Alison Bruce is the author of the Cambridge based DC Gary Goodhew Series which started with Cambridge Blue in 2008. Alison is also the author of two psychological thrillers and two Non-fiction books. In 2013 and in 2018 she was shortlisted for the CWA Dagger in the Library Award. Her most recent book is Because She Looked Away which is the start of a new series featuring DS Ronnie Blake.
Ayo: - Your last book was a standalone I believe, so I wanted to know what made you want to write a standalone and now go back to writing a series.
Alison: - The last book was The Moment Before Impact and I wrote that expecting that to be the first in a new series. That was my plan. I absolutely loved the main character in it, the two main characters and I saw them as being the start of a new series. But both my agent and my publisher said no, we think it is a standalone by the way in which the story is told. It is still unfinished business, so that is something I would like to come back to later. But then I was left in a position where the publisher said that they would really like a new series, something related to the police rather than an amateur sleuth. So, I came at it from the point of view of thinking that well I did not want to do another version of the Goodhew books because that is its own thing and again, I do not feel that I am completely finished with that. So, I thought that as a starting point – do you remember Nancy Kominsky? She used to paint things and she would do a few daubs on the page and you didn't think that it is not going to turn into anything but she would gradually fill bits in and it was a bit like that so I thought that my starting sketch was to think that if I was going to go from somewhere which was the opposite to Goodhew I would be thinking of someone who doesn't love Cambridge the way in which he (Goodhew) loves Cambridge which implies somebody who has been forced to move to Cambridge for one reason or another. They do not naturally operate at the Cambridge pace or with the Cambridge mindset. So, it has a fish out of water element to some extent. Gary was new when he first joined in Cambridge Blue and that was his first murder investigation. So, I thought that I wanted it to be somebody a bit more experienced who had a bit of history in the police. I was coming from all these opposites really, a bit like a pendulum I was probably too far away at that point and so I rounded off some of those rough edges and I settled on this character Ronnie Blake and she is new to Cambridge, she has family in Cambridge, she has reasons to stay without necessarily the enthusiasm to stay.
Ayo: - When we were chatting earlier you were saying that there was a bit about the University It does have lots of university elements in them. What made you decide to incorporate those? I know that when everyone thinks of Cambridge they think of the university, but I would have thought that you would or might have wanted to avoid that.
Alison: - I do tend to avoid it because I write about Cambridge the way that I see Cambridge. I do work for not the University, but the other University in Cambridge and I tend to avoid that. I like to approach Cambridge from what I see and what are my experience in Cambridge is which I believe are just as valid as the University angle. It is the day-to-day Cambridge that I see. But I also have this storyline where Ronnie's sister had been living in Cambridge for a period and it was natural, and it worked very well that she had come as a student.
Ayo: - One of things, I mean over the years I know that you have a BSc in Science degree with honours in Crime and Investigation, how much did that help in writing this series because when you started the Goodhew series you did not have that. Things have clearly changed over the years. Did this help?
Alison: - I took my degree really because I wanted to write, I did not always want to be going to other people. I wanted to have a better base knowledge myself. So, when I first wrote the very first Goodhew book which came out third – The Calling now The Cambridge Calling I had the murder victims in quite exposed places where the bodies had been for quite a long time. So, I got away with there not being much forensic evidence. But what I did do always from the beginning was to seek out the right people from which to ask advice. There is no way that I had the same level of expertise than any of those. But I hope that I ask more informed and more plausible questions, and I can narrow down what’s viable and what is not more quickly. What I have found from doing my degree is that some people do really make things up, and I know it is fiction but it is interesting where the line is between fact and fiction and sometimes you can read a book where you think that ten minutes of research would have helped and that is really frustrating. When I wrote the last book there was a lot in there about seatbelt injuries and I had the idea originally whether it was plausible for the person to have been put in the driver’s seat after the crash. I quickly found out that there are so many reasons why not. Seatbelt injuries, the impact, the seatbelt locking, the airbags and so forth. And then part way through writing it I read somebody else's book and the big reveal at the end was that the people had switched places after she was unconscious. I felt for all those reasons, no. And I think that the research is massively important because everybody knows that you are reading fiction but, at the same time you have got to make them believe that it is viable. But if you stretch that too far then it doesn't make sense. I do try and do groundwork.
Ayo:- Groundwork is important and as an author one of the things I wanted to find out from you as a general point is on the one hand you have people that state that they really just want to be entertained and on the other hand both you and I know that if you are writing a crime novel then a lot of social policy will come in to it. So, how do you juggle that—as in wanting to entertain and wanting to make people realise what is actually going on.
Alison: - Okay, I compare it to a drum. You know when you have got a drum, those little screw things which must be tightened up, you must think about what all of those are for you. Obviously setting, character, plot, things like the timeline, facts. You must look for where the saggy bits are and tighten them up. But sometimes you must ditch an idea because it is a great dramatic idea, but it doesn't hold water. Obviously, it won't work and if you have seen that this is the case then you need to deal with it. I have had lovely ideas that have gone in the bin. If you are not 100 % certain that you can tighten that drum, then throw it away.
Ayo: - When you decided to start this new Ronnie Blake series did you think that it would be easy even though you had already written the Goodhew series?
Alison:- No, I thought optimistically if I go back to the beginning once I have written one book, that they would all be a piece of cake but I then found number two notoriously the hardest one to write because you have written the first one with already having inspiration, but I have a kind of trauma each time I write a book where I sit there with a blank page thinking that how did my five lines of thought turn into 100,000 words. I was not expecting it to be easy, but I am very pleased with some characters that I have and the ongoing story opportunities for growth, but I am not expecting any book to be easier than the last one.
Ayo: - I would not say each time that you write it becomes easier as I would have thought that it becomes harder because you must make sure that people will want to continue to read the series. So, saying that how important is Cambridge as a location as all your books have been set in Cambridge. Let's look at it also in another way, would you set your books anywhere else?
Alison: - I would. I have one plotted set somewhere else, but I don't know whether the publisher will buy it or not. I might have to write it and go down some other explored avenue. They are very keen on me staying in Cambridge because it is a strong selling point and an agent that I was in talks with early on said excellent choice of location. The Americans only know four places – they know London, Scotland Oxford, and Cambridge and if to prove that I have a review on Amazon.com that says, “gee those Brit sure know how to write about Scotland” and that's for Cambridge Blue. So, they are not mutually exclusive either. I am lucky I have picked a good location. There was the option to make somewhere up and that was a thing for a while, but you can never invent somewhere that is as rich and cohesively fits together as well as a real place. Because what really happens out there really happens. So, it was a stroke of luck picking Cambridge. At the time Michelle Spring's books were set in Cambridge and I didn't know if I had to look over my shoulder because I had stepped on somebody else's territory. But she is absolutely charming. But I did not know if I was doing something naughty. But it did also make me want to make sure that I had my own brand on Cambridge. I have sometimes fought against the assumption that it was going to be quite cosy because it is in a historic place. I don't know where I sit on that cosy to non-cosy line but I'm in the middle. I would like to think that I am writing what I would like to read. Which is real people, real dilemmas, moments that are quite gritty but not something that is tortuous. I do tend to have a few pages that might be forensic related or have “corpses,” but they are part of the texture rather than the whole texture.
Ayo: - That brings me back to another question I was going to ask you and that is, is there really a DEAD Team?
Alison: - Ah, now I have called them the DEAD Team, but what I found out talking to a very experienced former Detective who has some great stories, he is retired but has been involved in the recent search Constance Marten and her baby and some other high-profile cases. He said that they have these teams that have a couple of people who are part of the team who are “inside” people and part of the team that are “outside” people. He was telling me about a case (which I won't go into too much detail) as I want to base a short story around it, where they suspected that this man and his girlfriend had been involved in a murder. What they did was surveillance, a lot of planning a lot of background and that was the “inside” team. Then they planned how they were going to observe and interact with him and that was the “outside” team. Between them they planned it and set it off and they caught them. So that was where the idea of the DEAD Team and I liked the idea of calling them the Dead Team where I could make an acronym where it would spell dead. I thought that it tripped off the tongue nicely and it was not just Ronnie doing her own thing. There are these other people who had extremely specific skills that I could employ at various points which I did not have in the Goodhew books. Goodhew is a bit of a loner, whereas Ronnie would like to be a loner, but she is stuck with this team.
Ayo: - Now that you are writing your second series is there anything you can think of you would do differently as you do not want to make the same mistakes compared to writing your first series?
Alison: - Yes, there is a mistake that I am in the process of making again and I'm going to stop myself after only one book and that is keeping a note of everything from each character even down to eye colour. The number of times I have had to look through a previous book and go for example “how does the boss take his coffee”. Those sorts of things. Continuity type of things. Exactly how long was her hair, how tall was he. Those kinds of things and so I do not want to mess those things up.
Ayo: - So, are you going to do this as a card system or on a spreadsheet?
Alison: - I think I am going to use cards, and I'll pin them to the wall. One of the things I have found really useful and will do again is to find pictures that represent the people because some of those things you can look at and go “that's what his hair looks like”. Or sometimes it is a certain expression. It is good if you can find an actor as then you can find subtly things about that person and what for example what they looked like ten years ago, what they looked like stressed, what they look like when they are schmoozing. I suppose that is like almost building my official little world that I can just gaze at when I am at my desk writing. What I learnt from Cambridge Blue is that it is going on at quite a pace right up to the very end and had the effect of going from forty to zero in about ten feet and it is like a smack against a wall, whereas I have learnt to slow things right down and to deliver it a bit more gracefully. This is not directly answering your question, but it does not feel right to me when people say just write for yourself. I can understand that when you are starting out, but it is really important to write for your readers as well. When you know what worked for them and what hasn't quite often, I will write something and I’m going to think that they are going to like that makes me feel that I’m engaging with them in the writing process.
Ayo: - So let me ask you another question on that point then. How do you feel when you have readers that enjoy your books so much but they get rather frustrated when you make your character do something that they don't think is something your character would do or try and tell you what they think that you should write about next?
Alison: - If you are on book one, it could be a problem because you don’t know what books two and three look like. By the time I had enough written for people to do that I was already three or four books in, and I knew where I was going with the first seven. You do get people who say something and sometimes it is something critical but it is really useful and I remember with one of my books, I think that it was number five I think somebody said “I have liked all of your books but I didn't like the main character in this one, I didn't find him sympathetic enough” and I looked back and I thought I liked her but I can see why not other people would and I thought what could I have done with that character. A couple of things I could have dropped in to make people warm to her. Although it is one person's opinion. I found it a valuable thinking process for me.
Ayo: - Okay, but doesn't that therefore mean you are allowing someone to indirectly tell you what your character should be doing? I think as an author I understand the point of view of you writing for yourself and writing for your readers but there must be a happy medium and but as a character quite frankly they may be absolutely appalling, but this is the way they are. Surely, they should not change.
Alison: - In that example it's more that I thought that I had written a character, whom I wanted. I didn't think I had written an unlikeable character. I thought that I had written a character that people were going to warm to. I wanted to hear why that reader did not find that character appealing and considered that it was a learning curve of how somebody else's perception of my character might work differed from my own perception of my work. No, you can't let the readers dictate. When there was the “will they, won't they,” thing going on with Goodhew and Sue Gully I had at least three different book events (where I had gone to a reading group), and I sat back and watched the for and against kick off. I'm sitting there waiting and all I wanted to say was - “you know that they are not real, right?”
Ayo:- I think for me, not only as a reader but as also someone who writes about crime fiction, the fact that some people get so into a character and they go past the fact that they are fictional and get to that stage that they believe they are true life people I find rather strange. Author's can write the characters the way they want to write about them. They are your characters.
Alison:- There is something on I believe an Amazon review or Goodreads review and he says, (because where Goodhew lives is owned by Emmanuel College), that “she writes about Cambridge as though it is really real but Goodhew's house is owned by Emmanuel College so he can't live there”. He doesn't live anywhere, I made it up. Anywhere I put him is someone else's house. Equally you think, well you want people to feel that it is realistic.
Ayo: - So, there’s a compliment in there.
Alison: - Yes, there is a compliment in there. There is a compliment in the fact that readers enjoy the characters that much that they become fully invested in them and start seeing them as real.
Ayo: - The other thing I wanted to ask you about was the day job and what you are doing. You mentioned it before we started the interview. How much does it inform your writing. Do you think that you have improved your writing? You were saying earlier about wanting to stop asking people questions so that you already knew the answers yourself instead of having to go and ask a police officer for example. How important has this been for you?
Alison:- It has made a huge difference partly because I have a team of around 25 people with nearly all of them being ex-police, so when I talk to them it is their mindset and I have Graham Bartlett who gave a quote and he said my pleasure actually thought you were a cop it is so authentic. I don't think it would have happened without the job. I know that certain things elicit certain responses.
Ayo: - You now know how to phrase your questions to get the answers that you want. Having been around the police for a long time you know what it is that you need to know and how you need to ask the question.
Alison: - Somethings I want to know I can boil it down to a very brief question and I know that will trigger a whole raft of answers and interesting stuff. You have different types, those who are incredibly blunt and also conscientious no nonsense in their answers and a lot of those are retired. There is a bit of a sadness about the difficulty of the job and the thanklessness, and they feel quite sad for a lot of the young ones coming up who really don't know what they are letting themselves in for. It is interesting.
Ayo: - I have one last question about the current book, and it is a bit to do with research as well. What sparked the idea for this story?
Alison: - When I'm teaching creative writing there is sometimes a game, I get the students to sometimes do in the class. It is called consequences. I give out some papers and get them to write down a name, an age, and what job the person either did do, does or wants to do. You fold it over and pass it on each time and what is the moment that had the most impact in their life. I decided to start the book with the moment that had the most impact on Ronnie's life which was when she was a child. Which I think really sets the scene how her mind set is, what she is trying to understand about the world and how her mindset is what it is. And then jumping forward to the situation where because of what has happened in her family she is having to move Cambridge and there are echoes of what happened to her as a child in what is happening to her now. So, I was looking for something like that which painted Ronnie very strongly very quickly and also put her in something that was a quite challenging situation where she ends up living with her half-brother and her nephew and she is struggling with that. She has never been in that position before and having to work with this new police team on this investigation which she is not really part of initially. It gave the reader a good opportunity to get to know her and for her to deal with something consequential personally and professionally. So that is why I picked it. I did have in my head a quite clear image of what happened when her sister died and then I built it out from there.
Ayo: - As much as you can, let's talk about Crash and Burn which is not due out until next year and is the next one in the series.
Alison: - Crash and Burn starts with a burning building. It is an old, abandoned bungalow that had been used by teenagers to hangout, to smoke, get drunk and is burnt down. As they are damping down the fire, they find two bodies. The second body is that of a woman who disappeared 18 years previously. They assumed that she was the last known victim of a kidnapper but with the other victims they always knew what happened. The investigation starts from the point of view of two different investigations. One that the DEAD Team are not involved in – misadventure or whatever had happened to the recent body and then the one that they are involved in which is the old case. If you know the way in which you can implant memories on children, it is the opposite way around where the daughter of the woman that died was potentially a witness, a three-year-old which is about the earliest time you can form memories. She can't give the police anything conclusive. She remembers bits and pieces, but she believes that she has imagined them or dreamt them all. But there are bits and pieces of her memory that she has which will prove critical to finding out what happened to her mother.
Ayo: - Sounds incredibly interesting. Can't wait for it to be published. I also wanted to ask how do you do your research?
Alison: - Research is critical but can end up being far more interesting than writing. So, you must be careful about whichever rabbit hole you go down stays in the rabbit hole and does not become a warren. I usually do research in two main bits. First, I think is my story viable. I don’t want to write loads and then go is that actually forensically impossible and have to give up and start again. So, if it is viable then I will get into the plotting and everything else and then I will try and come up with specific questions. For example, now I'm looking at what state bodies have been buried beneath the floorboards 18 years will be in now the house above is burnt. I know somebody who is a fire investigator who did some of the body recovery at Grenfell Towers. I will attempt to speak to her. I will ask her some very specific questions. I always try and go to the best person I can find in that field with the most well-formed questions at that point. Hopefully, I will get some answers and can dig a bit deeper for something that I'm going to use rather than thinking I have loads of useful information but nothing to connect it to. I try to do that all the way through. Find those specific things and hopefully in certain places people will read the book and pick up unusual bits of information and then when they Google it, they will find out that I have not made up the information based on something.
Ayo: - So that brings me to another question? Are you a plotter or a pantser?
Alison: - I'm a plotting pantser. Because I have tried just pantsing and the downside is I once wrote 30,000 words and realised that none of my characters could have done it. I had made it so watertight that nobody could have done it. If you only plot you can miss some great opportunities to go places. So, what I need to know for example, is if I am driving and I'm going from London to Bristol I am going to be thinking let's have a quick look at the map, London, Slough, Reading, Swindon, Chippenham, Bath Bristol. So that is my plotting and if I decide I want to get there via the A4, and Carn looks interesting, I'm going to stop for an hour at Carn but that is fine because I know that I'm still going to Bristol. So, I am a plotting panster.
Ayo: - What else, what are you up to what can we expect from you aside from Crash and Burn?
Alison: - I have got eleven books plotted. This is the first of 4 in the Ronnie Blake series. I have book that is half-written – this is an exclusive featuring, Celia. So, I want to finish that after Crash and Burn and before I write Ante Mortem. I want to squeeze it in there. I have a few more up my sleeve.
Ayo: - You mentioned something earlier when we were chatting earlier about the possibility of a prequel.
Alison: - I would like to write a prequel that is partly because I planned book 7 for Goodhew, and I knew where he was going to end up at the end of book 7. I thought that I don't know where or when or if I would want to go any further with book 8 and I thought of an idea for book 8 which I really liked the idea of. Obviously, he is in a different place quite a lot from Cambridge Blue. But I thought that the downside of all that really is that people jump in at book 8 and it will be a completely different experience. So, I thought that does not really sit with going back to book 1. It would be like thinking you were in Hawaii when you are back in Cambridge. So, I thought the perfect way to do it would be to do a prequel. The prequel being book 8 people would have read book 7. It is not on the cards for me to write it yet but that is my mindset.
Ayo: - So, we have not totally seen the end of Goodhew …
Alison: - I do not think that we have seen the end. When I wrote Cambridge Black, I thought that this is the last one for now. It felt like that. Now people still ask about Gary, and they are obviously re-jacketing the whole series. So, it will be a difficult juggle as I am so busy with work. But it will be the perfect time to do it.
Ayo: - Last question … How do you juggle writing and the day job?
Alison: - It is difficult. My job means that I regularly do 50 to 60 hours a week which means I do not fit much else in. So, I had written a lot, and it was not totally working so I blew all my years holiday, and I wrote pretty much every day into the night 24/7 some of the time. I was going all the way through the night falling asleep at my desk. And I was sending my daughter updates, and I was having a cup of tea when I reached a milestone. It was getting quicker and quicker, and I got into a rhythm. When I get quick, I want to jump off the end of one book and start the next. I have only tried it twice and the wrong characters were coming into my head at the time, and I realised that I was not in the correct book. So there needs to be that kind of breathing space. When I write quickly, I write really quickly but in-between I write really, really slowly. The average is slower than average but if I keep up the full momentum all the time, I would be doing a lot of books, but I cannot pull it out the bag that quickly.
Ayo: - You also need a break.
Alison: - I am an Olympic standard procrastinator. I can procrastinate about procrastination.
Thank you, Alison, so much, it is lovely to see you.
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- BECAUSE SHE LOOKED AWAY : Constable (26 Sept. 2024) Hbk
- Check out Alison Bruce's Website
Praise for Alison Bruce
'Alison Bruce always delivers. Her latest is tense, twisty, terrific' Ian Rankin
' [Alison Bruce] has written a superior thriller, full of suppressed menace' The Times Crime Club
'Unpredictable, challenging and compelling' Sophie Hannah
'Alison Bruce has long been one of the most adroit crime fiction practitioners in the UK. The Moment Before Impact is . . . her most accomplished outing yet' Barry Forshaw, Financial Time
'As always, Bruce produces a rewarding read' The Times
'I Did It For Us held me from the off. It's compelling, slickly plotted and brilliantly written' Amanda Jennings
