Summer Surprises with #The List

Its a Wednesday Summer Surprise for you!

Today, I'm delighted to introduce you to a new guest to this blog who has come with the kind of Summer Surprise that I absolutely love since it means me making a new purchase to add to my kindle queue. 

Graham H Miller

Graham H. Miller is a fellow Crooked Cat author who has a very exciting and busy day since his novel 'The List' launches today! I'll be popping into his launch party on Facebook  (19th July 2017) which is happening HERE 
and I'm sure he'll be delighted to have you pop in, too. (That's a cool hat Graham!)

Welcome to the blog, Graham. I love reading mysteries. I love writing them and although it wasn't my original intention some crime has crept into my contemporary mystery novels- though, unlike yours, mine cannot be termed crime novels. I've yet to read The List but it sounds just like my kind of story.

Can you tell us a little bit about what led to you writing The List?  BTW- Brilliant cover design! It's eerily mysterious...

The List is a crime novel with a mystery at its heart. My main motivation for becoming a writer was always asking myself “what happened next?” when I finished a book. This question really fuelled this book – each section begins with a short scene that takes place twenty years ago. 

The main hero is Detective Sergeant Jonah Greene of the South Wales Police. He feels his career is at a dead end when he returns from stress related sick leave and is pushed sideways into the role of coroner’s officer. His first body is that of a homeless man who froze to death. His bosses want the case closed but he is handed a list of seven names that the man wrote before he died. As he investigates the names, he becomes aware that something terrible happened in the mid-nineties. As he investigates, his career, relationships and finally life are put at risk.

As long as I can remember, I’ve had ideas for books. When I was at university I played role-playing games (the old-fashioned way with paper and dice) and graduated from there to writing stories. As I said, I’ve always been fascinated with the aftermath of big events, even if those events are usually the climax of a novel. 

One of my favourite TV programs of recent times was Broadchurch. Firstly they focused on one crime and studied it in detail, examining its effect on the whole community. Then, when they’d had the big climax with Olivia Coleman and David Tennant finding the murderer, they came back for a second season. This satisfied all my logical cravings as it exposed the faults in police procedure in the original series. It really was a “what happened next” plot.

So, when I was writing The List, I started with The Big Event in the nineties and worked out what would have happened as a consequence. From there I went to the crimes that would happen and finally how Jonah would solve them!

Law Courts, Cathays Park, Cardiff. 

My publisher, Crooked Cat, said that in my book, the location acts like a character. It’s set in Cardiff and the surrounding area in South Wales. In the last few weeks I’ve been visiting locations for this book and the next one to take photos and I’ve always been impressed. It’s such a fertile landscape for a writer to set a story in. 

Cardiff was a small town in 1800 and still has the energy of a city that is newly arrived. It has the old Victorian and industrial heritage side by side with modern areas which were developed less than twenty years ago. Outside the city are the valleys – a place all of their own – together with the coast and the countryside. Really, the possibilities are endless!

Thank you, Graham. That sounds like lots of books set in Wales are set to follow The List! There are so many places I need to revisit in Wales and Cardiff is one of the many that I need to explore a lot better sometime in the future, Graham. 

Your approach to writing The List sounds so 'planned and organised' compared to me since I essentially started off writing as a 'pantser' author. Well done with your organised strategy because I belatedly learned when I wrote one of my mysteries that being organised from the outset was a whole lot better than having to backtrack to tidy up at the editing stages! 

Graham H Miller can be reached at his website grahamhmiller.com on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/Graham-H-Miller-117009058317246/ and on Twitter @grahamhmiller 

The List is available from Amazon HERE

Thank you for popping in today, Graham. Best wishes with your launch today (which is already looking very promising on Amazon at before 8 a.m.) and for the future success of your writing.

Slainthe!