The latest Sergeant Alan Murray mystery.
https://www.amazon.com/WRONG-PLACE-DIE-P-B-Barry/dp/B0CYSS6XZ8/
Showing posts with label murder. Show all posts
Showing posts with label murder. Show all posts
Wednesday, 15 May 2024
Saturday, 19 January 2019
Murder most foul - why we like crime stories
I recently read an article which mentioned our predilection for reading about crime whether true crime or fiction or natty detectives. The writer seemed to suggest that we were a bloodthirsty lot. I'm not so sure that she was wrong.
From the earliest times, ordinary people liked to watched spectacles of some sort. Juvenal, a Roman poet from the late 1st/early 2nd century said people only want "bread and circuses" (panem et circenses is what he actually wrote, which roughly translated means bread and games or circuses). I don't think we have changed that much in the intervening centuries. Public executions were popular. Take for example Samuel Pepys diary entry for 16th October 1660 in which he says that he went to Charing Cross to see Major-General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered. When his head and heart were shown to the people there were "great shouts of joy". And have you noticed that whenever there is a major incident, terrorist or otherwise, people get their mobile phones out and start recording?
Nearly all of us have stopped at the scene of an accident or of a major fire to see what was going on. It's not that we revel in others' misfortune. I think it is the herd instinct, wanting to know what happened to our fellow human beings, and the feeling "that could have been me" which makes us do this. Of course, the nightly news broadcasts keep us up to date with all the major catastrophes around the world. Good news never does sell well except maybe at Christmas.
Be all that as it may, crime fiction and true crime, in both book form and on television, remains very popular with readers and viewers alike.What a pleasure it is to curl up in bed at night or stretch out in the most comfortable chair in front of the fire and read about the solving of a murder.
I enjoyed writing my Sergeant Alan Murray murder series. I am not a fan of blood-curdling descriptions of how victims met their end. I prefer the detective side of it and this is shown in my stories. Murray is head of a small police station at the foot of the Kerry Mountains in the heart of rural Ireland where crime of any sort is rare and therefore all the more shocking when three women are murdered within a short space of time.
From the earliest times, ordinary people liked to watched spectacles of some sort. Juvenal, a Roman poet from the late 1st/early 2nd century said people only want "bread and circuses" (panem et circenses is what he actually wrote, which roughly translated means bread and games or circuses). I don't think we have changed that much in the intervening centuries. Public executions were popular. Take for example Samuel Pepys diary entry for 16th October 1660 in which he says that he went to Charing Cross to see Major-General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered. When his head and heart were shown to the people there were "great shouts of joy". And have you noticed that whenever there is a major incident, terrorist or otherwise, people get their mobile phones out and start recording?
Nearly all of us have stopped at the scene of an accident or of a major fire to see what was going on. It's not that we revel in others' misfortune. I think it is the herd instinct, wanting to know what happened to our fellow human beings, and the feeling "that could have been me" which makes us do this. Of course, the nightly news broadcasts keep us up to date with all the major catastrophes around the world. Good news never does sell well except maybe at Christmas.
Be all that as it may, crime fiction and true crime, in both book form and on television, remains very popular with readers and viewers alike.What a pleasure it is to curl up in bed at night or stretch out in the most comfortable chair in front of the fire and read about the solving of a murder.
I enjoyed writing my Sergeant Alan Murray murder series. I am not a fan of blood-curdling descriptions of how victims met their end. I prefer the detective side of it and this is shown in my stories. Murray is head of a small police station at the foot of the Kerry Mountains in the heart of rural Ireland where crime of any sort is rare and therefore all the more shocking when three women are murdered within a short space of time.
Monday, 9 July 2018
Crime in the Mountains - the first Sergeant Alan Murray Mystery Novel
I started my first Sergeant Alan Murray Mystery novel Death in a Lonely Place several years ago following a visit to Killarney in Co. Kerry.
Link to Amazon.com
I remember standing on the side of a steep hill and looking down at the lakes below and thinking that this would be a good place to hide a body. The wildness of the mountains - that great mass of land towering above us - intrigued me. And so Sergeant Alan Murray was created.
I invented the village of Ballyamber where he lives and I reckoned that his wife went missing on a climbing trip on one of those majestic mountains several years before my story began. I had no idea what had happened to her, I only knew that she disappeared without trace.
Next, I started to write a novel about a woman who went missing in the area and from there the story took over. Other characters appeared from nowhere, or so it seemed: the gossipy Mrs. Quinn, timid Helen looking to start a new life and her domineering boss Amy, Major Johnson and his wife Kim. My special favourite is Murray's assistant, Jim Flynn who is young and motivated and does not have too much patience with how some of the investigation is going. They all crowded into the story with their own joys and sorrows.
In the background is the mountain - fictitious - call Ardnabrone which is reputed to claim three lives a year. Ardnabrone means the "hill of sorrow" and so it proves to be in all three novels in the Sergeant Alan Murray series.
Some of my readers have said "I thought I was there, right in the middle of it all". Many readers are asking when the next novel in the series will appear. The answer to that is that I do not know. I had intended Death in a Lonely Place to be a stand-alone novel but it proved so popular that I wrote the second one, Ending in Death and then I just had to find out what had happened to Alan Murray's wife and I wrote A Cold Case of Murder.
All three novels are available on Amazon as e-books and as paperbacks.
Link to Amazon.com I remember standing on the side of a steep hill and looking down at the lakes below and thinking that this would be a good place to hide a body. The wildness of the mountains - that great mass of land towering above us - intrigued me. And so Sergeant Alan Murray was created.
I invented the village of Ballyamber where he lives and I reckoned that his wife went missing on a climbing trip on one of those majestic mountains several years before my story began. I had no idea what had happened to her, I only knew that she disappeared without trace.
Next, I started to write a novel about a woman who went missing in the area and from there the story took over. Other characters appeared from nowhere, or so it seemed: the gossipy Mrs. Quinn, timid Helen looking to start a new life and her domineering boss Amy, Major Johnson and his wife Kim. My special favourite is Murray's assistant, Jim Flynn who is young and motivated and does not have too much patience with how some of the investigation is going. They all crowded into the story with their own joys and sorrows.
In the background is the mountain - fictitious - call Ardnabrone which is reputed to claim three lives a year. Ardnabrone means the "hill of sorrow" and so it proves to be in all three novels in the Sergeant Alan Murray series.
Some of my readers have said "I thought I was there, right in the middle of it all". Many readers are asking when the next novel in the series will appear. The answer to that is that I do not know. I had intended Death in a Lonely Place to be a stand-alone novel but it proved so popular that I wrote the second one, Ending in Death and then I just had to find out what had happened to Alan Murray's wife and I wrote A Cold Case of Murder.
All three novels are available on Amazon as e-books and as paperbacks.
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