Two cases from the files DCS Palmer and the Metropolitan Police Serial Murder squad. Case 5 'Loot' sends the team on the trail of stolen WW2 Nazi gold that seems to be the reason for two murders. But where has it come from and how much is there? Soon the body count rises as an old gangland adversary from Palmer's past emerges together with some feisty women and an English MP all prepared to kill for the prize. Everybody is playing cat and mouse with the gold changing hands with every twist and turn of the story that takes Palmer out of London to Gloucester and then to Brighton for an explosive finale.
Case 6. 'I'm With The Band' features 70's rock band Revolution are still very big and packing out the major venues today but their original members seem to be dying in suspicious circumstances. Or so their manager thinks and he contacts Palmer's number two with his fears. Palmer is not convinced until a nasty happening at Baker Street tube station underlines what the manager was afraid of. But who would want the band members dead? With a forty year career behind them it could be any one of thousands of past or present contacts. But this killer is confident, so confident he takes on Palmer via social network and tells him 'catch me if you can'. But Palmer's second in command DS Gheeta Singh was brought into his team because of her computer skills and is a match for the killer in cyber space. With just one original band member left alive the threat is real and Palmer must get to the killer before the killer gets to the member. The finale is an explosive one at a major Rock concert at the NEC.
Both case move along at the usual fast pace and with the usual ending twist that Faulkner does so well.
Loot and I'm With The Band by BL Faulkner are cases 5 and 6 of the Serial Murder Squad series.
As part of the #RandomThingsTours Blog Tour, I'm delighted to introduce the author to you today, he's answering some fabulous questions
1. Tell me a little
about yourself and your writing. My father, elder brothers, uncles
and cousins were all on the wrong side of the tracks and sometimes ran with the
notorious Richardson Brothers gang in South London in the 60s -90s. My mother
was determined her youngest would not follow that family tradition and made
sure I was kept away from it although I mixed with many of the ‘names’ as a kid
and cleaned the Richardson’s rollers every Saturday for 10/- at their scrap
yard in Camberwell as well as other members cars. The golden rule was never to
go inside the cars or open the boots. I wonder why? I started writing at school
and was encouraged to do so by a great English teacher called mister Reid who
saw something in my juvenile doodlings , I owe him a lot.
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| The Richardson Brothers |
2. When did you
first realise you wanted to be an author? I first realised
I wanted to write when I read Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee, I must have read
it twenty times by now. The descriptive writing is the best I have ever read
and paints a picture in your imagination that no other writer has ever equalled
for me.
3. Describe the
first piece you wrote. The first significant piece was a fun piece describing a
weekend away at the coast with the scouts. It made the local paper and the
Scout Magazine. I was hooked thinking that everything I wrote from then on
would get published. Sadly not so.
4. What do you most
enjoy about being an author? The most enjoyable thing about being an author for me is the
power to let my imagination run free and see where it takes me. I don’t plan a
book other than the basic premise and where it is set. Each one has a different
setting. The Last one, Ministry of Death is set in the NHS Drug Procurement
Department , the one before that in the take away meals environment, I’ve also
done Television, The City of London Financial District, Rock Groups etc..so
half the fun of writing is the research into the different settings. I like to
get it right.
5. What do you least
enjoy about being an author? I don’t think there’s anything I don’t enjoy about being an
author.
6. You worked as an
advertising copywriter, how did this influence your writing? Yes, advertising copywriter for Erwin Wasey Ruffrauth and Ryan, in Paddington. A top US
advertising agency whose boss lived in a suite at the Dorchester! I think some
of the characters I came into contact in that
industry have stuck with me and surface in the books from time to time. My
character Benji, the next door neighbour and nemesis of my DCS Palmer is
definitely from that work place.
7. You were a script
editor and writer for TV in the 80s-90s, what do you think that brought to your
novel writing? Whilst at the Advertising Agency I was writing stuff and sending
up to the television companies and got
lucky. ( they won’t even look at unsolicited commissions these days which I
think means they are missing out on a lot of new writers and we get the same
old tosh all the time) Anyway I was called up and asked to contribute to
various light entertainment shows during the 70s -90s and ended up as a script
editor/writer on most of the LE shows including Bob Monkhouse, Tom O’Connor, Russ
Abbot, NTNOCN etc..which broadened my outlook and way of writing as I spent a
lot of time in the ‘writers room’ with other writers and we bounced ideas off
each other as well as having my own work edited and on many occasions binned!
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| Bob Monkhouse |
8. What made you
want to move from TV to crime fiction novels? The
television job meant many days and even weeks stuck in hotel rooms at night and
that’s when I started to put together various ideas for TV series, mainly of
the LE format but all the time in the back of my mind I had this DCS Palmer
character pushing to get out. I don’t know where he came from but I get quite a
few emails and letters from retired ex Detectives and old South London
criminals now in their 80s- 90s telling me they recognise various characters in
the books so maybe some of the people I met as a youngster,
from both sides of the law, have stuck in the recesses of my brain and emerge
as a character in a book, who knows? Anyway, Palmer kept insisting he be
written and I really got into him and the Serial Murder Squad in those hotel
rooms. He was written as a pilot for a TV series but never made it.
9. What was the
inspiration to write the Serial Murder Squad series? I wrote three DCS
Palmer and the Serial Murder Squad programmes for TV and being rejected they
went into the drawer with all the other reject slips and then three years ago
when I fully retired and time became available I went back, pulled him out and
gave reign to all the plots in my head and in various notebooks that I’d kept
over the years. So like many writers I sent them out and started collecting the
reject slips but with the birth of Amazon there was another route to publishing
as an Indie. I realised that floundering away on your own as a new indie would
lead to mistakes and probably very little sales so I joined the Alliance of
Independent Authors which was the best thing I have ever done in my writing
career, I attended, and still attend a local meeting of members of that group
in Cheltenham where the fonts of all publishing knowledge, Debbie Young and
David Penny guided me through the tricky road of wannabe author to published
author with several thousand Palmers sold. There’s about forty of them in
various notebooks so many more Palmers to come I hope.
10. How would you
describe your books to someone who has never read one? I think you have
to have a USP (Unique Selling Point) or your books will get lost in the
plethora of the police procedural genre of thousands of books. Many authors use their
own area like Scotland or Cornwall to capture readers who recognise the
settings. I use London as that’s my place of birth and I
know it well, but realising how many are set in
London I also have a USP of humour. Coming from a light entertainment
background in television my mind is programmed to add (hopefully) witty and
humorous remarks between my principle characters and with the addition of
Benji, Palmer’s nemesis neighbour, I am able to run a fairly light back story
against the main serial killer theme. Readers seem to warm to that and the
juxtaposition and banter between the irascible old school DCS Palmer and his
young IT and cyber expert Detective Sergeant, Gheeta Singh, chalk and cheese.
So the reader will be taken into the darkness of serial murder but now and
again will laugh.
11. Who inspires you and why? I’m not inspired
much by books and authors these days, I get bored very easily and hate the
current trend of every detective having an achilles heel and family problems
and pages and pages of back story not relevant to the plot but insisted on by
traditional publishers to increase the book price and KU page read income. Not
on. I recently spoke with a well respected traditionally published crime author
who told me she had submitted her next book of 80,000 words to be told by her
publisher to expand to 140,000!!! She wasn’t happy.
I do get inspiration from
television. Television crime drama, especially the streaming channels of
Netflix and Amazon are right up to date with their output. Forensics are state
of the art and the characters well drawn, my all time favourite is The Sopranos
closely followed by Breaking Bad, but currently I
like Ray Donovan. I intend to start another series of books about a present day
London Organised crime syndicate and having just watched The Irishman film on
Netflix that is inspiring me to get going on it. That film is a classic, half
true and half fiction but so well put together.
 |
| Ray Donovan |
12. What is the best
compliment you have ever received about your books? Besides ‘I
couldn’t put it down’ I suppose the best one is one I get quite a lot,
‘these books should be a television series’. I’d love to go back in
time with them to the BBC commissioning editor who said ‘no’ and push them into
his face and say, ‘see what you missed, I could
have been a millionaire Rodney’
13. Any favourite
authors? My favourite authors? Laurie Lee
for his use of descriptive words whilst moving the story along at pace, a
complete master. Ed McBain the all time number one
in the pulp fiction genre that I reside in. Robert Crais
and his Cole and Pike novels, I rate them above Jack Reacher as his use of
words and sentences is unique. Do try him.
14. If you could
invite 4 dinner guests, fictional or real, alive or dead who would they be? Four dinner
guests? My great grandfather and
my grandfather both of whom I never knew so I could find out
the truth about the rumour of a family business fortune gambled away in the
1800’s. Probably all make believe but it would be an interesting chat anyway as
I know nothing about the family before my dad. Fred Karno, the UK’s
first impresario who ran concert halls in the late 1800s and 1900s and took
Charlie Chaplin and his understudy Arthur Jefferson who later changed his name
to Stan Laurel to America and worked with Hal Roach on silent comedy film
shorts for Buster Keaton and the rest of the silent comics. His life went from
poverty to millionaire back to poverty ending up running an off licence in
Dorset. And my fourth and last guest, Leonard Ernest ‘Nipper; Read,
DCS Read, the detective who nicked the Krays and many more top criminals whilst
head of the Murder Squad in the late 60s-70s and helped clean out corruption
amongst detectives at Scotland Yard with Commissioner Sir Robert Marks when
close to 200 were sacked or took early retirement.
15. What is your
latest project (s)? My current work load, and I don’t look at it as work as I enjoy
it too much, I’m getting paid for having a lot of fun and meeting a lot of
interesting people, however my current projects are finishing DCS Palmer book
10 ‘The Body Builder’ ( there’s a clue!), getting my London Gang series
underway and hassling Literary Festival organisers for a spot ( unpaid) in
there programme next year for my illustrated talk on ‘the Heists and Geezers of
UK Crime from 1930 to Present Day’ based on my Wordpress blog geezers2016@wordpress.com or any other ‘crime’ spot they’d like to
offer, I just love meeting writers and readers.
Faulkner was born into a family of petty criminals in Herne Hill, South London, his father, uncle and elder brothers running with the notorious Richardson gang in the 60s-80s, and at this point we must point out that he did not follow in that family tradition although the characters he met and their escapades he witnessed have added a certain authenticity to his books. He attended the first ever comprehensive school in the UK, William Penn in Peckham and East Dulwich, where he attained no academic qualifications other than GCE ‘O’ level in Art and English and a Prefect’s badge (though some say he stole all three!)
Twitter @crimewriter1
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