Manchester
Just as David Simon writes about Baltimore because that is his world, I find the British city of Manchester so inspiring. Voted the UK’s most violent city, Manchester is a strange mix of leafy suburbs, where white collar crime such as tax evasion, fraud and money laundering is quietly rife, and gritty inner city housing projects, where drug-related crime, gang warfare and violence visibly blight the lives of the poor. The weather is terrible, the music and football is world class, ours is a cultural melting pot on a par with New York or Chicago, and the decline of our textile industry that made the city prosperous in the 1800s has left poverty in its wake – even now, some two hundred years later. Small wonder I want to write about my home town of Manchester. The Lost Ones is set in Manchester and takes the reader on a tour of the UK’s rainy, second city.
Strong women
The best-selling crime-fiction series in the English-speaking world generally feature heroes who are men’s men, like Jack Reacher or Harry Bosch. I’m a woman, though, who has been brought up by strong women, in a family with very few men (they’re all dead, divorced or conveniently disappeared when the going got tough). Consequently, I want to read and I want to write about strong women, achieving amazing things in their own womanly way in a man’s world – and both the criminal underworld and the police forces on both sides of the Atlantic continue to be dominated by men. In previous series, I’ve written about Georgina McKenzie, the criminologist, Sheila O’Brien, the gangster’s wife, and Bev Saunders, the haphazard P.I.. In The Lost Ones, my lead protagonist is heavily pregnant Detective Jackie Cooke. In her, I’ve written a female character who can be Momma Bear at home and then kick a killer’s ass when she’s on the clock!
Serial killers
Over the years as a published author, I’ve seen the obsession with psychological thrillers grow exponentially, replacing the thirst for feelgood women’s fiction with something darker. Yet, as a reader and a devourer of global affairs, I have always been fascinated by serial killers far more than whether the husband did it or not. What compels human beings to commit heinous crimes, a la Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy? How did those men (and sometimes women) develop so differently from the rest of us, and what represented the tipping point, where they made the move from seriously mentally unhealthy to murderer? What motivates them to kill? When I was creating my killer, the Necromancer, in The Lost Ones, I tried to explore unusual motivations and modus operandi that would keep the police guessing and keep the reader turning the pages. In truth, I’m constantly trying to write something as quirky and gripping as Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs. How do you think the Necromancer measures up to Buffalo Bill? Let me know!
Family life
In so many police procedurals, I notice an almost total absence of the detective’s homelife or backstory. Well, that doesn’t work for me. When I write, I always incorporate my protagonist’s family somehow into the narrative. I can’t help but do so, because a Detective or an Inspector is not just a two-dimensional character that has a work life and no home life. I do love the books of Jo Nesbo, with his alcoholic cop, Harry Hole, but I didn’t want to slide into writing (admittedly highly popular) tropes where the leading man or lady has a drug or alcohol-dependency and is generally a loner. It doesn’t resonate with me, personally. When my Mom was alive, she was constantly calling me or visiting, telling me what to do and how I should be raising my kids. Sometimes, we’d laugh together. Sometimes, we’d yell at each other in the grocery store for all to see! That’s the nature of being close to family. Growing up, my grandparents, aunt, great-aunt and cousins all played a daily, vital role in my life. Now, in my own house, I have two older teenagers. We do so much together and have been through so much together – loss, divorce, building mayhem, school-based woes and puberty. Family life is what shapes a person, in my book, so I always try to bring a character’s home life into my stories. For Jackson Cooke, life wouldn’t be the same without her contrary mother, Beryl, or her hippy Dad, Ken or her irresponsible musician husband, Gus and her boisterous boys, Lewis and Percy.
Current affairs
I never read the news when I was younger. We couldn’t afford newspapers, for a start! As I get deep into middle-age, however, I find myself reading the newspaper almost every day. I read The Times of London, which is fairly centrist, but I also read the Guardian, which is quite left-leaning, as well as more conservative articles. I believe that you get a truer representation of the world if you read widely and try to maintain a balanced, open-minded point of view. I do find that current affairs inform my stories, now that I’m ten crime-thrillers in and counting. I read strange tales of murder most foul, committed in the heat of the moment, or conversely, committed with a great deal of forethought and calculation, and I’m fascinated by those gruesome and strange deaths that appear to be murder but which happen accidentally. I read how the internet has made the grooming of victims so much easier for rapists and killers. I read how war and a volatile global economy drive people to do terrible things to keep their families safe or to survive. My first series of The Girl Who… books, featuring George McKenzie, the criminologist, deals with trans-national trafficking, from Honduras to Afghanistan to Thailand. The Lost Ones, however, is both a tale of the everyday and a tale of the terrible. As ever, I am obsessed by a killer’s motivation, both in singling out victims and for the killing itself. And just like the stories I read every day in the news media, greed and the rather biblical concept of coveting is at the heart of Jackie Cooke’s case. Have a read, and see if you can make out my various inspirations for this first dark story in a new series!
Marnie Riches grew up on a rough estate in north Manchester. Exchanging the spires of nearby Strangeways prison for those of Cambridge University, she gained a Masters in German & Dutch. She has been a punk, a trainee rock star, a pretend artist and professional fundraiser.
Her best-selling, award-winning George McKenzie crime thrillers were inspired by her own time spent in The Netherlands. Dubbed the Martina Cole of the North, she has also authored a series about Manchester’s notorious gangland as well as two books in a mini-series featuring quirky northern PI Bev Saunders.
Detective Jackson Cooke is Marnie’s latest heroine to root for, as she hunts down one of the most brutal killers the north west has ever seen at devastating personal cost.
When she isn’t writing gritty, twisty crime thrillers, Marnie also regularly appears on BBC Radio Manchester, commenting on social media trends and discussing the world of crime fiction. She is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Salford University’s Doctoral School and a tutor for the Faber Novel Writing Course.
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