Crime-writer Margaret Murphy: Truth, Lies, and Creative Collaboration
Every now and then I like to invite one of my crime-writing friends to be a guest on my blog. This time it's the turn of Margaret Murphy. I really wanted to know more about Margaret's colloboration with forensic scientist, Dave Barclay, and how that works. This is what I learned:
A.D. Garrett
is the pen name for Margaret Murphy and Professor Dave
Barclay’s writing collaboration. Margaret is a Dagger Award-winning novelist,
RLF Writing Fellow, and past Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association. As head of Physical Evidence at the UK National
Crime and Operations Faculty for 10 years, Dave undertook physical evidence reviews in 233
murders.
Their debut novel, EVERYONE LIES, has had rave reviews and reached the
top ten in Amazon Kindle last autumn. Margaret has penned 9
novels under her own name, so how did the writing collaboration happen?
‘During Liverpool’s year as Capital of Culture in 2008, the city hosted
the BA Science Festival,’ Margaret explains. ‘The Macaulay (now the Hutton) Institute
wanted to organize a panel discussion, open to the general public, examining
the science behind crime fiction. Did I know three writers brave (or foolhardy)
enough to have their work scrutinized, explained, and potentially ridiculed by
a panel of six (yes, six!) scientists? The first “Murder, Mystery &
Microscopes” featured me, Val McDermid and Peter James. In the event, the
scientists let us off lightly, the event was a double sell-out, and has since become
a staple of public science lectures.
‘Fast
forward to the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival 2010. My agent, Felicity Blunt,
and I watched Ann Cleeves and Mark Billingham getting the MMM treatment; the
forensics expert was Dave Barclay, whom I’d met in 2008,’ Margaret says. ‘I am
a scientist by training, and Felicity said she’d love to get the two of us
together on a project. We met over gin & tonic and Dave and I later agreed
our respective contributions.’
So how did
the partnership work? ‘Dave came up with three ten-point plots and we chose one
that had the potential to build into a satisfying thriller. From there, we
exchanged ideas, and talked about the characters, with Dave advising on
scientific and procedural elements.
The writing is my job, so when we felt we had enough background, I got
to work. We had the main protagonists: forensic scientist, Professor Nick
Fennimore, and DCI Kate Simms. We had also worked out the central plot – an
unexplained blip in the number of overdoses among north Manchester’s heroin
addicts, which Simms suspects is something more sinister. Being science
trained, I could do some forensic research myself; when a question arose that
was beyond my experience, Dave would provide briefing notes or a PowerPoint
presentation – or we would Skype.’
Are there any CSI-style
cheats or inventions in the novel? ‘Fennimore is a forensic scientist, which
means the science has to be right. That said, EVERYONE LIES is a work of
fiction, so the characters had to have depth and complexity to engage the
readers, and as a thriller, the story needed both tension and pace. The writing
process is organic – characters will do unpredictable things against the better
judgment of the writer – and I added in storylines and characters and scratched
out others along the way. In these instances, Dave would deal with the
scientific consequences of my untidy creative mind.’
Will the collaboration continue? ‘Happily, the second novel
is completed and is due out in July,’ Margaret says. ‘Fennimore and Simms go Stateside,
on the trail of a serial killer. That was fun to research. In May 2012, we
spent three weeks in Tulsa and St Louis, talking to experts covering a range of
aspects of the US Criminal Justice System. Highlights included being guided
around the Homicide Department in Tulsa, and talking to detectives, Cold Case
Investigators, and CSIs. They’d had 19 homicides between January and May – and
said it had been unusually quiet. We also talked to District Attorneys, a
forensic anthropologist, and a judge in Oklahoma. Our guide and facilitator,
Mike Nance, was formerly a homicide detective, and is now a Team Adam consultant. Mike is also a co-founder of the International
Association of Cold Case Investigators. Please check out their Facebook page and like it – these
guys do important work. In St Louis, we met with just-retired head of
the Major Case Squad, Bill Baker, and the Godfather of Homicide, Joe Burgoon, and
listened to a fund of stories that impressed on me both the humour and
compassion of the men and women who stand between ordinary people and those who
would do us harm. It’s impossible in a short blog to do justice to everyone who
helped and guided us, but I will be blogging the research trip, day by day, on
the A.D. Garrett website from 30th
April to 17th May, so I hope you’ll drop by.
EVERYONE
LIES, published by Constable Crime, is now out in paperback and in e-format.
The sequel, BELIEVE
NO ONE, will be published on 3rd July.
For
information on the books (including foreign publications), events, writing and
forensic science, visit the A.D. Garrett website at www.adgarrett.com or follow @adgarrett1 on
Twitter.
Labels: A. D. Garrett, Believe No One, Everyone Lies, Margaret Murphy, Professor Dave Barclay
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