It was both a delight and an honour to be asked to guest blog on It’s A Crime, and I’m so pleased to be here. I’m even more pleased, however, to see the reactions from Rhian and Chris to the latest exploits of Charlie Fox - Second Shot and Third Strike. With both books I knew that I was about to step out on something of a limb as far as a series character was concerned, and I admit that initially I wasn’t too sure if I could really pull it off.
I remember explaining to an audience at Left Coast Crime in Bristol, back in 2006, that I intended to open Second Shot with Charlie lying in a frozen forest in New England, having just been shot twice. The room actually gasped, and a part of me thought, Uh-oh, is that a good thing or a bad thing that just happened there?
Whenever you step outside the conventions, there is the chance that you’re going to misjudge the mood. I took a chance with Charlie herself. Not the standard private eye or police officer of conventional British crime fiction. Not quite the standard amateur sleuth, either. I wanted a strong female lead who would not scream and fall over and wait to be rescued. And I wanted to explore the killer inside her, the deadly instincts that she initially tried to suppress, but at the same time never to lose sight of her human edge.
Men who kill are the norm in crime thrillers. It’s almost expected of them. Women who kill, however, are so often portrayed as psychos or cold-blooded assassins. Charlie is neither and I strove to make her more rounded, more real. She doesn’t go looking for trouble, but working as a bodyguard she can be forced to kill in the line of duty, to defend her principal or die trying. And when that principal is her own father, as in Third Strike, things get somewhat complicated.
In that book I wanted to bring to a head a lot of themes that have been rising for a while in the series. The main one was Charlie’s ongoing difficult relationship with her parents. I felt that Charlie’s father in particular always stole every scene in which he’s appeared. So this time I wanted to bring him much more to centre stage, to confront him with his own killer instinct and see if he was still able to take the moral high ground, as he’s tended to do in the past. This is a book about respect, the search for it, the attempt to regain it.
And it leaves Charlie - not to mention her parents - in a very interesting place. Bringing her back from that in the next one presents a whole new set of challenges!
[Our thanks to Zoë. You can find out more about her work here and sign up for her newsletter. If you have any questions for her, please post them in the comments. She's on a tight schedule at the moment, but hopes to be able to access the net later today and tomorrow to be able to reply to any comments. And hopefully later... We culminate tomorrow with Chris's review of the latest novel: Third Strike.]
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