A very quick not to say that while No Precious Truth isn’t out until April 1 next year, if you pre-order it on Kindle, the price is £10.39, as cheap as I’ve seen Amazon go an on unpublished book – they’re running it for $14.99 in the US. The link is here. I know, it’s Amazon, but Kindle is the big format. I have one.
If you’re catching up on the Simon Westow series, The Scream of Sins is currently £12.99 ($11.49). Buy it here. The first two in the series are just £2.99 – quite a deal.
For Tom Harper fans, Rusted Souls, the final book in the series is £10.39 on Kindle ($11.49). Grab it here. The first eight books in the series are all low priced for Kindle.
Look, I’m from Yorkshire. Our wallets squeak when we have to open them. We all need to save money.
While I love Tom and Annabelle Harper dearly, along with Simon Westow, his wife Rosie, Jane and Sally, and can’t imagine them not in my life, there’s someone I all too often forget, and it’s to my shame that I do, especially as he’s the only one who truly existed.
Richard Nottingham, the Constable of Leeds.
I wrote seven books with him in the role he had in real life (and to settle any possible questions, no there won’t be more). He gave me my start as a published fiction writer with The Broken Token
(which was also an Independent on Sunday best audiobook of the year) and got me a rating as one of the 10 best crime novels of the year for Cold Cruel Winter. All seven of the novels in that series won starred review in Publishers Weekly.
Richard was kind to me, a true inspiration. I’m proud of all those books, of him, and the community around him in Leeds during the 1730s.
From records, I know he was given a reward in the 1690s for informing on a highwayman – and this well before he became the law himself. Maybe it gave him the taste. Or possibly the fact that Walter Nottingham, perhaps his father or brother, was constable before him.
I made what was a title, a sinecure, a man who take part in official processions, into a proto coppers, with the night watch underneath him. He solved crimes. He found himself in danger. I was stretching history, but Richard seemed to enjoy himself doing it.
My Richard had a wife and two daughters. The real one had other children, of course, one of whom was a young woman who went in to marry into the minor nobility. Richard owned property in town. On Kirkgate at first, then Briggate; Leeds was a very small place at that time. People kept arriving, but there were fewer than 10,000 inhabitants.
I have written about the real Richard Nottingham here, with plenty of detail snippets from documents. Sadly, I’ve never found a portrait of him.
Why mention him at all? Most of the books are out of print in hardback, after all (and only the first is available in paper, I believe). But a number of you who came to my work through Tom or Simon might not know about Richard. You might like him.
The ebooks are all pretty cheap, and you’ll discover a family, as well as a place and time that are close to my heart. I always had Leeds, of course, but Richard showed me what to do with it, and that’s a gift I can never fully repay.
I will remind you that if you haven’t read The Scream of Sins yet, it’s been out for a month now – and God, the reviews have been so good it’s amazed me, since it’s so dark. Why not read it and judge for yourself?
It’s Sunday and tipping down with rain. Much as I’d love to be out at my allotment, there’s not a chance today.
That means it’s time for a story. A true story about the unpublished novels that preceded The Broken Token. Make a cup of tea, grab a biscuit and pull up a chair, because there were a few of them.
The first came when I was 20. I’d married an American and were we living in a bedsit in Hyde Park – the Leeds one, of course. I’d written poetry, which in retrospect was only slightly better than the usual teenage angst, and some short stories. It was time for my big artistic statement. A novel.
I’d read quite a bit of Richard Brautigan and hooked into that style, as best I could. The problem is that I wasn’t a San Francisco Beat/hippie guy who with a highly skewed, often surreal worldview. I was a 20-year-old Brit who had nowhere near the experience of the world as I believe I did. It probably had a title, but I don’t remember it.
The second came after we moved to the US, living in my wife’s hometown of Cincinnati. I was probably two or three years older. We’d bought a very cheap wreck of a house, we were both working. I’d been reading a lot more American crime novels, people like Michael Z Lewin, who books too place in Indianapolis, about 100 miles away. Bear in mind that this is heading towards the late 70s, a more innocent time. And a much more innocent your Brit, who still had a lot of growing up to do. Never mind that I believed that life had hardened me to my core.
The novel wasn’t completely awful. Hard boiled? No. Scarcely soft-boiled. Someone saw something in it and offered to put it out as a YA if I’d make some (a lot of) changes. I didn’t, and now I’m grateful. The title is lost in the mists of time, but the PI was called Steve Holzer.
There followed a more mainstream, autobiographical novel that was so much of a nothing that I can’t recall the plot. Thankfully, probably. After that, The Ohio Boy, about a talented young Ohio poet who was determined on self-destruction through alcohol. I knew nothing about alcoholism back then and didn’t really research. The poems were the ones I’d written a few years before, still seen through rose-coloured glasses. Unsurprisingly, nobody was interested.
After that? Career Opportunities, an American recalling student days in London and his involvement with the punk scene in 76-77. I still have it somewhere. Never reread it; I don’t need the humiliation. I knew about punk from records and the music papers (this was around 1980, long before any books about it all). I didn’t know London. What could go wrong?
A long gap followed. Divorce, and a move out to Seattle on the West Coast. A few short stories, a couple of one-act plays, then diving into becoming a music journalist, married again, with a young kid and a mortgage, writing a lot of quickie unauthorised celebrity bios. I was back in Leeds regularly to see my parents and picking up books on Leeds history, old enough to start really learning about it.
The result was The Cloth Searcher, an historical novel set in Leeds in the 1730s, with Richard Nottingham as a secondary character. I was stumbling towards something and nearly there, in the opinion of an agent who read it.
“Go and write something else and let me see it,” she said.
I did. That was The Broken Token, and the start of all that’s happened since.
Hey, time to wake up.
To remind you, The Scream of Sins is out there now. I’d be very grateful if you could buy a copy or borrow one from the library. If they don’t have it, ask them to get one in – others can read it after you.
I know, I’ve been quiet for a while, and sorry about that. But I’ve been taking time to breathe a bit after the exhibition and event, and I’ve been writing. The next two Simon Westow books (The Scream of Sins and Them Without Pain) are with the publisher – Scream comes out in March – and I’m busy with the WWII novel featuring Woman Police Sergeant Cathy Marsden, currently seconded to the Special Investigation Branch.
The joy is in the research; the couch is a pile of books about the war (I’ve put together something called Cathy’s War Timeline, which is taped to the bookshelf next to the writing table) and I’m learning more and more. The book takes place in early 1941, so I don’t want to go beyond that; I’ll only confuse myself.
Plenty of great little Leeds details in there, like the barrage balloon at St James’s hospital that someone came free from its mooring. People hung on, tied it to a lamp post – and it tore up the lamp post. It was finally brought down near the city centre. How can you not love a tale like that?
Cathy herself is a joy, easing myself into her mind and her life, so I know how that coat feels on her back, how the gas mask case keeps banging against her hip. The walk down the blackout street to home on Brander Road in Gipton. She’s fully alive.
That’s for the future. It doesn’t have a title yet, but it’ll be appearing in summer 2025, a very distant time.
For now, though, the holidays loom, and I hope yours are all good, healthy and peaceful. Meanwhile, there’s a review of the Tom Harper exhibition and event here. If you prefer, here’s an image.
On, and if you haven’t bought it yet, Rusted Souls is a good gift both to give and receive.
Chris Nickson 