Saturday, 27 August 2016
Stop Press Murder by Peter Bartram
Series: Crampton of The Chronicle
Release Date: 1st August 2016
Publisher: Roundfire
Publisher: Roundfire
Genres: Thrillers / Mystery
FIRST, the saucy
film of a nude woman bathing is stolen from a What the Butler Saw machine on
Brightons Palace Pier. NEXT, the piers night-watchman is murdered - his body
found in the coconut shy. COLIN CRAMPTON, ace reporter on the Evening
Chronicle, senses a scoop when hes the only journalist to discover a link
between the two crimes. HE UNCOVERS a 50-year feud between twin sisters - one a
screen siren from the days of silent movies, the other the haughty wife of an
aristocrat. BUT COLINS investigation spirals out of control - as he RISKS HIS
LIFE to land the biggest story of his career. STOP PRESS MURDER, a Swinging
Sixties mystery, has more twists and turns than a country lane. It will keep
you guessing - and laughing - right to the last page.
GUEST POST
IT
STARTED ON A DARK NIGHT IN WORTHING…
By
Peter Bartram
The
scene is an ill-lit street in Worthing, a coastal town in West Sussex. The
time: February 1966. A young reporter is walking back to his newspaper's office
after covering the proceedings in the local magistrates' court.
As the reporter turns the corner, a bulky
figure looms out of the shadows. The reporter immediately recognises the man as
one of the defendants who'd earlier been standing in the dock at the court.
He'd been found guilty of affray - fighting in the street after a booze-up the
previous Saturday night - and fined five pounds, (£84 today if you take into
account inflation).
"You're from the paper, ain't
you?" says the bulky figure. "I was watching you scribbling away at
the press table."
"You're point being?" says the
reporter.
"My point being that if you print
anything about me in your rag, you better watch your back. Know what I
mean?"
"I have a reasonable idea,"
replies the reporter.
It turns out the bulky figure works as a
kitchen porter in one of the town's hotels. If his bosses discover he's just
picked up a criminal record they'll sack him. Hence, his aversion to publicity.
The reporter nods agreeably to the bulky
figure and continues on his way. The bulky figure scowls and slouches off in
the opposite direction.
Fast forward to July 2014. The reporter has
now become a freelance journalist after a career which has taken him to Fleet
Street and on many foreign assignments. He's planning to write a series of
crime mysteries, a lifelong ambition. But he's puzzling over who the central
character should be. When it comes to detectives, other crime writers have
covered every conceivable angle. Same with private eyes.
And then the light bulb comes on his mind as
the memory of that incident in a dark Worthing street floods back. Why not make
the central character a crime reporter? And why not place him in the 1960s? And
why not set the stories in Worthing? No, on second thoughts, perhaps not. The
reporter recalls interviewing a Canadian visitor to the town back in those
days.
"What do you think of Worthing?"
says the reporter.
The Canadian (looking dismayed at the geriatric
population passing by) replies: "Back home, we bury our dead."
So not Worthing. But if the scene is moved
to Brighton, just 10 miles along the coast, that was a town that hummed with
action in the Swinging Sixties.
I bet you guessed several paragraphs back
that the reporter was me. And those days in the 1960s working in newspaper newsrooms
have proved to be more fruitful than I imagined at the time. They've provided a
wealth of background and incident for my Crampton of the Chronicle series of
humorous crime mysteries.
And so did I ever write a story about that
kitchen porter? The irony is that I hadn't intended to. The story was a feeble
one by crime standards - not the kind on which the paper would use up valuable
column inches.
But when I mentioned the incident to the
editor, he insisted I write the story as long as possible - and we put it on
the front page. "Nobody threatens the fourth estate and gets away with it!"
my boy.
I
haven't yet fictionalised that incident in a Crampton book, but maybe it will
turn up in a story in the future. But whenever I'm stuck for an idea, I take a
trip down memory lane to those 1960s newsrooms.
Stop
Press Murder: a Crampton of the Chronicle Mystery by Peter Bartram is published by
Roundfire Books.
There
is a free Crampton taster novella - Murder
in Capital Letters - available to download at
www.colincrampton.com/free-novella
Read Murder in Capital
Letters - for free!
Murder in
Capital Letters, a Crampton
of the Chronicle novella, is free to download for your kindle or other e-reader
at:
SHOT TWICE! Brighton antiques dealer Freddie Hollingbourne-Smith
is murdered in his workshop - and crime reporter Colin Crampton is first on the
scene.
TOO MANY
SUSPECTS: Colin discovers plenty had
reason to kill Freddie… like thwarted beauty queen Julie Appleyard, his jilted
mistress… snooty toff Sir Tunnicliffe Hogg, his persecuted neighbour… devious
hard-man Harry Spittlefield, his cheated partner… not to mention fiery and
passionate Isabella, his betrayed ex-wife.
CRYPTIC
CLUE: Colin must puzzle out the
mystery left by a small pile of printers' type - all in capital letters -
before he can finger the killer.
THE CLIMAX
EXPLODES on the famous train, the
Brighton Belle. With Colin's feisty Australian girlfriend Shirley at his side,
the laughs are never far from the clues as the pair hunt down the murderer.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Bartram
brings years of experience as a journalist to his Crampton of the
Chronicle crime series – which features crime reporter Colin Crampton in
1960s Brighton. Peter has done most things in journalism from
door-stepping for quotes to writing serious editorials. He’s interviewed
cabinet ministers and crooks – at least the crooks usually answer the
questions, he says. He’s pursued stories in locations as diverse as 700
feet down a coal mine and a courtier’s chambers at Buckingham Palace.
(The former is easier to get into but at least you don’t have to wear a
hat with a lamp on it in the latter.)
Peter wrote 21 non-fiction books,
including five ghost-written, in areas such as biography, current
affairs and how-to titles, before turning to crime – and penning
Headline Murder, the first novel in the Crampton series. As an appetiser
for the main course, there is a selection of Crampton of the Chronicle
short stories at http://www.colincrampton.com. Peter is a member of the Society of Authors and the Crime Writers’ Association.
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