Jagger,McCartney, and getting what you need...

As the great philosopher Jagger once said…‘You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you’ll find, you get what you need’…

When I was a teen, the kind of teen for whom growing long hair and writing short stories were both pre-requisites to living life as a literary creature, I had one burning ambition.

To write long stories. The kind of long stories that any publisher worth his salt would call a book.

To paraphrase that other great philosopher McCartney (egged on by his Auntie Lil, who wanted him to write something interesting)…I wanted to be a paperback writer.

Not just any old paperback writer. I wanted my paperbacks to be about crime. But not just any old crime. I wanted them to be about crime fiction. And not just any old crime fiction. I wanted them to be about catching murderers.

In fact, I wanted to write books about catching serial killers.

And I didn’t want to write about a solitary serial killer hunter. A lone wolf with a hero complex. I wanted him to lead a team. The kind of team that took no shit. Gave no quarter. And came at the catching game from left field. A part of the field nobody else came from.

That’s when I got to know DI Tom McHale and the people he worked with. And that’s when I wrote my debut crime fiction novel A Time for Dying. You can get it from my publishers, Northodox Press, Amazon, Waterstones, and all good high street book shops.

And you can pre-order the sequel, A House for Monsters, in paperback and Ebook, from Northodox right NOW. It’s due to hit the shelves next February.

As it turned out, I got exactly what I needed…a career (late in life) as the kind of author who writes the kind of crime books I’ve always wanted to read.

Now you can read them, too.Unlike the great philosopher Jagger, who also said, ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’…