I recently had the opportunity to sit down for a pint and a chat with debut crime author Alex Smith. Smith is the author of a brand new series of crime fiction novels starring detective and single dad DCI Robert Kett, but he’s better known by his full name, Alexander Gordon Smith, under which he has written twelve novels for children and young adults. Paper Girls, the first DCI Kett Thriller, is one of our featured books!
Hi Alex, thank you for being here!
Thank you very much for having me! This is my first interview wearing my crime author hat, so it’s exciting to be here.
Yes, we will talk a little about your various writing hats in a moment, but can we start by asking you for the pitch for your first book, Paper Girls?
Sure! Haunted by his inability to track down and save his missing wife, DCI Robert Kett leaves the Metropolitan Police behind and moves to Norwich with his three young children, hoping to heal their broken family.
But his newfound peace doesn’t last. Two newspaper delivery girls have gone missing in the city, and the clues point to a serial kidnapper. Kett is dragged into the centre of one of the darkest cases of his career — a case that pits him head to head against a horrifying evil. And a case that might uncover the terrible truth of what happened to his wife.
It’s a great read!
Thanks! I’m really glad you enjoyed it.
So, in an ocean of police detectives, what makes Kett stand out?
Kett’s a family man, and much of his story revolves around his relationship with his children: Alice, who’s 7, Evie, who is 3, and Moira, who is 1. Kett’s wife, Billie, was kidnapped three and a half months before the beginning of Paper Girls, and when nobody can find her Kett moves his children to Norwich to try to give them a better life, a fresh start away from the horror of the case. His entire life has fallen apart, he doesn’t even know if Billie is alive or dead, but he has to try to hold it together for his three girls. He’s a father first, and a detective second—or at least that’s what he tells himself.
I think the books, too, are primarily about him and his family. The crimes are central to the plot and the action, of course, but at its heart this series is about a good man trying to hold his family together in terrifying circumstances. Really, the books are a mix-up of Luther and Outnumbered.
That’s a crazy combination, but it works. The kids provide some real laugh-out-loud moments amidst the horror.
Thanks! They’re actually my three girls, almost word for word. They were certainly where the idea for the series came from. It’s impossible to be a parent and not find constant inspiration (and infuriation!) in your kids.
Tell me about it!
Right? For years I’ve been keeping a mental log of the things they get up to, and always planned to work it into a book somewhere. I had an idea a while back for a cozy mystery series about a detective with three girls, and it was the girls that helped him solve the crimes because they allowed him to think outside the box.
This series definitely isn’t cozy…
No, it’s pretty brutal in places! But there’s a coziness to it, I think, in the way that Kett is with his three girls. There’s a real gentleness there, and love, and it helps offset the horror. I’m a great believer in the power of hope, so although this is a gruesome thriller, there’s a thread of heroism and hope running through it. Much of that comes from Kett’s home life, and the constant presence of his children. And they do still help him with his cases!
So you’ve got three girls, how do you find time to write?
Ha, good question! Luckily it’s my full-time job, so I have an office at home and a place to get away. Well, technically it’s a place to get away, but we live in a small house and you can hear pretty much everything from every room. Having the three girls at home means constant noise, but I’ve learned to tune it out. Mostly. I mean, they are extremely loud, especially when they’re fighting. But writing can be a lonely job, so having them there in the background is actually really nice—and it’s a constant source of inspiration for the books.
I also tend to lose myself in a book, so it’s hard to get distracted. I tend to write a book in around three weeks, but it’s constant writing for those three weeks, dawn to dusk. It gets pretty intense.
A book in three weeks is nuts! Do you know what’s going to happen before you start writing?
No, not at all.
You don’t plan?
I don’t like to, because it feels like cheating! There’s no right or wrong way to write a book, every writer is different. For me, it’s all about keeping the mystery alive, and keeping the characters on their toes. If you know what’s going to happen then so do the characters, and it makes them lazy. And if you know what’s going to happen, it’s very easy to lose interest in the story. I keep writing because I want to find out the answers, which means sometimes I get right up to the end chapters of a story and still don’t know the full truth—not until the final moments. Writing this way makes me feel like I’m a detective too, and it’s really good fun.
Sometimes, I don’t even know what the crime is going to be when I start writing. For the DCI Kett prequel, Cry Baby, I just started writing and waited to see what Kett would find. It turned out to be a body on a bus, and the story just rolled from there!
Can you walk us through the process of writing Paper Girls? The book was inspired by your children, but when did you know what the crime was going to be?
The idea for the detective with children had been floating in my head for a while, but I hadn’t done anything with it. Then one day last year I was walking down my street just as night was starting to fall. The newspaper delivery girl was right in front of me, and she was walking down the drive of a house that was undergoing renovations. The place looked deserted and dark, but the door was open, and I watched her hesitate before throwing the newspaper inside. Like all crime writers, I just started thinking about how easy it would be for something terrible to happen. What if somebody had left the door open on purpose? What if they were waiting for her?
By the time I got home, a few minutes later, I had the opening for a story in my head, and the tagline: They were supposed to deliver the news. Instead, they made the headlines. I sat down that day and started to write, and everything I’d stored in my head for the last few months came pouring out. I really enjoyed it!
Impressive, but then, you’ve got some experience with writing already.
True. Paper Girls is my thirteenth published novel, but I’ve written over twenty in total. I have been writing since I was six.
Yes, your Amazon biography mentions your first book, The Little Monster Book.
I was lucky enough to learn what I wanted to do with my life when I was very young, and I’ve been writing ever since. Most of my books—written under my full name, Alexander Gordon Smith—are for younger readers, mainly teenagers, but they are all horror and thriller books, and to be honest there’s not a huge amount of difference between those books and the Kett novels. They are fast-paced, character-driven stories that are designed to keep a reader on the edge of their seat. I want a story to pick somebody up on the first page, and not put them down again until the last one. Hopefully all the techniques I learned writing horror stories for teenagers help make Paper Girls a fast and furious ride.
But this is definitely an adult story.
Yeah, it is. But it’s a weird distinction, it’s sometimes hard to work out what makes something adult. I mean, there is swearing for a start, and the themes are more adult. But some of the violence in my teen books is much worse. I think the main difference is that in my YA books there is a real sense of fantasy, of this not being real. Prisons full of monsters, and infernal machines, and vast beings who try to consume the world, these aren’t real-life things. But the monsters in the Kett books are very human, and there’s something so much scarier about that, because these monsters are people you might know, people who might live right next door to you.
I think the idea of real-life monsters has always fascinated me. I remember when I was a teenager I collected a Real Crime magazine full of all the worst serial killers in history. I read every episode from cover to cover. My parents were horrified. Actually, thinking about it, my first real piece of writing was when I was about thirteen and I wrote a story at school about a serial killer who murdered all of my teachers. They were not happy!
So yes, the Kett books are adult thrillers, but that same sense of hope and essential goodness runs through them, the one that fuels my books for younger readers. I want readers to finish the books with their hearts pounding, but also with a sense that all has been put right with the world. Until the next one, of course…
Speaking of which, Bad Dog is out now, and Three Little Pigs is on the way. What can you tell us about these books without giving too much away? Do we see any more of Kett’s home life?
Definitely! Kett is battling some real demons in Bad Dog, because of what happened in Paper Girls. His life is still falling apart, and he’s doing his best to be there for his children. But Kett’s trouble is that he’s a good man, and a great detective, so he finds it very hard to say no to a new case, especially when there’s a chance of saving somebody. Bad Dog is a darker book, because the crime that starts it—a murder in the woods by something that might be a man, or might be a dog—is brutal. It also puts Kett in a very dangerous place, both physically and mentally.
Three Little Pigs will take us back into the mystery surrounding Billie’s disappearance, and see Kett returning to London with a brand new lead. I don’t want to say too much, but this book is the fastest and most terrifying yet, and the events in it will change Kett’s life forever…
Argh, any more hints about what’s going to happen?
No, sorry! I haven’t quite reached the end yet, so even I don’t know the full truth…
Well, we’d better let you get back to it. But before we go, can you tell us your favourite crime author?
That’s tough. Can I pick two? When I was a kid, I found a book in a charity shop called An Unkindness of Ravens, by Ruth Rendell. I was way too young to be reading it, but I still remember the thrill of working my way through it. It made me want to write my own scary books.
More recently I discovered the books of JD Kirk, and it really opened my eyes to the idea that there are many different kinds of crime thrillers. I think one of the things that put me off writing crime was that I didn’t necessarily want to write the same kind of book as the ones I had been reading, there was a real bleakness to them that I enjoyed to read, but would have found hard to write—I’m an eternal optimist. But there was something so fast, so entertaining, so engrossing and scary and just fun about the DCI Logan books, I loved them. They’re crime books, yes, but there’s almost an element of soap opera there—these characters that we return to again and again. The Logan books definitely inspired the Kett books. I’m even hoping that one day Kett might take his family on a long drive up to the Highlands…
Being such a huge fan of JD Kirk, I was absolutely blown away when he read and enjoyed Paper Girls. He loved it so much he even gave me a quote for the cover!
We love JD too! Thank you for taking the time to speak with us, Alex!
It was a pleasure!
Paper Girls and Bad Dog, the first two books in the DCI Robert Kett series, are available now on Kindle and in paperback, through Amazon. Paper Girls is also an audiobook, narrated by Tim Bruce. Cry Baby, a prequel novella set on the day that Billie Kett was kidnapped, can be found for free on BookFunnel. Three Little Pigs, the third Kett adventure, is released on 1st April.
Find out more at alexsmithbooks.com, and zertexmedia.com
