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Interview with Huw Richards
Times Educational Supplement / Further Education Focus
30 June 2002
Judith Cutler may be an established crime writer but she still insists "I still think of myself as a teacher rather than a writer."
Six years on from taking early retirement, Cutler still feels the pull of her roots in further education. Not that she regrets leaving "The Premature Retirement scheme lasted just long enough to let me reach 50 and become eligible and I thanked God for the timing. I could not have made it through another year."
But she says "I still feel a moral and political commitment to further education." That commitment has expressed itself in an original manner. While higher education is associated with memorable literacy characters as various as Zuleika Dobson, Lucky Jim and Howard Kirk, further education had no counterpart apart, in the purely metaphorical sense, from Cinderella.
Cutler has filled this vacancy with Sophie Rivers, a loose-cannon English lecturer of femme fatale tendencies, protagonist of nine novels - the ninth, Dying In Discord, was published in May 2002 and another already in the pipeline.
The early books, which have the strongest FE content, carried the standard disclaimers, but it is a short journey across Birmingham from Matthew Boulton College where Cutler taught from the age of 21 "I was younger than many of my students" to Sophie's William Murdock college, with its urban landscape, decay and problems. The picture of harassed, overworked staff coping with challenging students in the face of inadequate resources and heavy-handed management rings alarmingly true.
There is much of Cutler in her heroine they share English as a discipline and passions for cricket, music and good food, although Cutler says "She is about 20 years younger than me and much fitter." There is also much of her experience in the stories.
She also knows of staff who traded good grades for sexual favours and, when asked how she depicts bullying and sexism in the police so vividly, says "It is based on my experience in further education."
Nevertheless her lecturers are more sympathetic than the academics drawn by writers like Colin Dexter and Robert Parker. She says "FE lecturers are like the human race. There are shits and skivers, but for every one of them you'll find two who give twice what is expected of them."
Sophie, neither mad nor bad but undoubtedly dangerous to know, fits this mould "She's bossy and can be a bit of a liability. But she would be a good and supportive colleague, and she cares enormously about her students. Few other crime heroines put investigations on hold while they spend the morning teaching remedial English."
Cutler's venom, in reality and fiction, is reserved for managers who outrage a deep-rooted sense of justice "I get angry when principals who are paid £95,000 a year, and employ qualified lecturers at rates of less than £10 per hour, wring their hands about stress."
Her final years at Matthew Boulton were blighted by efficiency "Students who needed six to eight hours a week to get them through A level were cut to three and a half to four. A group who needed personal support and attention, my students were never in any sense privileged, were cut loose and expected to rely on a learning centre."
Lecturers are prominent among the fans who bombard her with emails, and remind her that a popular character becomes as much the possession of readers as of its creator. She has taken copious flak for marrying Sophie to England cricketer Mike Lowden rather than policeman Chris Groom, a far stronger presence in books.
Cutler, productive enough to placate the toughest boss, has now supplemented Sophie with four books featuring Birmingham-based policewoman Kate Power and is contemplating a series featuring cricketer WG Grace as a detective.
Sophie will undoubtedly continue, but has had to follow her creator out of further education "There was a limit to how much you could do with further education, and while I keep in touch with former colleagues and students, I'm not as up to date as I would need to be. If I were to take Sophie back into further education I'd need to go back and do some part-time teaching first and I can't see myself doing that."
Dying in Discord by Judith Cutler, Headline
MY WRITING DAY
from Writing Magazine, December 2002-January 2003
'Unless you happen to be one of those one-in-a thousand writers who earns huge advances, then writing is something at which you have to work very hard if it is going to be your living,' says Judith Cutler.
A glance at her track record certainly shows Judith works hard. She writes the Sophie Rivers series about the Birmingham-based private investigator, which sees its number ten in the series published next year, and also the Kate Power mystery series about policewoman Kate, with number six coming shortly.
The latest in the Kate Power series is Hidden Power, 'In this one, I have Kate going into an undercover and difficult investigation. It is difficult because of the partner she is assigned to work with; Kate does not get briefed properly and is not really sure what she is supposed to be looking for, and on top of all that she becomes fond of the people she is supposed to be investigating.
'I try to write both a Sophie Rivers book and a Kate Power book each year. From January to May, I will write Sophie Rivers. Then from June to December it will be Kate Power's turn.'
That of course is a demanding schedule, and Judith puts in a full working day: 'I am up about seven each morning,' she says. 'And one of the first things I do is twenty minutes of stretching exercises, and that is followed later by a brisk walk. I know what sitting hunched over a computer all day can do to you, especially to your back, so the exercises are important.
'I then get to my desk by nine, and the first thing I do is check the incoming e-mails. Then, to get myself going, I edit the material I wrote the previous day. From there, my writing session will last right up to lunch. I will break for something to eat and to watch the TV news before starting work again about two. My afternoon session will last right up to six o'clock. I do not like to carry on beyond that otherwise I find it difficult to unwind.
'If the themes simply refuse to come, I will go off and mow the lawn, or clear nettles from the garden, or do something else that is non-cerebral. Mowing the lawn is best; just going back and forth mindlessly I find my mind is free and is receptive to ideas that surface. I think you have to train your mind so that, without really trying too hard, ideas will surface from the subconscious. At a conscious level, I will read through newspaper reports of police cases or I will talk to police officers I know. While that is happening, it is at a subconscious level that ideas will start to come.
'My interest in writing started many years ago. As a child I had a good deal of illness; asthma, bronchitis, that sort of thing. So I was stuck at home and my only sources of excitement were steam radio and books. By the time I reached school I had already started to write stories in my head, and indeed I had a short story published when I was still at school. But then I went to university, married, had a child, worked as a university lecturer.
'It was years before I started writing again, when I was confined to bed with chickenpox. That was when I started my first novel. It was rejected, as first novels often are, and the second one was also rejected - although the rejections were much kinder. Then I went back to the old rule about writing what you know about.
'I knew about life in a further education college in Birmingham, so I wrote my first Sophie Rivers murder mystery in exactly that setting. The Kate Power books followed in order to have a series about a policewoman. That way the two detectives do not overlap. There are things Sophie, as an amateur sleuth, cannot touch, and there is territory where Kate cannot go as a police officer.
'I have also published a couple of romantic novels, and they were based on those first two novels that were rejected all that time ago. You should never throw anything away, you never know where and when you might be able to recycle it.
'I still write short stories as well. For example, one of my passions is cricket and I have written a series of historical stories in which WG Grace becomes an amateur detective. They are being published in the American Strand magazine.'
Writing Place
Judith Cutler creates her Sophie Rivers and Kate Power stories from her ground floor study. 'It is a quite a fair sized room,' she says, 'with one wall covered with bookshelves. There are lots of English literature type books, because I taught the subject for 30 years. There are the authors you might expect, such as Jane Austen, but there is also a shelf of Georgette Heyer; I think she plots so perfectly and characterises so lightly. It is a comfortable room, bright and airy, with walls lined with pictures of Birmingham where I lived for so long: pictures of the cricket ground, the canals, Drayton Road, and other places. I have two desks: one for my computer where I do the creative work, and a separate table for correcting proofs where I do the critical work. The window looks down the garden, and a door opens on to the conservatory, which does mean the garden summons me.'
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