A Killing in Camden Town

Over halfway through my Patsy Lassiter prequel and will have to average 2000 words a day to complete it by my self-imposed deadline of January 30. I've never struggled in the past with that level of output and this one is coming very easily. That's partly because I'm so familiar with the nature of the central character, but mostly I think because revisiting the summer of 1983 has been such an enjoyable creative experience. The memories of period and specific places grow more vivid by the day and because I've written this one quite quickly, the story itself is economically told with plenty of momentum. I'm particularly pleased with my two female leads - Patsy's 30 year-old boss DI Angela Hurst and 26 year-old material witness in the case he's handling, Suzy Jackson. There were women DI's in the early '80s, I know because I was a crime reporter and encountered one personally. But the glass ceiling was lower back then and you had to be a flier to reach that rank at her age. DC Lassiter and DI Hurst recount this one in the first-person in alternating chapters. A new approach stylistically for me. Angela knows all about the glass ceiling incidentally - and that isn't an anachronism. The phrase was first coined in in America in 1979.