THE FIRST FIVE PAGES

Harriet F . Townson describes the j oyful p rocess of beginning her first foray into crime fiction

Dis For Death is my first crime novel but it’s my fourteenth novel. It’s hard to pinpoint when exactly I decided to start it, but I wrote the bulk of it from October 22 to May 2023. In a sense it’s the most useful example I can think of for this, a series about how you start a novel, as it’s a much more organic beginning than most of my books and I hope tracing it back a little further than the first idea of the actual book is helpful here because of that.

I have been writing for twenty years – mostly what’s called ‘commercial fiction’, novels about families and secrets and the past. I have also written other stories – I ghost-wrote a novel for a very famous person one summer, which was a lot of fun (no, sorry) and I wrote a novella for the Quick Reads series, plus I have several times attempted a YA novel which one day I will finish. One day. But the idea for writing a murder mystery, featuring a detective called Dora Wildwood: well, I’m not quite sure when the moment was when, whilst in the middle of my ‘normal’ job and my life that I decided to just go for it, but I could probably pinpoint a few reasons why.

Being a professional writer is a strange job to have. It is wonderful in lots of ways (eg: eating toast and writing a story in your pyjamas when it’s raining outside qualifies as work) but quite tricky in others. When you’re a full-time writer you have one book you’re working on. If you’re an editor, you have ten, twenty, sometimes fifty books coming out that year. If one book doesn’t work, that’s fine, you can have another go with another author. But when your one book that you’ve spent the past year or two years writing sinks without trace you are left feeling rather blue. When I was an editor I had an annual appraisal with my boss. I knew where I stood after that appraisal. Writers don’t have appraisals. When their careers are in trouble no one really tells them until it’s often too late.