Welcome to the crime novels of Judith Cutler

Crime and Detective Stories quote

STILL WATERS (Allison and Busby, hardback)

People often ask where authors get their ideas from. It's often hard to say, but the idea for Still Waters came at quite a precise moment. My hairdresser was colouring my hair, to the accompaniment of local radio, which brought a news update. A body had been found in a local seaside resort. The man, who lived in a flat on the sea front, had chosen to hop off not his own balcony but a neighbouring hotel's. I was hooked. And then my hairdresser, an ex-policeman, reminisced about his days in the Force. He wasn't just any copper: he was part of an underwater search and rescue team. One of his cases made my (newly-blonde) hair stand on end. Well, how would you like to reach for the hand of a young woman trapped in a reservoir only to have it come off in your hand?

So that was the moment that Still Waters was conceived – the third in the Fran Harman series.

Still Waters sees the development of the Fran and Mark relationship. They have decided to buy a house together. But a novelist can't possibly let what should be a period of great personal happiness go unmarred. So I decided to stir things up a bit. What better than to run a story about all the reorganisation affecting public services everywhere - as if the police could ever be run like a business! You can imagine that Fran in particular is not likely to have an easy time.

Things aren't easy at home, either, and even the rescue of their new house, the Rectory, is causing heartache. Fortunately Paula's Pots, who featured in Scar Tissue, are back again, in their new incarnation as Pact Restorers. It is they who take on the huge task of making the Rectory habitable. And they have a strange link with a man who is doing his level best to get Fran to leave the police.

So what do they find at the bottom of the Rectory garden? And why is there a new corpse on the very last page?

Crime and Detective Stories quote Keeper of secrets review

THE KEEPER OF SECRETS (Allison and Busby, hardback)

No, this historical mystery isn't by my husband, Edward Marston - it really is all my own work!

Tobias Campion came into existence when Mike Ashley, editor of all those wonderful anthologies of crime short stories, asked me to write a Regency story. I can't remember whether he actually stipulated that not one single bosom must heave, but somehow it became a guideline. Much as I would have liked to write a pseudo-Georgette Heyer confection set in Bath or Brighton, the Rev Tobias Campion insisted that he should have an unfashionable parish somewhere in the Midlands. You can read his first outing in The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits (Constable, 2005).

While I was researching for the story, I came to realise how very few people enjoyed the glittering life we associate with the Regency, and I have built on this information in the novel.

Poverty was rife, especially amongst the sort of people Tobias would have as parishioners. Education was haphazard. Medicine was all too often inspired guesswork. The role of women was equivocal: certainly they weren't as trammelled and trapped as they were in Victoria's reign, but if I wanted a protagonist with social and indeed geographical mobility it had to be a man. Religion, though not in one of its more intense phases, was the base-rock on which life was founded, so it was natural for me to ask Tobias to take holy orders. He was happy to. Damaged by something in his past - was it as sin of omission or commission? - he is estranged from his family and determined to earn a living. Already he has had to compromise. He has accepted a living from a very rich relative, Lady Elham, but he quickly offends her by preaching against the vested interests of landowners, counselling generosity, not just lip-service charity, to the poor.

At first lonely in his new parish, he makes friends with the village doctor, a man with his own secrets and with his cousin's house-keeper. Jem, his groom, becomes not just his henchman but his moral guide.

I don't think I have ever enjoyed writing a book more than this. True, the language was a challenge, and time and again I'd have loved my characters to be able to make a quick phone call or leap into a powerful car. But I really felt I was living amongst friends. I hope you enjoy making their acquaintance too.

Cold Pursuit review

COLD PURSUIT (Allison and Busby, hardback)

I was delighted when Allison and Busby asked me to write a second novel featuring Fran Harman, the Detective Chief Superintendent from Kent. She’d had a bad time in her first outing, and I thought it was time to improve her lot. But since she’s a serving police officer, whose work has become her life, I couldn’t suddenly take her and Mark on a wonderful protracted honeymoon in an idyllic part of the world.

Instead I thought I’d give Fran some contemporary crimes to deal with – and what more contemporary than the weirdly named happy slapping? And why not make her a crime victim herself? I also updated bullying: it was bad enough when I was young, with name-calling and physical attacks, but the term hardly begins to describe the torment that computer-literate schoolchildren can inflict on their peers. Then I introduced a third contemporary problem, stalking – and a victim who was perversely in denial.

Just to make life even more hectic, I set Fran and Mark off house-hunting, possibly the most depressing and dispiriting occupation one can voluntarily undertake. But Fran and Mark remain positive, and the last chapter leads into the next Fran Harman book…

Sherlock Magazine review

THE CHINESE TAKEOUT (Allison and Busby, hardback, £18.99)

I wrote this, the second Josie Welford novel, by popular demand! Yes, really! Josie Welford proved so popular with ladies of a certain age that I couldn't resist producing a second adventure for her. As you'd expect, her restaurant is flourishing and her recipe file gets thicker by the day. But who would have thought she would end up dating a rural dean?

I've often wondered what would happen in the hard-nosed twenty-first century if someone claimed asylum in a rural church like the one in which I worship, with no facilities and precious little in the way of comfort. How would the congregation behave? I rather think we at St Peter and St Paul would do better than the St Jude's congregation, which is sharply divided when a young Chinese lad throws himself at the altar. But we'd know, as they do, that if you want asylum it presupposes you've committed a crime – possibly a serious one. Since for various reasons Tang never divulges what he's done, it's up to Josie to find out what she can – which includes a lot about herself she'd rather not have admitted. There's a funeral, a christening – will Josie's story end with a wedding?

"One can always rely on Judith Cutler for a good story, beautifully told." - Tangled Web

"Judith Cutler writes so well that she could make the Telephone Book enthralling reading, as her wit and perspicacity make every page a delight." - Tangled Web

Life Sentence reviews

LIFE SENTENCE (Allison and Busby, hardback, £18.99)

Life Sentence was a very difficult book to write since it drew on painful personal experiences, shared, I should imagine, by all too many men and women in their middle years: how do you manage to work and look after aged relatives miles away from where you live?

For years my sister and I commuted to Devon from Sheffield and Birmingham respectively to provide as best we could the care that Social Services couldn’t offer. Eventually, when my mother was widowed and moved into a care home, my sister heroically surrendered her perfectly happy existence in the North and moved down to keep an eye on things. She has made a much better fist of settling down than my protagonist Fran Harman would ever have done, but such sacrifices should never be underestimated.

Fran’s parents are not our parents, but they do share the problems of growing old and losing control of your life, unable to understand that their daughters (do men have similar pressures?) have other responsibilities and indeed personal ties.

For all that, I hope you find Life Sentence an optimistic novel: Fran solves her crimes, sorts out her family problems and embarks on what I hope is a wonderful relationship with an old friend turned lover.

Kirkus Review of Books

THE FOOD DETECTIVE (Allison and Busby, hardback, £18.99)

If any of you have got an idea for a novel and simply can't make headway with it, perhaps The Food Detective will spur you on. I struggled for months before I got the right angle for this.

I wanted to write a novel set in Devon, though not the cosy seaside Devon of the picture postcards. It would feature the work of a Food Standards Agency inspector, Nick Thomas, an ex-policeman suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder caused by a terrible incident in his days with the West Midlands Police. Nick was so damaged that his marriage broke down, he failed to fulfil the promise of his earlier career and he was subject to crippling flashbacks. I got to about chapter 18 when I realised that not only was the novel attracting no publisher, but it was also boring me - and I was the writer, remember!

My favourite character in the book was a WeightWatching publican called Josie Welford, a middle-aged woman with a quick tongue and a love of good food I could identify with. One morning I asked myself 'What if?' and promptly rewrote the whole thing from her viewpoint. The book fairly rattled along: I was actually sorry to type in the last full stop.

To my great delight, my publisher liked Josie too - so much that he's asked me to write another book about her, which will come out next year. Its working title is Sanctuary. Watch this space!

So if your novel simply isn't working, take a tip from me: stand back and ask if you're seeing it through the right pair of eyes. Good luck.

a lively entertaining tale - Sherlock Magazine

DRAWING THE LINE (Allison and Busby, hardback, £18.99)

My second stand-alone novel for Allison and Busby arose out of my love of antiques and conversations amongst some of my friends in the trade. Alan Miller, of Applecross Antiques, was particularly helpful, so I dedicated the book to him.

Drawing the Line is the story of Lina Townend's search for her father. Lina (short for Evelina), in care almost all her life, has finally found a congenial home with Griff, an elderly antiques dealer, to whom she's informally apprenticed. Their life together is perfect, but for her nagging desire to find who she really is. When she comes across a page from a sixteenth century book, a memory of her childhood flares up, starting her on her quest, much against Griff's will. When both of them are violently attacked, it seems Griff's worst fears are justified. But Lina persists, of course, eventually finding - well, would you want her father in your family?

Available now, a new heroine, featured in Scar Tissue (Allison and Busby, 30 April 2004)
This is the first stand-alone crime book I've written; appropriately, it comes out with my new publisher, Allison and Busby. It also features a new heroine, Caffy Tyler, and a new location, Kent.

Caffy, like me, is a Midlander in exile, but apart from that and a love of reading I like to think we have very little in common. Ok, we both enjoy painting and decorating, and a half of Bishop's Finger. But our career paths are quite different. Caffy's a tough but vulnerable young woman, feisty as they come. She works for Paula's Pots, an all-women team of decorators. When one day she sees through a window what all people in their profession dread - a dead body - the lives of the Pots are changed forever.

The book is dedicated to the team of painters who gave me the idea - Kate Emans and the Paint Pot Girls.

Two of the most entertaining speakers, Raw Edge Magazine

MURDER ANCIENT AND MODERN
Judith Cutler and Edward Marston, author of over 70 crime novels, most with historical settings, compare techniques for writing about crime in the past and in the present. Their talk has been given at libraries, festivals, bookshops and writers' groups in the UK and in America.

"Two of the most entertaining speakers on the crime writing circuit" - Raw Edge Magazine

MURDER ANCIENT AND MODERN is available for hire.
Email: judith.cutlervirgin.net

BELOW: Crime writers Peter James and David Roberts with Judith Cutler and Edward Marston on board 'The Spirit of Adventure' where all four were guest speakers on a recent cruise.

Spirit of Adventure photo

The World's Finest Mystery and Crime Stories: 5th Annual Collection
Find Judith's Dagger-nominated short story, Doctor's Orders, in The World's Finest Mysteries and Crime Stories, ed. Gorman and Greenberg.

Crime on the Move
"I was delighted and honoured to be one of the authors selected by Martin Edwards for the latest Crime Writers' Association anthology, Crime on the Move."

Crime on the Move cover "My story, Revenge on the High C, had its origin in a real piano recital on a real crusie ship. I was so affronted by the so-called musician's take on the classics that I was ready to storm out, yelling that he was a charlatan. Then I realised I could kill him. So this is the story of his death."

"My favourite story in the anthology? I'm sure if you read them all for yourself you'll work it out. I wish to make it clear, however, that in no circumstances will you ever get me careerimg through our village on a tandem!"