F is for Filey Connection, The

The very first Sanford 3rd Age Club Mystery was entitled A Death at the Seaside, and it was set in the Filey/Scarborough area of the Yorkshire coast.

In many ways, it was experimental. I'd written plenty of mystery novels and my fair share of detective works, too, but they were all hard-boiled, no punches pulled, type titles. They tended to be (still are) very gritty, dour works, clothed in an atmosphere of gloom. I decided I needed a change and a rest from them, and I came up with the Sanford 3rd Age Club.

Despite having read this kind of thing since childhood, I'd never properly analysed them, and I elected not to bother now. Instead, I hit the keyboard and a month or two later, there was A Death at the Seaside, available on the Kindle.

All the elements were there, but it was short; barely 25,000 words. The follow up, An Heir to Murder wasn't much longer. It was then that I decided I'd better look at other examples, and analyse them properly. So I began buying cosy crimes from my local bookshops, and in every case, I read them twice. Once for the pure enjoyment, the second time to analyse how the author had got so much mileage from the story.

By the time I put out A Halloween Homicide, I was getting somewhere near, and the series finally came of age with A Murder for Christmas, which reached the magical 80,000 words.

So what was the big secret? In a nutshell, it's more murders and plenty of suspects. Chuck in a few red herrings, let's have a little subplot going if we want, and the whole kit and caboodle springs to full-length life.

In January this year, when Crooked {Cat} Publishing offered me a contract, I pulled A Death at the Seaside and An Heir to Murder and merged the story of A Death at the Seaside with elements of An Heir to Murder. That became The Filey Connection.

Even now, at about 70,000 words, it's a little shy of the target, but the necessary elements are all in there: suspects, murders and the inevitable red herrings.

This is not to say you can write detective novels to a formula. You can't, and you shouldn't even try. Every story has a unique background, its own unique murder and suspects, and the mean by which the perpetrator is nabbed should be original to each and every tale.

The only common element is the cast of characters, and, of course, Joe's famous hand-rolled cigarettes.

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The Filey Connection, first of the Sanford 3rd Age Club Mysteries, from Crooked {Cat} Books is available for the Kindle from Amazon UK and Amazon Worldwide and in all other formats from Smashwords