Guest Blogger: Margaret James

This week, I'm delighted to welcome fellow writer, Margaret James to my blog to talk about her work. Over to you, Margaret...

Thank you so much for inviting me to be a guest on your lovely blog, fellow novelist and journalist Christine! I’m delighted to be able to share some home thoughts of my own today.

I’ve been writing novels since my children were very little, and I’m a grandmother now. But, as well as writing fiction, I’m a journalist working for Writing Magazine, the UK’s bestselling title for writers of all kinds and at all stages of their careers. I write the Fiction Focus pages for every issue and some of the author profiles too. It’s been my privilege to interview many of today’s bestselling novelists and learn the secrets of their success.

I’m also one third of the team that runs CreativeWritingMatters. The other team members are Sophie Duffy and Cathie Hartigan. We organise literary competitions, offer mentoring, and provide a whole range of other services to writers. Cathie and I are the joint authors of the bestselling how-to title The Creative Writing Student’s Handbook, available of Amazon Kindle and as a paperback:

We organise the Exeter Story Prize, the Exeter Flash Fiction Prize, the Trisha Ashley Award for the best humorous short story, and Exeter Novel Prize, which is judged by a top London literary agent. You can find details on the website.

My latest novel is The Final Reckoning, a psychological thriller set in Herefordshire. Here’s some information about it:

What if you had to return to the place that made you fall apart?

When Lindsay Ellis was a teenager, she witnessed the aftermath of the violent murder of her lover’s father. The killer was never found.

Traumatised by what she saw, Lindsay had no choice but to leave her home village of Hartley Cross and its close-knit community behind.

Now, years later, she must face up to the terrible memories that haunt her still. But will confronting the past finally allow Lindsay to heal, or will her return to Hartley Cross unearth dangerous secrets and put the people she has come to care about most at risk?

As novelist who usually writes family dramas or romantic comedies, why do I occasionally write crime fiction and why do I love to read it? Real life can often be terrifying enough, so who wants to read about imaginary crimes when there are plenty of factual horrors in the newspapers and on our screens all the time?

I think the appeal of most crime fiction is the puzzle. It’s certainly what attracts me. So, when it comes to writing crime fiction of my own, my starting point is always the puzzle. The Final Reckoning starts with the heroine thinking about an unsolved murder case from several years ago. Why would anyone want to murder a middle-aged man in a rather decisive but unusual way? What message, if any, was the killer leaving for the police to find? My heroine Lindsay Ellis is the one who stumbles across the body, but she is never a suspect. Eventually, the dead man’s son is tried for his father’s murder, but he is acquitted. Who else would have had a motive to kill? Nobody – apparently.

The fun of writing this novel came from filling it with twists and turns, from puzzling my characters as much as I hoped I would puzzle my readers, and from delivering the kind of twist ending that would have encouraged these readers to guess the truth, but to guess wrong.

I haven’t cheated these readers. I’ve slipped in plenty of clues pointing to the identity of the murderer and also to the murderer’s motivation. But, of course, as the writer, I have known the answer to the big question in this novel all along. So it looks rather obvious to me!

The Final Reckoning is published by Ruby Fiction and is available in ebook and audio format from all the usual platforms, including Amazon and Kobo.

I always love to hear from readers, so please feel very welcome to contact me!

https://www.facebook.com/margaret.james.5268
https://twitter.com/majanovelist
https://margaretjamesblog.blogspot.com/

Thank you so much, Margaret, for being my guest, I've really enjoyed your writerly home thoughts! For regular visitors here, do treat yourself to one of Margaret's books if you haven't already - I can thoroughly recommend them. (And Ma especially enjoyed Margaret's Charton Minster trilogy!).

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