Lonnie Donegan, submissions, and A House for Monsters...

I used to be a guitarist to quite an exclusive audience.

I believe I was 5 or 6 years old and in my musical prime, sitting on the front lawn, serenading the factory shift workers as they came home for their midday meals.

The short distance from the local factory and their village homes required the use of leg power. Anything petrol powered was used at weekends.

As they trudged up the road like a weary human caterpillar, most of them passed by our small, prefabricated, ancestral home.

I waited for their arrival with my plastic guitar and my small woollen blanket of many colours. I was a diminutive Joseph sitting on my amazing multi-coloured dream-stage of grass and wool…preparing my best Lonnie Donegan impersonations for my appreciative paying audience.

Entertaining was my business… and for a while, business was good.

If I was lucky, I was paid in thrupenny bits. If I was very lucky, my fee included the odd sixpence.

I think that was when I started forming the idea in my head that I might actually be doing something that was worth something to somebody else apart from my mum and dad.

I think that was my introduction to the dizzy heights of showbiz.

That lasted until I was 7 or 8, when my dad sat on my plastic guitar one drunken night…and Lonnie Donegan reluctantly disappeared into the background, to be overtaken by a newly-discovered interest in books.

Girls came later. Much later. They didn’t happen until I was at least 10 or 11. Song lyrics gave way to the printed word.

Later in my creative development, the printed word was augmented by the written one. That happened in 2016, when I self-published my first ever book. It’s title was Love & Coffee. It was one of those ‘says what it does on the tin’ books. I’d just turned 60 and I was up and walking.

Self-publishing became a secret habit, like toast and peanut butter, or black coffee with no sugar.

I felt like I was on a journey and was stuck on a side road with three full tyres and one flat one. I needed a proper publisher.

Then in 2023 I met up with those lovely people at Northodox Press and I sent them a submission…my debut crime fiction novel. It was called A Time for Dying. I felt like something in my head had switched from OFF to a big fat ON!!

It’s available from Northodox and also from Amazon, Waterstones, and loads of good bookshops, naturally.

Next, cue the sequel; more crime…more death…more blood…and a large slice of humour. It’s called A House for Monsters. And it’s due to be published by Northodox next February, and available from the usual suspects, as they say.

I’d just turned 70 and was I was up and running (albeit slowly).

So…If crime fiction with a BIG difference is something that is right up your street (or down your nearest dark alley), introduce yourself to late-night, jazz-loving, DI Tom McHale and his team of brilliant individuals.

They don’t just hunt the serial killers that nobody else can catch, they waste no time in putting them behind bars or in the ground.

And it’s not just a job. It’s a goddam way of life.

Or death…