Sunday, 27 August 2017
Stop Press Murder by Peter Bartram
Series: A Crampton of the Chronicle Mystery
Release Date: 1st August 2016
Publisher: Roundfire Books
Publisher: Roundfire Books
Genres: Murder / Mystery
FIRST, the saucy film of a nude woman bathing is stolen from
a What the Butler Saw machine on Brighton’s Palace Pier. NEXT, the
pier’s night-watchman is murdered - his body found in the coconut shy.
COLIN CRAMPTON, ace reporter on the Evening Chronicle, senses a scoop
when he’s 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 COLIN’S 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:
www.colincrampton.com/free-novella.
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.
UK
Murder in the Morning Edition
Morning, Noon & Night trilogy
US
Murder in the Morning Edition
Morning, Noon & Night trilogy
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