Writing A Dangerous Life

Today's guest takes us into the gritty world of the 1950s gangs and criminals. Welcome, Len!

~ Samantha

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Writing A Dangerous Life

A Guest Post by Len Maynard

My fascination for the dark underbelly of the entertainment business has been evident since I first started writing back in the 1970’s.

At a funfair I was always more interested by what was happening behind the flashing lights than the rides and sideshows. At the theatre I always wanted to know what was happening behind the proscenium arch once the curtain fell.

The character of Tony Turner had a certain appeal for me – a famous and popular actor whose career was on the slide. It was someone whose life I wanted to explore, to dig down and uncover the secrets he had kept hidden behind the showbiz smile. The fact that he was also my first murder victim gave Jack a very good reason to conduct that exploration on my behalf.

A Dangerous Life also took me away from the middle-class monster of Three Monkeys and allowed me to write about British gangland of the 1950’s, a world I only knew about from watching the black and white B movies at my local cinema.

Growing up, the names of two Edgars – Lustgarten and Wallace – had been my passport to a monochrome world of murder, thievery, blackmail, fraud and all things criminal.

Once I had my background, my characters and my initial murder the rest came fairly easily.

I wrote the opening scene of a thirteen-year-old Gerry Turner confessing to the killing of her brother some months before starting the actual book. It was such a haunting scene that I knew I would have to use it. I was unaware when I wrote it that it would be a springboard into another novel.

Equally I was unaware of how important young Gerry would become and the role she would go on to play in future Jack Callum books. But that in itself has been one of the delights in writing about the Callum world, how minor characters suddenly come into their own and take centre stage.

Norton Common, where Tony Turner’s tortured body was found nailed to a tree, like a lot of places depicted in the books, really exists. It’s a charming and rather lovely area of parkland barely a mile away from where I live, an ideal spot for ramblers and dog-walkers and not a place where a dead body is likely to be found. (Sidebar – a few weeks after finishing A Dangerous Life, a body was found on Norton Common, hanging from a tree. Nothing to do with me, guv. Honest.)

A Dangerous Life is available now on Amazon US and Amazon UK.

Connect with Len Maynard

Born in Enfield, North London in 1953, Len Maynard has written and published over forty books, the majority of them in collaboration with Michael Sims. Ghost story collections, the Department 18 series of supernatural thrillers, stand-alone horror novels, the Bahamas series of action-adventure thrillers, as well as a handful of stand-alone thrillers. As editors they were responsible for the Enigmatic Tales and Darkness Rising series of anthologies, as well as single anthologies in the horror and crime genres. The DCI Jack Callum Mysteries are his first to be written under his own name.

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