My guest author Jeanette Taylor Ford has come along to Patricia’s Pen to talk about her River View Series and how she came to write crime. Without further ado it’s over to Jeanette.
How I came to Write Crime
Jeanette Taylor Ford
My stories are often inspired by old buildings. Many years ago, I lived in Hereford in a whattle-and-daub, black and white farmhouse which is about four hundred years old.
I loved it and decided to write a book based around it, intending it to be a gentle mystery – ghostly footsteps and other mysterious things happening to scare off the new owner of the house, Lucy. I’d intended it to be a one-off. But as soon as I finished writing it, a new story came into my mind and it began with an old skeleton being dug up in one of Lucy’s fields.
Before I knew it, I was writing about a crime investigation, featuring the two detectives who had solved the mystery of the strange goings-on in Lucy’s house. By the Gate is still quite a gentle story, and introduces more of the characters who would feature in subsequent books. Suddenly, I was writing a series.
The third book involves a more dangerous criminal, a gangland boss, whose interest fell upon the village of Sutton-on-Wye because of a certain incident involving a teenager, bringing danger to a resident of the village. Books four and five followed fairly rapidly. I’m currently writing book six, which features the nursing and care home in the village.
The problem I have is, they don’t at first glance seem to be a series; their titles are vastly diffierent, as are the covers. They also can’t be described as either thrillers or cosy crime. What are they? I don’t know. But people do like them and for that I’m grateful. At the moment, I intend for book seven to be the last in the series, but who knows?
About Jeanette Taylor Ford
In 2010, Jeanette began to write poetry, followed by short stories. She’d always been an avid reader and loved writing, although her writing experience throughout the years was mainly writing letters to her parents, grandmother and sister. She’d write many pages and they were always excitedly received. Eventually, her mentor encouraged her to write a book, The Sixpenny Tiger. She thought that was ‘it’, that was the book she had in her and there wouldn’t be another one. But she found she’d been bitten by the writing bug and very soon, in the first year of her retirement in 2012/13, she wrote four more books.
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