‘Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.’  Confucius

‘Game Over’, the second in the Hex series, and follow-up to ‘Wicked Game,’ is released by Cutting Edge Press this week.

Hex, for those who don’t know him, is a former hitman desperate to make amends for past crimes – a tall order.  Returning to his old stamping ground in ‘Little London’ (Cheltenham), he reinvents himself as a property developer.  But going straight is tough.  He misses the buzz.  He also misses McCallen, an intelligence officer for MI5 with whom he became embroiled in ‘Wicked’.

When McCallen comes to him with a private job, involving a trip to Berlin, Hex can’t resist – and one small step outside the UK risks the certain attention of Mossad.  Bodies drop like proverbial flies and it soon becomes clear that the killer is out to get Hex and his associates as payback for his last job.

As much as  ‘Game Over’ is a ‘whodunnit,’ it’s also a ‘whydunnit’, and this is the aspect of characterisation that interests me most as a writer.  In a sense, we’re all amateur psychologists and I’m very much in the camp of ‘people are not born bad, but created.’ I don’t believe any of us are immune.  Given the right circumstances, most can be corrupted by life events and, consequently, behave appallingly.  It’s this motivation, which, for me, holds a certain fascination.  Almost more compelling is the horrific chain reaction that can spring from a single, malign act.  Luckily, this kind of thing is easier to chart in fiction than control in real life.

I loved writing ‘Game Over’ for three reasons:

Revenge has to rate as one of my favourite ‘drivers’ for a plot because the desire for us to get even is buried deep in all but the most saintly.  For the writer, it’s a gift because it allows latitude to let rip with the action.

Redemption underpins the action and provides the emotional spine for the story.  Occasionally, readers who haven’t read my work believe that I’m a ‘shoot ‘em up’ writer, which couldn’t be further from the truth.  Hex, a complex character, fatally flawed, isn’t a one-dimensional cold-blooded killer.  It was important for me to get this straight right from the start, which explains why, in both novels, his struggle to jettison his past and stay on the straight and narrow is something that consumes him.

In common with other writers who have put specific places on the map, for example Alison Bruce’s novels are set in Cambridge, Chris Simms in Manchester, I chose to set much of the action in Cheltenham.  I love the place so much I upped sticks and moved there, consequently location research proved a doddle although I should warn Cheltonians I’ve taken a few liberties with the quarry scene!
​
As before, there is an element of ‘will they/won’t they’ get it together in the relationship between Hex and McCallen.  The advantage of writing two novels in sequence is that it’s easier to develop this aspect, again another device to draw out Hex’s caring side.
Were there any problems in writing the novel?  One. It’s virtually impossible to write a contemporary story, with more than a passing nod to espionage, without referring to technology in some form or another.  This was made doubly difficult because the novel is set in Cheltenham, home to the U.K’s third intelligence service:  GCHQ.   In fiction, as in life, there is heavy emphasis on the way we are tracked, watched and studied by unseen powers with the kind of sophisticated technology that can identify, not only the terrorist at a distance, but the brand of cigarette he or she smokes.  Technology plays a huge role in all our lives and the UK has possibly more CCTV than any other country in Europe.  We all believe that we are under surveillance 24/7 and that the chances of pulling off a crime are zero.  And yet we also know that individuals can and do get away with murder, that crimes remain unsolved, that people evade capture, sometimes for decades, that folk disappear without trace, and that, sadly, airplanes can mysteriously vanish.  It’s also worth remembering that even the most advanced technology is only as a good as the person operating the system.   As a writer, this is what interests me and, for that reason, I’ve concentrated on the human element in the story, sometimes at the expense of the technical.  In ‘Game Over’, the powers that be may well have an inkling of what our main man is up to but, for political considerations, are willing to sit back and let him run his own course and, more importantly, take the flak and the fall for what unfolds.  Cutting to the chase, the importance of gadgetry in this work is deliberately understated.  I hope readers, who are fans of uber-technology, will be forgiving.


You can buy Game Over here
Follow Eve on twitter: @EveSeymour

Bristol is one of my favourite cities, it is where I spent most of my nights out from the time I could drive until the time I moved to Cambridgeshire. Bristol is full of grand decay, ambitious beauty, bad behaviour and stained with a dark past; the ideal location for a crime convention then. A weekend in Bristol is my call to adventure and the unexpected, the opportunity to add to my previous Bristol memories of stray bullets and delinquency. Here are the edited highlights of how CrimeFest 2014 did it for me.

When you are an author and your panel is announced there are a few questions that spring to mind: Is it a good time-slot? How scary is the moderator? and Do I know anyone else on my panel? are three of mine. My panel was 9a.m. on Friday morning and since I’d arrived at 11p.m. the previous night it would coincide with my first visit to the venue. I had no worries about my moderator (the smart-but-not-scary Len Tyler @LenCTyler) or the other panellists… but 9a.m… I am a night-owl. So I lay in bed until about 2, telling myself to rest, then woke at 5 with visions that I’d overslept. But who, I wondered, would be venturing out for the first panel of the day? I imagined a 9a.m. slot would attract just a few die-hards so I was delighted when we found the Lancaster Room full.  And in that is the answer to several reasons why CrimeFest (@CrimeFest) works so wonderfully well.

​Here I am practising the subtly-support-your-chin-in-case-you-nod-off pose.

First, the readers and writers who attend are genuinely in love with crime-writing, they are rarely present to see a single author but keen to check out a variety of panels. Second, the delegates that CrimeFest attracts are diverse; it is an event that feels welcoming to all and that mix of people ensures that the ying and yang of larks and owls, grit and cosy, and party v serious is all accommodated. And last, on my short and non-comprehensive list, is the laid-back vibe of the event that means I can feel happy to own up that I left half-an-hour after Death in High Heels panel to crash out on my hotel bed for a lunchtime sleep…
​
…I didn’t nod off immediately, I reclined (gracefully of course) and considered some of the issues brought up by that panel – its full title was Death in High Heels: Women as Victims moderated by Ruth Dudley Edwards (@RuthDE). This is a subject that is arising with increasing frequency at reader events with questions such as Do you ever kill a man? (Yes, I do) and Wouldn’t it address the gender balance to have a woman killing men?  (Does striving for sex equality make it desirable for women to up their murder quota then?). For me, this particular panel turned out to be unusually frustrating; Martyn Waites (@MartynWaites) and Jessica Mann were so far distant on opposite sides of the fence that I don’t think either one of them could hear the other. The two ‘moderates’, MR Hall (@MRHall_Books) and Jessie Keane (@realjessiekeane), had far less opportunity to speak, MR Hall managed to sneak in several interesting points but I felt that both of these authors probably had far more to offer. In my books I do use violence (sparingly I think, although one person’s paper cut is another’s A and E emergency) and, for me, it was their point of view and experiences that would have been of greatest interest. I was a little disappointed to come away with nothing more than the revelation that some writers swear by it and others swear at it.

Of course, in between panels I mooched around bumping into new and familiar faces before joining the DHH Literary Agency (@DHHLitAgency) team and their authors for dinner. Incidentally I was one of the lucky authors who had both agent and publisher with them for the weekend – a big thank you to Broo (@BrooDoherty) and Krystyna, Dom and Grace (@GraceEVincent) from Constable for keeping me company. In so many ways it is the conversation in the bar and over tea that makes CrimeFest. This year Merchant 3 became the home to both the bookshop and tea facilities which was a huge improvement and gave our lovely tea lady a less harried weekend too.

During my mooching I met up with Clare, Kate and Jeremy, three representatives of the Clic Sargent (@CLIC_Sargent) fundraising team who organised an online event called Get in Character. The campaign allowed people to bid for the opportunity to name characters in forthcoming books and several of the authors who participated were at Crime Fest, including Belinda Bauer (@BelindaBauer), Amanda Jennings (@MandaJJennings), Kate Rhodes (K_RhodesWriter), Elly Griffiths (@EllyGriffiths) and Martyn Waites. The CrimeFest team had supported Clic Sargent with the donation of a pair of full passes for the weekend and here I am with the winner of these, Lucy Cavendish 2013 Shortlistee, Lynn Fraser.

There were four panels entitled Debut Authors: An Infusion of Fresh Blood,one per day and each scheduled for the first slot in Merchant 1. This seemed like perfect scheduling to me, fresh-faced and enthusiastic authors jumpstarting our brains.  It was Saturday morning’s Debut panel that became my favourite of the weekend.  Laura Wilson (@LWilsonCrime) is always an effective moderator and she steered the discussions with pace and humour and by the end I was convinced that I needed to visit the bookshop NOW. I steered away from Paul Mendelson’s (@MendelPS) The First Rule of Survivaldespite the fact that it looks like a great read – it is just that it turns out to be about the disappearance of schoolchildren in Cape Town and last Thursday I’d signed my daughter up for a trip to Cape Town… sorry Paul but my attempt to avoid parent-panic lost that sale! Here are three of the books I did buy though: two from this panel, Never Look Back by Clare Donoghue (@ClareDonoghue) and The Book of You by Claire Kendal.  My third is The Beauty of Murder by the charismatic AK Benedict (@AK_Benedict).
​
So I went home with two bags of books, motivation, the buzz of spending time in great company and the excitement of meeting current and future authors. So it wasn’t bullets and delinquency, more like shots of creativity and some criminally good ideas, and the addition of a happy chapter to my Bristol File. See you next year!
P.S. Thanks also go to the CrimeFest team for arranging the weather – I’m sure they will refuse to take responsibility just in case it rains next year, but I am convinced the sunshine was one of those behind-the-scenes arrangements that show how hard they were working and how beautifully they considered all those things that gave this author her favourite CrimeFest to date.

You can’t judge a book by its cover. Isn’t that how the saying goes? Well, yes, except, of course, when it comes to actual books. With actual books people do exactly what the saying warns them not to. Certainly, at the outset, books most definitely are judged by their cover. Covers are vital. They can sell a book. They can stop a book from selling. They are like the sirens calling out from the shelves and shelves of books out there. A cover is the thing an unpublished writer dreams of. Seeing your name on the jacket of a book becomes the Holy Grail when you’re striving all the extra hours in a day, filing your seventeenth rejection letter, battling relatives who suggest kindly that perhaps you should get a ‘proper’ job and stop ‘wasting your time’. All the while inside your brain, you’re thinking one day… One day I’ll see a book in a book shop with my name on the cover.

The Judas Scar is my second book. My first book, Sworn Secret, has a cover that I like. I don’t love it but I like it. There are elements of it I love; the atmospheric trees in the background, the colour scheme, my name on it in blingtastic writing! I was walking the dog when my editor sent the image through. I remember clearly closing my eyes, opening the file, then opening my eyes after stealing myself to do so. It wasn’t what I was expecting but it was a cover with one of my characters on it. And she wasn’t far from how I’d seen her in my head. It’s funny though, as an author you have no say in the cover. This is not your job. I’m sure the Big Names get input, but for the rest of us, it’s out of our hands.

My second book is published by Cutting Edge Press and Paul Swallow over there is mighty proud of his jackets. Rightly so. They are strong. They stand out. They represent the story inside and they try to be as striking as possible. From the off he told me he wanted to pitch The Judas Scar right, that he had certain ideas. When he finally sent through a mock up of his idea, I didn’t know what to think. It was so nothing like what I was expecting; eight coloured hands in squares of contrasting colours, with a squiggly line drawn on to them, and a square in the middle with the name of the book. I stared at it thinking: what on earth is that? I didn’t hate it, it was just so very different to the tormented man or the rooted oak tree I’d had in mind. But its immediate appeal was the echo of Warhol, the artistic elements of it, the creativity and individuality it embodied. As I got used to it, I began to think it was actually pretty damn clever. Repeated hands carrying repeated scars (a direct reference to scarred hands in the story). The idea that all of us carry scars, that all of us are different, but at the same time remarkably similar. What happened next was brilliant. The image went back and forward between Broo, Paul, myself and Ollie, the designer. Versions and versions of it, tweaking and tightening, and each time it came back it was better. The final design that Paul settled on is a triumph. It has Cutting Edge Press’s trademark cover flaps, the background is a subtle mimicking of the central image and the font is just perfection.  I can’t stop looking at it. It’s so pleasing to the eye, different to anything else out there, delicate in places but packing a punch. I am friends with the lady who runs our local book shop after years and years of loitering and browsing, and I went in to give her a sneak preview. She immediately said: I love it! Wow, that will really stand out from the crowd. And this, of course, is just as Paul imagined it.  He and Ollie have created a stunning cover and one I don’t think I will ever tire of looking at.
​
My baby, as Paul likes to say, is going out immaculately and stylishly dressed.


The Judas Scar is published today and has been getting brilliant reviews:Order here.
Follow Amanda on twitter: @MandaJJennings ​