Mark Roberts: Author Guest Post

When Mark Roberts, author of Day of the Dead contacted me, I jumped at the opportunity to feature a guest post on my blog.  I may have missed out on being able to take part in the actual blog tour (TBR – need I say more…), but that wasn’t going to stop me from getting involved!  What kind of #AuthorStalker would I be if I gave up, right? ?

I’ll first share a bit about the author and his latest publication, Day of The Dead before I share the AWESOME Author Guest Post that Mr Roberts has kindly provided!!  Woohoo!!

About The Author

Mark Roberts was born and raised in Liverpool and was educated at St. Francis Xavier’s College. He was a teacher for twenty years and for the last thirteen years has worked with children with severe learning difficulties. He received a Manchester Evening News Theatre Award for best new play of the year. He is the author of What She Saw which was longlisted for a CWA Gold Dagger. Blood Mist, the first in his DCI Eve Clay series, went to number one in the Australian kindle chart.

About The Book

The man who calls himself Vindici broke out of prison last year. Now he’s filmed himself torturing and killing paedophiles in Liverpool’s affluent suburbs. Half the city are celebrating: the streets are safer for their children. But for DCI Eve Clay and her team at the Merseyside Police, it’s a nightmare. Their job is to solve the crimes and lock up the killer – hard enough without being despised by the public they are trying to protect.

And now, just when they think they’ve cracked the case, they receive a photo of Vindici, at a Day of The Dead parade in Mexico. So if Vindici is 5,000 miles away, who are they hunting in Liverpool? DCI Eve Clay must draw on all her cunning to unmask a killer who is somehow always one step ahead…

 SOUTH LIVERPOOL TEACHER TURNS TO CRIME 

These words sound like a headline in the Liverpool Echo. However, if you throw the word fiction in at the end of this statement, this is actually true. But writing crime novels for adults wasn’t so much a case of ‘turning’ into it, it was a logical progression based on a long journey that has led me to Blood Mist, the first novel in the DCI Eve Clay series, the sequel Dead Silent and the recently published Day of the Dead. So what’s with the teacher business? I combine being a crime novelist with a full-time job as a teacher working with teenagers with severe and profound and multiple learning difficulties.

Before my first adult crime novel The Sixth Soul was published in 2013, I’d spent most of my time as a writer producing three children’s novels in which there was one common element – Crime.
In the first of my children’s novels Night Riders, two teenagers with Down’s syndrome commit an armed robbery. My second children’s novel The 12 Day Jinx concerned Ellie Becket, a tough ten-year-old girl who battles to save her twin brother from the murderous clutches of a 99 year-old psychopath, Mrs Nijinsky (The Jinx). In my third YA novel Tomorrow Belongs To Me, death and destruction follow two teenage boys as they travel through Oxfordshire.

The transition from writing crime novels for children to writing them for adults took three years. I found the process of writing for adults much more enjoyable. The freedom to be as dark as I wanted and to explore issues that were just not, and rightly so, permissible in children’s novels was extremely refreshing. As the themes of my children’s books became increasingly mature, writing for adults became attractive.

In The Sixth Soul, the first DCI David Rosen novel, a Satanic serial killer abducts and kills pregnant women. In the sequel What She Saw, children on a south London estate are at risk from a killer who literally loves playing with fire. What She Saw made it onto the long list for the CWA gold dagger.

Blood Mist, Dead Silent and Day of the Dead, the DCI Eve Clay novels, have been an incredible stage of my progression as a writer. I’ve taken several elements that are significant to me and set up the world of DCI Eve Clay and her close but diverse team in my native Liverpool, a city I truly love and one I’ve only lived away from for fifteen months during the last fifty-five years.

In Blood Mist, a blizzard rages as DCI Eve Clay is called to a barbaric crime scene in an affluent south Liverpool suburban house. A family of six have been slaughtered and their mutilated bodies have been dragged from the place they have been murdered to form two strange patterns. None of the neighbours have seen or heard anything. Something about the patterns of the staged bodies triggers something deeply buried in Clay’s mind and, as she closes in on the perpetrators, she goes on a parallel journey of discovery into the mysteries of her own childhood. Abandoned as a baby, raised for six years by her guardian Sister Philomena, and growing up in the Catholic care system. As she enters a lair of evil, she learns a profound secret about her past that is as disturbing as it is shocking to her and those around her.

One of my aims in writing Blood Mist, Dead Silent and Day of the Dead was to bring Liverpool alive and convey the life, atmosphere and action of the city. From the Williamson Tunnels underground to the iconic skyline, from the cathedrals to the River Mersey, I wanted to make the city a character in its own right.

Set in a seventeen hour time frame, Dead Silent has DCI Clay confronted with a completely bizarre murder scene. Leonard Lawson, an elderly and respected professor of medieval art, has been butchered in his bedroom. His daughter Louise has seen her father die, his body mutilated and transformed into a hellish parody of a work of art he loved.

At the heart of Day of the Dead is a huge paradox. DCI Clay and her team are hunting down a ruthless serial killer who is entering people’s homes, torturing and killing them. At this point in time, I guess most people reading this are on the side of the police. The victims, though, have one thing in common with each other. They are paedophiles. For once, the public in the novel are not rushing down the street to help the investigation. In fact, the public and some members of the wider investigating team are openly hostile to Clay’s efforts to snare the killer.

The title Day of the Dead refers to the Mexican festivities from the middle of October until early November when the dead loved ones are commemorated and ‘welcomed back’. The image system and meanings behind it were ideal for the third Eve Clay novel, and I wanted to reach out from the boundaries of Liverpool and embrace the wider world.

In creating the character of Eve Clay, I wanted to reflect my personal view of the majority of human beings and not create a detective with an addiction problem, a massive mistake in the past that has caused harm to a friend or colleague or a messy private life. She is a decent human being, a loving wife and mother and a brave and loyal colleague. Although she was born into unthinkable darkness, she strives for the light.

She has a lot in common with so many of the readers and writers, the publishers, the editors and agents I have been lucky enough to meet and have helped me on my transitional journey from children’s crime novelist to adult crime novelist.

I’m currently working on the fourth DCI Eve Clay novel. All I can tell you is that it is provisionally entitled Black Sun. It is set in Liverpool. It is definitely not a romantic comedy and it’s certainly not suitable for children.

WOW!  I absolutely LOVE that post!!  Thank you so much Mark and Head of Zeus!  If you want to follow the blog tour, I have included the poster. To buy this belter of a read, click the wee book below! 

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