

You think your story took a wrong turn waaay back, but it’s only finally come to a head now
This is terrible. I mark progress on a book by the cumulative total of words and having to throw away some of those words because you’ve wandered down a literary cul-de-sac just throws the whole project out of whack. To quote some old phrase: there’s no harm in turning back if you’re on the wrong road. That’s not to say it doesn’t hurt, but don’t throw any of that excised chunk away. The chances are it might come in handy for something else further down the line. You just might not be absolutely sure what that is yet. CJA suggests that you miss a section and carry on from the point you feel you should have been at, had you not decided to deviate in the first place, leaving the missing part to be filled in later. As someone who frequently writes out of sequence—many’s the epilogue I’ve written before the rest of the book—this would work for me.

You’re bored with the characters
Here CJA and I deviate because she suggests that perhaps this is because you haven’t worked out who your main protagonist is yet, and you’ve been concentrating on someone who’s a minor character. CJA’s advice is that sometimes you have to find the knife before you can twist it, and therefore writing a dozen pages or so of nothing-much-happening will help you get inside the world you’re creating and possibly also discover whose voice grabs you hard enough to make it obvious they should be the main character rather than a bit-part player.

When I was writing only the Charlie Fox series, I was never in any doubt who was the main protagonist. But since then I’ve written more third-person, multiple-viewpoint narratives. The latest Blake & Byron books focus on two main characters, but with various scenes from other viewpoints. These characters are important to that particular story, but who may (or may not) reappear in the next book.

The best advice I ever received on this front was to make everybody count. Imagine Hollywood is turning your book into a movie, and a bit-part actor has just been cast in only one short scene, in which he/she is questioned by your hero/she-ro. I want that actor to be delighted with the part, rather than reading glumly through their lines and thinking, ‘ah well, it pays the rent…’

The scenes I’ve just been working on are a case in point. My detective, Byron, needs to question a possible witness at a motorway service station. The witness turns out to be a female truck driver from Glasgow, who is a reformed drug addict and spends her downtime reading Dostoevsky. What’s not to like?

You keep imagining all the reasons why people are going to hate your work
CJA describes this as your Inner Critic—you can’t make choices because you keep imagining how someone on goodreads or Amazon will tear you apart for it later. The Inner Critic, she says, has its place during revision, but during the first draft stage is better drowned out with some Finnish death metal. I’d agree with this, but at the same time I tend to self-edit as I go along, and therefore I don’t rush a first draft onto the page with the thought that I can correct any problems at the second/third/fourth draft phase. But, this is just me. I know everyone writes in their own way and therefore I do give sneaky house room to my Inner Critic during the first draft. I just try not to let it paralyse me to the point where I can’t get anything down. Reading over and over what I’ve written previously, trying to refine and improve it, always helps.

The Difficult Third Quarter
Here I’m deviating completely from CJA’s list to add a few of my own. The Difficult Third Quarter—DTQ—is one of my constant bugbears when I write. The first quarter of the novel I’m racing into the story, introducing the players and asking more questions of the reader than I’m answering. The second quarter is for some answers, followed by more questions and a few red herrings. But the DTQ is when you have to start pulling the threads together. Pull them too tight, too soon and the ending falls flat. Don’t pull them tight enough and you’ll be left with too much explanation to do in the final chapter. Unless you write the kind of books where the detective settles everyone down in the drawing room for the big reveal, this is something to avoid.

So, my question this week is do you suffer from writer’s block and if so what do you do to combat it?

This week’s Word of the Week is carking, meaning anxiety, worry, a burden on the mind or spirit. It comes from the Anglo-French karke, from the Old North French carche, charge—a variant of load, burden, imposition.

You can read this blog, or comment, at Murder Is Everywhere.

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But it’s not just unusual words that fascinate me. I love common words with unusual meanings, or slight difference in spellings that change everything. (A while ago, I was sent an email imploring me to sign a partition.) When I started making a note of some words that caught my eye for this post, I quickly filled pages of notes, and then had to force myself to stop. Here are some of my favourites, in no particular order.

Homophones
In UK English, we have both practice and practise—noun and verb. So, you could be practising your backhand during tennis practice.

And although in UK English we would ask someone to use their best judgement when making a decision, if the context referred to British legal proceedings, the spelling would be judgment, as in US English.

One that often seems to cause confusion is callous, meaning to be insensitive or to have a cruel disregard for others, and can also mean hardened and thickened, but callus particularly means a thickening, or a hard thickened area, of skin or bark. So, someone might have either callous hands, or callused hands—or even callous, callused hands—but the meanings would be very different!

While androgynous means having both male and female characteristics, androgenous means having only male offspring.

Everyone knows what angry means, but angary is a legal term meaning a belligerent’s right to seize and use neutral or other property, subject to compensation.

Pursue means to harass or persecute—or, in Scots law, to prosecute—and Spenser spelt it pursew with the same meaning. But written persue, it is not only another alternative spelling, but also means a track of blood. (Spenser again) from the act of piercing.

Consent might be to agree or comply, but concent is a harmony of sounds or voices.

The meaning of blanket is familiar, but blanquet is a variety of pear, blanquette is a ragout of chicken or veal made with a white sauce, and bloncket means grey. (That bloke Spenser gets everywhere.)

A lake is not only a body of water, but also a small stream or channel, or a reddish pigment made from combining a dye with metallic hydroxide to give the colour carmine. Spell it laik and it becomes a Northern English term meaning to sport or play, or be unemployed, and lakh means the number 100,000 in India and Pakistan, especially when referring to rupees, or an infinitely vast number.

While a block is a mass of stone or wood, a bloc is a combination of parties, nations, or other units to achieve a common purpose.

One that always used to confuse me as a kid was the difference between demure, meaning chaste or modest, and demur meaning to object or hesitate.

And I know for a fact I’ve accidentally mixed up defuse, to take the fuse out of a bomb or, according to Shakespeare (and what did he know?) to disorder, with diffuse, meaning widely spread or wordy, or also to pour out all around; to scatter.

A clue might be anything that points to the solution to a mystery, but it’s derived from clew, being the ball of thread that guided Ariadne through the labyrinth, as well as being the lower corner of a sail, or one of the cords by which a hammock is suspended.

To be discreet means to be careful of intentionally unobtrusive, but discrete means distinct or unconnected.

Another I keep coming across in my recent reading is reign, meaning to rule, being used in the context of somebody being given a free hand to do as they like. I can see how this might seem logical, but it should relate to horse riding rather than the monarchy, as in to be given free rein. Not to be confused with wet rain falling from the clouds, or the US gender-neutral name Rayne, meaning abundant blessings from above.

And this is before we get to the words with one spelling but lots of different meanings…

Homonyms
To smirkle means to assume a facial expression somewhere between pleasure and sarcasm, followed by laughter; an emotional response to an idiotic question; a dance move in Revenge of the Nerds; a gag reflex to a noxious odour, and also to pilfer or steal.

Swanky can be used as a compliment for something that’s strikingly fashionable or luxurious, but it can also mean to be overly ostentatious, or using one’s wealth, knowledge or achievements to try to impress others. In Scots, swanky means an active or clever young fellow, one who is tall but lank, or to be empty or hungry. Whereas swank is a Scots word meaning slender, pliant, agile, or supple.

Pernicious means both destructive and highly injurious, but also (according to Milton) swift, ready and prompt.

A tent could be a portable canvas shelter, an embroidery or tapestry frame, a plug or roll of soft material for dilating a wound, or the Scots word for taking heed or notice of.

A rabble could be a disorderly mob, but also a device for stirring molten iron etc in a furnace.

To cleave is both to split apart and to join together.

A race is the descendants of a common ancestor, a fixed course or track over which anything runs, the white streak down an animal’s face, a rootstock of ginger (Shakespeare) to raze or erase, or to tear away or snatch. (Both Spenser. He just made them up as he felt like it, didn’t he?)

One of my pet hates is the word feisty, used to mean tough, independent, or spirited—usually about a heroine. It can also mean lively and aggressive. However, originally feisty mean either a small, excitable, yappy dog, or to be flatulent. Not the kind of characteristic I particularly want to be associated with Charlie Fox…

Anyway, there are LOTS of others, so what are your favourites, folks? And what’s the best accidental misuse of a word you’ve ever come across?
No Word of the Week this week. I think I’ve used quite enough, don’t you?

You can read this blog, or comment, at Murder Is Everywhere.

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Instead, the comments came from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS). This government-run agency’s task is to independently assess the effectiveness and efficiency of both the police and fire & rescue services, in the public interest.

Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary, Zoë Billingham, said there was “a once in a generation opportunity to permanently uproot violence against women and girls, which is now epidemic in this country.”

This year’s report is not the first time the police in England and Wales have been found wanting in this area. In 2014, another report by the HMICFRS concluded that: ‘The overall police response to victims of domestic abuse is not good enough. Unacceptable failings in core policing activities, investigating crime, preventing crime, bringing offenders to justice and keeping victims safe are the principal reasons for this.’

The latest report, commissioned by the Home Secretary, looked at all local forces in England and Wales, and opened by saying ‘Fundamental cross-system change is urgently needed to tackle … violence against women and girls (VAWG).’  VAWG offences are classified as acts of violence or abuse that disproportionately affect women and girls (in this report, girls are seventeen or younger). This includes rape, domestic abuse, stalking, and many other crimes.

Although the report allowed that ‘the police had made vast improvements in the response to VAWG over the last decade, including better identification of repeat victims and improved safeguarding measures,’ it followed this by saying that it had also found ‘several areas where the police need to improve, including grave concerns about the numbers of VAWG cases closed without charge, and major gaps in the data recorded on VAWG offences,’ and suggested that the police could not tackle the problem alone. ‘The whole system—including policing, health and education—must take a fundamentally new approach.’

It is hard to believe we have entered the third decade of the twenty-first century, and this level of VAWG is not only still going on, but seems to be getting worse.

And, if not getting worse, then certainly it seems to be taken less seriously.

Police forces across England and Wales were listing priorities such as counter-terrorism, organised crime, so-called county lines gangs (which operate across different force areas), and some forms of child abuse. Ms Billingham said: “Violence against girls is not highlighted specifically as a priority within strategic policing requirement, the only real signal the government has to state what its priorities are.”

The report underlined data showing that ‘huge’ discrepancies were found in how different forces used the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme (DVDS), which was designed to supply confidential information about a person’s past criminal activity to someone who is believed to be at risk of future abuse by that person. It is intended to reduce intimate partner violence.

Clare’s Law
The DVDS is also known Clare’s Law. It is named for Clare Wood, who was murdered in her home in Salford in 2009 by a former partner with a severe record of serious abuse against women. He had been imprisoned three times—six months for breaching a restraining order; two years for harassment; and six years for holding a woman at knifepoint for twelve hours.

Unaware of this frightening history, Clare met George Appleton on a dating website in April 2007. They began a relationship, which was ended by Clare several months later. At that point, Appleton turned nasty and began a campaign of intimidation towards Clare.

Although she was interviewed several times—and Greater Manchester Police were aware of Appleton’s criminal background—in February 2009 Clare was raped and strangled by Appleton, who then set fire to her body. Days later, he was found hanged in a derelict building. Clare’s father, together with various politicians and journalists, mounted a campaign to give sufferers the right to know if their partners had previous history of domestic violence.

Clare’s Law was first implemented in England and Wales in 2014, although it is not, in fact, a law, but takes the form of guidance issued to police forces. It has since been extended to other police services in some areas of Australia and Canada.

Perhaps because divulging information about a person by the police raises issues over privacy, less than thirty-nine percent of DVDS applications by partners of potential suspects, or other concerned members of the public, end in disclosure.

And only fifty-two percent of proactive DVDS applications by police forces resulted in that information being passed on to a potential victim.

Three out of four domestic abuse cases reported to the police are closed early without any charges being brought. The HMCIFRS found that police forces were closing such cases either because of lack of support from the victim, or lack of evidence despite the victim wanting to proceed.

Ms Billingham said: “It is the police’s job to build the case for the victim. In many cases, it isn’t clear that forces are taking all the opportunities to undertake an effective initial investigation, or that they desisted from pushing back the decision onto the victim… When was the last time any of us heard of the police asking a burglary victim if they wanted the police to take action? It doesn’t happen but it happens repeatedly in crimes of domestic abuse.”

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of all this is that the data informing the report was collected in the year to March 2020—before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, with the resultant rise in domestic violence.

When I first came up with the character of Charlie Fox, more than twenty years ago, she started out teaching self-defence classes to women in a northern English city. Over the course of the series, she moved on from that into professional close-protection work. It is sad to realise that the need for those lessons she taught back then—how to avoid being strangled; to escape from a wrist lock; even to deal with an attacker armed with a knife or broken bottle—has not decreased. If anything, that need has grown…

If you’d like to comment on this blog, you can do so at Murder_Is_Everywhere.

This week’s Word of the Week is hüzün, a Turkish word for the gloomy feeling that, bad as things are at the moment, they are probably going to get worse. One can take comfort from the fact that this state of affairs happens so universally, there is a word in another language for it.

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You might think these words were used to describe the situation in Afghanistan in August 2021 as the Taliban took control of the country. In fact, they were written by British journalist David Loyn in September 1996, to describe events as the Taliban last came to power after the departure of Russian forces in 1988/89.

The more things change, it seems, the more they stay the same.

The past few weeks have seen the withdrawal of coalition troops from Afghanistan after a conflict lasting twenty years. I doubt history will look kindly on the manner in which this evacuation took place. Although I agree with the words of German field marshal and military strategist, Helmuth von Moltke: “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” I’m paraphrasing here, but you get the gist.

Even so, I think Field Marshal von Moltke would be shaking his head in horrified wonder at the chaotic scenes we’ve watched on the nightly news, as crowds of desperate Afghans and foreign nationals tried to get aboard the last flights out of the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, even as the Taliban were re-taking the city. The sight of people clinging to the outside of a US transport plane as it rolled along the runway, and then falling as it took off, is not one I will soon forget.

On August 8, President Biden had announced, “The likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.” This was despite the fact that, as far back as May 20, the UN had reported that the Taliban “now contest or control an estimated fifty to seventy percent of Afghan territory outside of urban centres, while also exerting direct control over fifty-seven percent of district administrative centres.”

By August 14, the Taliban controlled all border crossings, with the exception of the airport. The following day, they began their assault on the capital, which surrendered within hours.

I realise I’m an outsider in all this, but I still wonder why—when political and military commanders knew well in advance that they were ending operations in Afghanistan—they didn’t begin evacuation of Afghan nationals who had worked alongside the coalition forces via Bagram Airfield, while they still had control of it. It would appear from reports I’ve seen that the last US troops left the base—shutting off the electricity and disappearing into the night—July 1, without a formal handover to the Afghan Armed Forces. Most of the AAF only realised the US troops had gone when the lights went out and the looting started. Although the AAF quickly regained control of Bagram it, too, fell to Taliban forces on August 15.

On August 26, a suicide bomber detonated around 25 pounds of explosives and shrapnel outside the Abbey Gate of the airport, killing at least 170 people and wounding 150 others. The Islamic State group IS-K claimed responsibility. This further hampered the evacuation efforts.

Although reports claim that 122,300 people were airlifted out of Kabul, tens of thousands were left behind. We are told that some are now living in fear of reprisals for having aided the coalition. Women are frightened of consequences for simply gaining an education, a job, or going about without a chaperone.

So far, the new Taliban government appears to be playing nice. They promise we will not see a return to the human rights abuses of the 1990s, when public floggings, amputations, and executions by stoning were commonplace. They even promise that women may continue their education, and return to their government jobs—although not at any kind of high level, obviously…

Only time will tell.

For me, it was heart-breaking to watch events as they have unfolded in Afghanistan. I took a particular interest as I’ve highlighted the situation there in two of my books. The first of these was Dancing On The Grave, the first of my Lakes crime thrillers. This story features an ex-military sniper who is suffering from PTSD after serving in Afghanistan. The treatment of a teenage Afghan boy who operated as his spotter plays a huge role in the plot.

The latest book to feature Afghanistan is a prequel to my Charlie Fox series, Trial Under Fire, which came out in August. The action of this book follows Charlie years before the series proper starts, back when she is still in the British Army and is on what should have been a routine patrol with her unit in Helmand province. At that time, female personnel were not supposed to be put in combat situations. But a helicopter crash and the arrival of a Black Ops team soon throws that out the window. They need Charlie’s ‘very particular set of skills’. How can she say no?

If you’d like to comment on this blog, you can do so at Murder_Is_Everywhere.

This week’s Word of the Week is dustsceawung, which is an Old English word for which there is no direct translation. It means to contemplate the fact that dust used to be other things—we came from dust, and will return to being dust when we are gone. It is supposed to shift one’s focus from the material things in life to subjects with deeper meaning.

As well as Trial Under Fire, my latest book out is the Charlie Fox short story collection, Fox Five Reloaded. Available for pre-order is the first in a new series, The Last Time She Died, which will be out in October 2021.

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I recently came across an excellent article by Thomas Umstattd Jr on Author Media about how author websites can irritate readers. It makes illuminating reading.

Thomas lists in his piece the eight points that are likely to most annoy visitors to your website. As he explains, if you’ve ever tried to find something on a website that’s not intuitive to use, you don’t tend to write to the webmaster with advice, but instead you go to the next competitor on the list and buy from them instead.

An author’s shop window
So, the importance of a well-designed, easy-to-navigate site is really important. It’s an author’s shop window, after all, and you can’t expect to gain customers if they can’t find what they’re looking for.

First up is if people can’t find an easy way to buy your latest book. Visitors are used to being able to click on a book cover and go straight to a sales page or sales website. Occasionally, clicking on a book cover simply produces a larger version of the image.

Thomas suggests that if your book is available only on Amazon, that you link directly to the book’s page on that site, with a smart link to take them to the store in the correct territory. But, if your book is available from a selection of outlets, then provide suitable sales links for those who are Amazon adverse.

Second is if people can’t find the status of your work-in-progress. He suggests using a plugin that will add a progress bar to the website, according to how far through the project you are. This sounds terrifying to me. I think I’d rather stick to the occasional blog post about how the latest book is coming along.

Number three on the list is if readers can’t easily contact you. I confess that if I’m deep in a book it can take me a while to respond to messages, but I do try to get to all of them. Thomas suggests several methods of contact, including a PO Box mailing address, a contact form on the website, social media profiles, and even a phone number. I was surprised to see this last one, and I would not willingly give out my phone number on the internet.

At the same time, he advises turning off notifications from social media and your email program, to give you the headspace to write.

The fourth irritation is if people can’t find your website on Google. Getting the site optimised for search engines is vital. If you don’t have the skills in SEO yourself, then hire a professional. Thomas points out that each book should have an individual page, and anything written on the home page of your website should be in third person, so it mentions your name rather than ‘I’. The same goes for your author biography. It’s very exasperating, if you’re doing a piece on an author, to have to go through their biog, changing every first-person mention to third.

Books in your series
Not being able to browse your backlist is at number five on the list, and particularly if people can’t look up the previous books in your series and work out what order they should be read. It’s also a good idea to have a printable list of your backlist books, in order.

Number six on the irritation list is if visitors to your site can’t find a good quality image of you, your book covers, or any maps that form a part of your story. Particularly relevant for novels set in a specific location—real or imaginary. As Thomas reminds us, people often read or listen on their phones, where it would be difficult to see the detail of a map on the screen.

He advises putting a large resolution image of any maps on the book page of your website, so readers can study them more easily, or including the maps related to a particular book in a blog post. And, of course, having hi-res author photos available for press or PR use.

Seven is pop-ups. They can be great and serve a useful purpose if you want to grow your email list. But, it’s the timing of pop-ups that is usually the problem. They appear before you’ve had a chance to read much of anything, and before you’ve decided that yes, you would like to sign up, then are never around later when you want them. Thomas reckons corner pop-ups are less irksome than centre ones, and delaying their arrival tends to work better.

Responsive design
Lastly, these days many people will be visiting author websites on their phones rather than via a desktop or laptop, so making sure the website has responsive design that will alter to display to best advantage on a mobile screen is really important.

What irritates YOU the most about author websites you’ve visited—or any other websites, for that matter—and what features did you think were really cool? I’d love to know.

Meanwhile, if you want to read the full article by Thomas Umstattd Jr, go to Author Media.

This week’s Word of the Week is bibliosmia, meaning to smell a book for pleasure, or the aroma of a good book.

Books News
One book just out, another about to come out, and a third on pre-order for October.

TRIAL UNDER FIRE: Charlie Fox prequel, is just out. It tells the story of Charlie from a few years ago, when she was still a young soldier in the regular Army, serving in Afghanistan. ‘The last thing she expected, when she headed out on routine patrol, was to end up riding into a firefight, on horseback, with the Spice Girls…’

Available for pre-order and out August 16 2021 is FOX FIVE RELOADED: Charlie Fox short story collection. An extended edition of the original FOX FIVE collection, this now has nine stories, set across the globe, from Lancashire in England, to swanky Long Island, exotic Casablanca, and Afghanistan, the hotspot of the Middle East.

And finally, a brand new set of characters, THE LAST TIME SHE DIED is the first of a new series, and will be out October 20 2021. ‘She came back on the day of her father’s funeral, ten years after she vanished. But she can’t be who she says she is. Because we killed her. Didn’t we?’

You can read the fully illustrated version of this blog, and comment on it, over on Murder Is Everywhere.

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When Charlie Fox became a professional bodyguard—which she did in book four in the series, having spent all of book three at a bodyguard training school in Germany—I knew I couldn’t always have things going Horribly Wrong for her. Not without her becoming the Typhoid Mary of the close-protection world. So, occasionally I made mention in the narrative of other jobs—the ones that took place in the cracks between books—when everything went like an oiled machine.

The jobs when nothing went wrong, there were no ambushes or kidnappings, no attempted heists, no natural disasters, and nobody gets butchered.

The boring ones, in other words.

Likewise, when a character disappears from one story and crops up again later in the series, I need to know what they’ve been doing in the meantime. They don’t just hang about in cryogenic suspension, waiting to be defrosted and fed back into the plot.

Hence, a character from book two, private security contractor Ian Garton-Jones was running a business that involved a horde of glorified security guards, trying to bring order to a north of England sink estate ravaged by violence and racial tensions. When I decided to bring him back, it wasn’t until ten books later. By that time, he’s progressed to the far more lucrative private military contractors’ market in Iraq.

Hopefully, though, if you read book twelve without having read any of the other books, you wouldn’t feel like you were missing an inside joke. At the same time, I tried hard to reintroduce Garton-Jones in such a way that I wasn’t repeating myself too much for people who’d already met him before.

When Charlie was almost run off the road on her motorcycle by a van driver with more than the usual homicidal tendencies in book five, she sought shelter at the nearby workshop of a bike customising Hell’s Angel called Gleet, on his sister’s farm, with destructive results. I made a return visit to the siblings’ farm two books later. A new reader to book seven might take that crackled stone gatepost as merely a bit of description, rather than a memento of their previous encounter. As was mention of the expertise with a crossbow of Gleet’s morose sister, May…

But, there’s one character who has been notable by his absence from the latest book, and that’s Sean Meyer. He’s been a part of the series—and Charlie’s back story—right from the beginning. And, I confess, that over the course of the series I’ve certainly put him up a number of trees, and thrown the largest rocks I could find at him. He spends almost the entirety of book nine in a coma, and only appears in book eleven in flashback.

Still, readers do ask what’s happened to him. Where is he now? And what’s he up to? I mean, when you’re an ex-Special Forces soldier who’s suffered serious head trauma and realised you want a complete break from life as you know it, what do you do next?

Until recently, I had to say I’d no idea.

But now I know.

And the answer is—something completely different.

After the events in the Middle East and Bulgaria, Sean dropped off the grid. Several military contractors working in Iraq got the idea into their heads that he’d killed one of their own. Not to mention double-crossing a crime lord in Bulgaria with ties to the Russian mafia. The close-protection world in which Sean had always moved with such self-assurance had already become alien to him.

In the back of my mind, I have the idea that Sean is now in the Mediterranean, travelling, sailing, seeing the world notthrough a gun sight for possibly the first time in his life. He’s trying to keep a low profile, to stay off the radar and out of the way of trouble.

(Yeah, like that’s going to last for a guy like Sean.)

And will he ever get back together with Charlie? Well, never say never. I try not to plan more than a couple of books ahead, and there’s nothing to say their paths won’t cross again. It will be interesting to see whose side they’re on, as and when it does, won’t it?

I think I may feel a new story coming on. When I can leave the UK long enough to do the research, of course.

In the meantime, there are always videos like this one available on YouTube—Tristan Mortlock, aka Super Yacht Captain, taking the motor yacht AWOL into a very tight berth in Portofino Harbour in Italy, with the assistance of the harbour authorities, several crew members, and a drone. Enjoy!

This week’s Word of the Week is horripilation, meaning goosebumps—having the hairs on your body stand on end due to fear, excitement, or cold. From the Latin horrere, to stand on end, to bristle with fear, or to tremble, and the Latin pilus, meaning hair.

You can read the fully illustrated version of this blog, and comment on it, over on Murder Is Everywhere.

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The Charlie Fox prequel novella, TRIAL UNDER FIRE, goes back to a time when Charlie Fox was a regular soldier in the British Army. A radio operator out with a routine night patrol, she is not supposed to be in a close-combat position. But a downed helicopter sees her unit tasked with an urgent rescue mission, and all bets are off.

With enemy forces closing in, Charlie’s skills are put to the test…

Chapter Four

Anybody who’s ever been in a firefight will know just how chaotic it is. Not least because the adrenaline is rampaging through your system and all your senses seem to be running at maximum revs, even though I was four months into my tour in Afghanistan at that point. This was not my first time under fire by any stretch.

I took a couple of long, deep breaths, willed my heart to slow its pounding to a steadier rhythm. I knew I would never hit anything if I allowed my sight picture to be shunted all over the place by the beat of my own pulse.

As soon as our lads opened up from concealment on the south side of the ravine, the firing intensified. I shut it out of my mind, tried not to pay attention to the battle being fought behind me. I kept one eye on the image overlaid by the illuminated reticle inside the scope, and the other open in the darkness, now strobe-lit by muzzle flash.

It was unusual for the Taliban to mount a conventional military assault, or even to hold their ground when they faced a possible pitched battle with coalition forces. Guerrilla hit-and-run tactics had served them well when their countrymen were kicking the arse of the Russians during the 1980s. And they hadn’t done too badly at kicking ours back in the mid-1800s, either.

So, either the crew of the Lynx was of importance, or the insurgents were waiting for something to happen…

When I caught another flash high to my left—southeast of our position—at first I took it for more weapons fire. I tracked right and left, hunting for another burst, but nothing came.

A padded knee hit the dirt near my shoulder.

“You see that, Charlie?” Corporal Brookes demanded. He had to lean in and yell in my ear to be heard over the crackle of the guns. “What d’you reckon?”

I lifted my head. “Didn’t see enough of it to make a guess,” I said. “Small arms, maybe? If it was another RPG, it would have hit us by now.”

“Now there’s a cheery thought. If you—”

“There!” I interrupted him. “There it is again. It’s a vehicle—headlights, look. Coming fast, if the way they’re jolting around is anything to go by.”

“The mad buggers. They’ll rip the axles out of that thing.”

“Well, let’s hope they do it sooner rather than later, then.”

I dropped my face back to the scope, saw with more clarity an old Toyota pick-up truck, the rear bed crammed with Taliban fighters. They sat packed in so close their knees interlocked together, bristling with the usual AKs, but also PK machine guns, and old bolt-action Lee-Enfields.

I’d learned to make a fairly accurate estimate of distance using the mil-dots on the SA80’s reticle against the size of a known object, like the ubiquitous Toyota pick-up. By my reckoning, they were already a little over 800 metres away, and closing as fast the terrain would allow.

Brookes was saying something but I’d tuned him out as I tried to relax behind the gun, to melt into the dirt beneath me. I tracked the pick-up as it bucked and rocked over the ground. Vague calculations ran through my mind as I tried to predict where the jolting front headlights would land next, rather than where they were now.

I tried to concentrate on a point directly between the lights, where I knew the front grille of the Toyota would be, and the vulnerable radiator behind that. I could see it clearly inside my head, a target maybe half a metre square. And I told myself it was easy as I squeezed the trigger.

The truck reared up at the moment I fired, so it might almost have been reacting viscerally to the shot, but I knew I’d missed. They had gained another twenty or so metres by now, still coming, still closing.

I was at the limit of the effective range of the SA80, but ever since the army had discovered the ability I had with a long gun, they’d encouraged me to put down thousands of rounds in training, to enter Skill-at-Arms meetings and the competitions held at Bisley.

And if I left it much longer, the men advancing would have us well within the range of their battered AK47s. The Lee-Enfields some of them carried dated back before the Second World War. Old, true, but in the hands of an experienced fighter they could be deadly at a greater distance.

“You’re never aiming for that truck are you?” Brookes said. “’Cos you’ll be bloody lucky to—”

I ignored him, fired again, a two-round burst this time as the front of the truck came down, and immediately saw from the steam hissing out into the beam of the headlights that I’d scored a hit. The driver jerked the wheel in reaction, almost overturning the vehicle. It wrenched to a stop and I caught movement as the occupants bailed out into cover, expecting my next shots to be aimed at them.

“You jammy fucker!” Brookes said, just as Captain MacLeod reappeared alongside us.

“Corporal Brookes, give us a heads-up as soon as that truck gets within—”

“Don’t think they’re going to get any closer, sir,” Brookes said. He jerked his head in my direction. “Seems like they ran into car trouble.”

TRIAL UNDER FIRE is published, in eBook and print formats, on August 2 2021. Get your copy here.

The post Trial Under Fire excerpt appeared first on Zoë Sharp: Author of the Charlie Fox series and the Lakes Thriller series..

The kind of car driven by the main protagonist of a novel is, for me, a snapshot into the mind of that character. And for the author, it’s often a quick way to give information about the type of person your hero or SHEro is, without having to spell it out.

Dashing characters have a habit of driving equally dashing cars, where the quirkier types of detectives often drive classics. Occasionally, they are both. In the first of Ian Fleming’s novels to feature James Bond, Casino Royale, published in 1953, 007 drives a supercharged Bentley 4.5 litre that is already more than twenty years old.

Purely from a practical point of view, I can see the attraction of using a classic. By dint of it already being out of date at the start of the novel, it can hardly become an anachronism as the series goes on. In the three TV series of Spender, shown in the early 1990s and starring Jimmy Nail, he drives a Ford Sierra Sapphire Cosworth. A very In car at the time, but not one that’s stood the test of time as well as the original three-door Cosworth with its huge whale-tail rear spoiler.

Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse is noted for the MkII Jaguar he used in the TV adaptations, but in the books, he originally rumbled around the streets of Oxford in a Lancia Aurelia saloon.

Leslie Charteris, on the other hand, decided there wasn’t a vehicle quite dashing enough to suit his debonair thief, Simon Templar, alias The Saint. So, he invented one. In fact, he invented several, but the most notable of these was the Hirondel (artist’s impression below by Ted Lodigensky). The Saint was noted to drive this at speeds exceeding a mile a minute—not to be sniffed at in the 1930s!

I suppose this was also a very good way of never being caught out with the technical details about a particular model.

When I began writing my Charlie Fox Series, I knew very early on that she would be a motorcyclist, and thought it best to give her a model I was very familiar with. Hence the fact in the earlier books she rides a 250cc Suzuki RGV, which I can promise was plenty quick enough to get her into trouble—and preferably out of it again.

When the Suzuki eventually bites the dust, which it does through very little fault of Charlie Fox, she fortunately has another bike waiting in the wings, in the form of a Honda FireBlade. I knew I needed to give her a bigger bike because, quick as the Suzuki was, doing a road trip through Ireland in the company of people riding bigger, faster bikes, she’d need to be able to keep up.

And in the first of my Lakes Thriller Series, I wanted to give my CSI, Grace McColl, something practical for reaching off-road crime scenes. A Nissan Navara pick-up seemed just the thing. There was even room for her dog in the back.

Whereas her colleague, Detective Nick Weston, needed something that hinted he hadn’t quite grown out of his boy racer years. A Subaru Impreza—the STi WRX model—fitted the bill.

Both vehicles said something about their owners, and using them seemed a quick way to build character. Drivers of certain makes of car do seem to behave in predictable ways on the road these days. (And not always predictable in a good way.)

Are there any types of cars you would or would not like to see a character driving, and what do they say to you about the people who drive them?

If you’d like to comment on this blog, you can do so at Murder_Is_Everywhere.

This week’s Word of the Week is immane, meaning huge, vast, but also monstrous in character, cruel or savage, from the Latin immanis.

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Last weekend, I received an email from a reader who said she had read my Charlie Fox series and hated it.

When I read that opening line, my heart did one of those strange little lurches in my chest.

After all, you accept, when you write fiction, that your work is not going to please or suit everybody who gives it a try. That aspect makes it a lot harder than writing non-fiction, which is where I first started out. Non-fiction is a retelling of someone else’s story and doing your best to make it as cohesive, dramatic, interesting, and accurate as possible.

But when what goes onto the page is entirely made up from your imagination, there are plenty of opportunities for people to find it lacking. And, with the anonymity of the internet, most of those who don’t like what you do will have no problem saying so!

Also, Charlie Fox is not—and never has been—a conventional heroine. (I rather like the term SHEro, actually.) If I had to sum her up in a sentence, I suppose I could say that she’s a prime example of ‘that which doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.’

Ex-British Army, ex-Special Forces trainee, thrown out of her career before it really began, she starts off the series teaching self-defence classes in a northern English city. She doesn’t go looking for trouble, but trouble has a habit of finding her anyway. And when the former SAS sergeant who trained her turns up again in her life, she’s set on a course into the world of close-protection. It’s a good use of Charlie Fox’s capacity for violence—an aspect of her character that I’ve been exploring throughout the series.

So, as I said, you’re not going to please all the people, all the time. Although, I have to say that just about all the people who take the trouble to get in touch with me, do so because they’ve enjoyed the series. And when this particular reader seemed to be taking a different approach, I did the proverbial girding of loins to read the rest:

‘I hated all thirteen of [the books] (and the short stories), I hated how they made me feel things, made me cry and ruminate for days and wake up in the middle of the night feeling heartbroken for Charlie Fox (and myself).

‘Hate how the story still lingers with me as I contemplate Charlie’s future, will she ever have someone she can fully trust? Will Sean ever come back into her life or is he gone forever? (Is that a good thing or a bad thing?)

‘And finally, I can’t stop thinking about what a happy ending (not that you do happy) would look like for Charlie that wouldn’t cheapen her experiences and take away from her being a strong, kick-arse woman.

‘You have ruined me for all other books that come after and I wish you the worse of life filled with accolades and awards, don’t you dare write anymore books on Charlie Fox, I don’t think my heart could take it. 

‘Thank you

‘P.S. in case my sarcasm didn’t translate well, I love your books and am desperate for more.’

Sometimes, something arrives, out of the blue, and changes the way you look at what you do, how you feel about it. I’ve always said that I take my work seriously, but myself not at all seriously. To receive something like this is, honestly, rather humbling.

It makes all that agonising—over a scene or chapter that just won’t come out quite as I envisaged it—all rather worthwhile.

It makes me feel incredibly privileged, to be able to do what I do, and gain satisfaction from it—never mind the small matter of also making a living by the written word. And when I learn that other people get enough enjoyment out of reading that made-up stuff from my imagination, so that they’re inspired to write such a letter to the author, well, that’s just the icing on the cake.

This week’s Word of the Week is chthonian, an adjective meaning of the underworld of the dead, its spirits or gods. From a Latinised version of the Greek khthonios, meaning of the earth, in or under the ground, from khthon, the surface of the earth.

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