I always intended to be a writer - and to begin 'tomorrow' . Tomorrow took a long time coming and meanwhile I worked as a director in a London publishing firm, editing military, theatrical and other memoirs, together with a fiction list of ghost stories and romances. I learned a lot about the world of writing there, but not much about what it was actually like to be a writer. Tomorrow did eventually come. I married my American husband James Myers and for some years we had a commuting marriage between Paris, where he then worked, and London, where I did. Crazy, looking back at it, but it seemed a good idea then - particularly as it was there that I dreamed up my first series detective, Auguste Didier, a half French, half English master chef in late Victorian and Edwardian times.
At the moment I'm in the middle of a series about a father and daughter team. Peter and Georgia Marsh's current appearance is in Murder in the Mist. Their cases take them out and about, but Peter and Georgia are based in Kent, where I was born and where Jim and I now live. Murder in the Mist is, guess what, set in Kent. Peter and Georgia find themselves in the small Kentish village of Fernbourne, where in the late 1930s the Fernbourne Five had flourished, a group of artists and writers. The group was dominated by the love triangle between Elfie Hunt, her husband Gavin, and the poet Alwyn Field who committed suicide in 1949. But what is the truth behind that suicide? Peter and Georgia decide to find out.
I’m currently writing Murder Takes the Stage in which Peter and Georgia, in following up a clue as to what might have happened to Rick, Georgia’s brother, who disappeared years ago on holiday, eat lunch in a Kentish fish and chip restaurant, said to be haunted by the ghost of a man who murdered his wife there in the 1950s. Tom Watson was acquitted of the murder, but later disappeared and is thought to have committed suicide. He was one of the Three Joeys, a trio of clowns in a seaside show. Peter and Georgia find there are unanswered questions – and set out to solve them.
New in the US from Five Star Publishing is Tom Wasp and the Murdered Stunner. Tom Wasp is a chimney sweep in the East End of Victorian London, but together with his young apprentice Ned he manages to get mixed up in murder. In this novel his friend Bessie, a painters' model, is found murdered and Tom vows to find her killer. Tom has appeared in several short stories over the years but this is his first full length novel. I'm currently halfway through its successor, Tom Wasp and Newgate Knocker.
As well as novels, I greatly enjoy writing short stories, which appear in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and in anthologies. A collection of them is published by Crippen & Landru under the title Murder, 'Orrible Murder.
You can also read about my crime writing in my author's profile at the Crime and Mystery Fiction Journal website, www.twbooks.co.uk
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