My upcoming series of books are about Inspector John Carlyle, a forty-something policeman, working out of the Charing Cross police station in Central London. The first Carlyle novel, London Calling, will be published in 2011, with the second due in 2012.
The original idea for the core storyline of London Calling came after reading A Florentine Death, by Michele Giuttari, who is a former head of the Florence Police Force. The protagonist perhaps owes most to Donna Leon’s iconoclastic Venetian detective Guido Brunetti but there is also more than a nod to Andrea Camilleri’s sicilian gumshoe Salvo Montalbano. Overall, I would describe the novels as 'European crime fiction', full of shades of grey, moral ambiguities and unfinished business. |
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Where better to set such a series than London? While there are many great crime series set around the continent – Venice, Florence, Ystad, Hamburg, Edinburgh and Oxford to name but a few - London, it seems to me, has not been used as a backdrop too often. This was a surprise, not least as it is almost impossible not to open the Evening Standard on any given day and be handed at least one or two potential storylines.
London, of course, is a sprawling metropolis of more than 650 square miles and more than 8 million souls, drawn from all corners of the globe. Carlyle’s London however is a much smaller geographic space, centred in and around the Covent Garden neighbourhood, located between the financial district ('the City') and the shopping district (the West End). As such, I am able to set much of the action amidst a range of familiar landmarks, including Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace. |
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In London Calling, someone has started killing off elite members of London society. In the killer’s sights is the man aiming to be the country’s next Prime Minister, not to mention the Mayor of London. Inspector John Carlyle of London’s Metropolitan Police knows why, but not who. Can he stop the killer before others take it into their own hands?
When Carlyle is handed a note telling him of a body in a nearby London hotel room he thinks it’s a joke. On discovering otherwise, he begins a journey through the murky world of the British upper classes, leading all the way to the heart of the political establishment.
The first Inspector Carlyle takes place in a world where right and wrong don’t exist. And, for a cynical policeman, the chances to ‘do the right thing’ are few and far between. |
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