Have you ever wondered what drives a person to crime writing? One can always blame her parents for whatever it is that parents do when they create monsters from the dark side. There are next-door neighbours too that one can blame – how often have you looked at a twitching net curtain and asked yourself, what are they doing in there? And what guilt do librarians bear for doling out books as though they were placebos, when in fact they are pushing mind altering ideas onto impressionable young minds. People often gang up on television schedulers too for the damage they have caused society, but surely, loud-voiced parsons, reading saucy extracts from the first testament of the Bible, have twisted more minds than the complete works of Shakespeare ever did. Looking back, I guess it was the combined efforts of everybody around me which finally pressurised me into my first offence, a thriller called Toxic Love.
After all, when a friend phones my mother to tell her that Agatha Christie is on the television, or a fellow patient in the hospital scours the tv guides, every day, looking for a ‘good murder’ to watch, it leaves one punch drunk, wondering if it is they, or the rest of the world which has gone mad. All around me it seems that murder has become every day; normalised by middle-aged, female sleuths in tweeds skirts. Their repressed sexual urges, no doubt, lead to a morbid fascination with crime and gives them a twisted insight into the minds of the most hideous criminals imaginable. Such mild, inoffensive spinsters of the parish become nemeses of the most formidable kind who we watch, fascinated, as they bring yet another murder to justice. Being exposed to such programs daily, I believe, is as harmful to a person as being irradiated by the lies spread by Fox NEWS 24/7, or as dangerous to a person’s sanity as over exposure to Judge Judy. A mild dosage may be safe, but like food-additives, too many may cause unforeseen side-effects.
Take me, for example, a simple man, leading an innocent life until locked down during covid with a murder mystery fan. Like a teenager faced with a choice of dabbling in drugs or be rejected by their peers, I thought that I could control my world, that I would be unaffected while sitting alongside my mother in the sitting room and dabbling in mystery. Soon, like the teen who once sneered at others who had allowed drugs into their lives, I required stronger and stronger doses of the murder mystery drug to keep the pain of life at bay. Shame, of course, played a large part in my life, how can one openly admit to such a problem, and 12 step programs for crime fiction addicts are not as readily available as they should be. Soon the nightmares began.
I would see myself walking down a normal street, a drizzle of SUVs passing by. Then people alighted from the cars, mostly women, looking for all the world like librarians – not a botoxed-lip in sight. There was always an over-weight man too, one with food issues, who wore a misanthropic frown. Then, as happens in dreams, there was always a body lying on a carpet, a footpath, or ritualistically laid-out in a field. The body was invariably mine. And looking up to the ceiling, or the sky, as though I were an infant unable to turn over on its stomach and crawl away, I would find myself surrounded by gaggles and gaggles of would-be, amateur sleuths who viewed my murder as a cause for celebration, a mystery to be solved. I hated that all the fun of unravelling my murder mystery fell to them and that I was helpless to discover who had killed me. Although I should have known, you would think, who murdered me. The victim normally knows who has killed them. Maybe it was PTS which blocked out the memory of my own murder. Or maybe… But of course, I wasn’t really dead. This was my dream after all. And if you have not really been murdered, then remembering the killer’s face is rather difficult.
These nightmares shook me, stirred me, drove me to the edge of desperation. But worse was to come, a strange madness possessed me and the seeds of Toxic Love, my first crime novel, rooted themselves deep into my brain. No amount of systemic weedkiller could have prevented them from germinating and growing into the twisted tale that they became as the novel developed to full-term and bore me into the world of crime writing.
Though not a murder mystery, there is still a female lead. However, she is a sassy young woman, not a pitiable old bat. There is a sinister ex-boyfriend too, some rather eccentric old women and a man once convicted of murdering his wife. There is also a game afoot; a terrible, sinister, murderous plot; and our heroine is its intended victim. For all the gory details go to Amazon and search out Toxic Love. But first you might want to listen to me read the first chapter of the book on Spotify and so get a feel for where the book might be going.
As for me. My name is Jim and I am addicted to crime writing… The second instalment is already underway.