In Kelly’s sixth mystery featuring Det. Insp. Peter Shaw, Death on Demand, Shaw must solve the baffling murder of a centenarian.
Was your father an influence on your professional career?
I’m the son of a Scotland Yard detective, which is as good a start as any in life for a crime writer. Frankly, he didn’t talk about his work a lot. I think he felt I needed shielding from some pretty nasty people, so he didn’t bring his work home. But I think I did acquire his mind-set—the idea that I have a right to ask questions, to be inquisitive, and that I expect answers. I went on, after university, to be a journalist.
Did that work shape how you wrote fiction?
Being a journalist is a brilliant training for crime writing. I loved being a “hack,” trying to pick up stories from what I could see, and what I heard, around me. Working for the Financial Times was the icing on the cake, because I got to see how real power works. I hope this gives my fiction plenty of local gritty believable detail but also a convincing overarching bigger story.
How did your Shaw series start?
My publishers were looking for a police procedural series. I think I had always wanted to write books loosely based around my dad, so it was a great opportunity. In fact, the main character is a young version of my father—his sidekick an older version, with some of the hope, and idealism, worn away. That’s why they annoy each other; they’re the same person.
You’ve said that you like exploring how landscapes make us who we are.
My real interest in fiction is the relationship between people and place, the way in which our characters and actions are affected by landscape. I was brought up in the dull city suburbs of London, reading books about adventures and mysteries in wonderful landscapes—Cornish coves, Scottish mountains, small towns in which everyone knew everyone else. What I am striving for is a novel in which the place is so important the plot won’t work without it. In Death on Demand, the key was a real place, which I knew as a student in the northern industrial city of Sheffield. There was an abandoned housing estate called Parkwood Springs, the entry and exit to which was a single narrow tunnel. This gateway had proved so small that the whole place had eventually been abandoned as buses could not get through, or many modern cars. It was a classic real-life locked room of the golden age of crime writing. I thought it would be wonderful to set a murder here, as if it was a medieval walled city with the gates locked at night.
