The Jigsaw Man was born in the winter of  2017. It was a time when psychological thrillers were at their zenith and I wondered where were the stories featuring maverick detectives and serial killers? These stories seemed to have fallen slightly to the wayside. It also occurred to me that even though I had been reading crime fiction since I was a teenager, there were very few novels that featured a female detective as the protagonist and there were no novels that had a female detective that looked like me, a Black woman. I have been a Criminal defence lawyer for sixteen years and although I haven’t represented a serial killer, I have encountered many female detectives of colour during my career. These women have been trainee detectives or senior investigators on big and disturbing cases. I wanted my novel to tell the story of a detective similar to the women who have sat opposite me in a police interview room, or who I’ve cross examined in the witness box. These women exist in real life so why did they not exist on the page? We could probably all relate to the real-life challenges of trying to balance a demanding career with our  personal lives. Now imagine trying  to balance all of that whilst pursuing a serial killer in the same streets where you grew up and lived. 

Telling the story of a relatable, smart, tenacious and flawed Detective inspired by the women that I had met was exciting to me, but I also wanted to tell the story of my hometown. I grew up in South-East London in an area called Deptford. I’ve always believed that South-East London isn’t just a convenient location to set the story of The Jigsaw Man but is also an essential character that keeps the story moving and provides the motivation behind the characters’ actions.  

I called my novel a macabre love letter to my diverse and creative hometown. The story of Deptford is no different to the stories of many neighbourhoods across the world. We all know of neighbourhoods that were once declared undesirable but have since been hit with the gentrification stick. I’ve continued to find it fascinating that a new restaurant, hailed as the place to be, is on the site of where the playwright Christopher Marlowe was murdered in 1593.

The infamous River Thames was less than a five-minute walk from my childhood home and I grew up hearing stories that were meant to scare us but instead intrigued us. We were told that a trunk filled with dismembered body parts had washed up on the riverbank or that the haul from a bank robbery had been throw into the river. The river has a habit of discarding its secrets on the riverbanks and we sometimes found these secrets. There are memories of finding rusted weapons, headless dolls, an occasional dead animal on the muddy slicked pebbles of the riverbank and standing on the bridge watching the river police extracting a body out of the dark waters.  The tales of trunks containing dismembered body parts could have been no more than urban legends, but they stayed with me.  

Nadine Matheson is a criminal defense attorney and winner of the City University Crime Writing competition. She lives in London, UK. Her debut, THE JIGSAW MAN is on sale March 16, 2021 from Hanover Square Press.