AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN DEAN

Introduce yourself

 I have been writing for as long as I remember, encouraged by my parents (Dad was a librarian and Mum went on in later life to become an award-winning poet) as well as my teacher at primary school, Judith Burtt nee Kent, and Tom Cowley at comprehensive school.

I took that passion for writing into adulthood and, as the oft-used joke goes, became an overnight success 25 years later when my first crime novel was picked up by London publisher Robert Hale. When Hale ceased trading not long before Christmas in 2015, after almost 80 years in the business, I was signed up by The Book Folks, now a Joffe Books company, which re-issued my backlist and has published all my new crime novels written since. In all, there are twenty-six novels so far, twelve each in the DCI John Blizzard and DCI Jack Harris series plus two featuring DCI Danny Radford, written as John Stanley.

Before I decided to focus full-time on my writing, I was an award-winning journalist for forty years, including on newspapers for seventeen years and the remainder as a freelance. The business closed in 2020 to allow me to focus on my writing.

Before moving to live in Scotland eight years ago, I lived in Darlington, in South Durham, where I was Chair of campaigning arts organisation Darlington for Culture for five years.

Today, I live on a hillside in Dumfries and Galloway with my wife Frances, five cats, two dogs, thirteen chickens and fish beyond number.

I am also one of three national Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Libraries Champions – I am the champion in Scotland. We provide a conduit between libraries and the Board of the CWA and also help libraries promote themselves through enabling CWA members to participate in their events. We also promote the CWA’s annual Dagger in the Library award. 

I was the Co-Founder in 2020 of the annual Kirkcudbright Book Week, a literary festival which brings a wide range of authors to the town.

 Introduce Detective Jack Harris

Jack Harris joined the Army as a rebellious teenager seeking to escape his life in a North Pennines valley before he found himself on the wrong side of the law. After serving in the military, he left to join Greater Manchester Police, for whom he later headed up a new initiative against organised crime, then switched forces to return to the valley as Divisional Head of CID.

I always had in mind the idea of complex character who, when we met him in the first book was a burned-out detective, anti-social, unpredictable, occasionally unprofessional and unable to escape bad memories from his time with the Army. But he was also passionate about wildlife, a man who viewed the move north primarily as providing an opportunity to have an easier life in which he could walk the dogs more.  

As planned, Dead Hill saw the rebirth of Jack Harris. He will never be perfect but, although the books in the series can be read as standalone novels, they also tell the story of his continuing recovery.

The origins of fictional characters have always fascinated me, particularly the extent to which many creators draw on real people as a starting point, and Harris is a good example. When I draw on a real person it tends to be just the start of the process and I will only use a small part of their make-up. Maybe it’s their physical appearance, big, small, athletic, notable hair, dishevelled clothes etc. Or one or two elements of their personality, affable, irritable, nervous, irreverent. From that starting point, creativity takes over as the building of the character begins. Ideally, the inspiration for the character should not be able to recognise themselves in the final version as the real person is subsumed into someone new and unique.

 Why did you choose the setting of the Northern Pennines?

 It chose me! As a writer, I am always inspired by a sense of place. Whether it be a gloomy city or a stunning hillside, a glass-strewn council estate or a majestic waterfall, something about my surroundings repeatedly triggers ideas for stories.

Let me take you back to a hillside in the North Pennines and the birth of the DCI Jack Harris crime novels.

I had already written several in the DCI John Blizzard city-based series, which were well received, so the last thing I was looking for when we embarked on a family holiday was to come up with another series.

We were staying in a village on the Durham/Cumbrian border and there was a play area in the middle of the village. Every evening, our two children would go for a swing and I would wander out to keep an eye on them – they had gone well past the ‘Dad, give me a push’ stage but had not quite reached the stage where they could be left alone in a place they did not know.

In such circumstances, a person has a lot of time to think and I found myself staring at the hillside opposite. And as with all writers, ideas started to swirl around in my mind. Something about the hill’s slopes and its late evening shadows, the way the buzzards hunted across the ridge, the sound of the sheep bleating and the distant barking of a farm dog, worked their magic on me and by the end of the week, an idea was born, eventually turning into Dead Hill, the first book in the Harris series.

 How does this location make for a great mystery?

 The North Pennines landscape and the sense of isolation that it can create for those people living there, particularly in the long, dark winters, gives me a lot to play with, as does Harris’s passion for conservation (he is the wildlife liaison officer for the valley where he is also head of divisional CID). 

Going back to those evenings when my children were on the swings, I already knew a lot about wildlife crime through my journalism. The more I watched the buzzards on the hillside, the more the idea of a novel based on illegal persecution of birds of prey emerged as one of the major themes in Dead Hill. 

I have gone back to wildlife crime for a number of the other novels but the location gives me other themes as well, everything from conflict in small upland communities to the encroachment in a rural area by criminals from towns and cities.

 What can readers expect from this series?

 I pack it in to my novels! Pick up a DCI Jack Harris book and you’ll find yourself reading about everything from murder and organised crime to deeply human dilemmas enacted in plots that twist and turn.

There’s an old half-serious/half-jokey crime writers’ adage that, if your novel starts to lose momentum, it’s time to murder another victim! Of course, it’s not that simple. What is behind the adage is one of the most important elements of crime writing, indeed all writing, namely to constantly inject energy into the story – so yes, you’ll find big drama-filled moments but also revelations, characters falling out with each other, information from a character’s past injecting new energy into the story’s present, flashes of description which brings a character’s surroundings to life, feuds in remote communities, jealously-guarded secrets etc.

My latest crime novel, number twelve in the Harris series, which has just been published, is a good example. Murder in the Pennines takes Harris from his base in the North Pennines to the aftermath of events which took place when he was a teenage soldier seconded to a NATO peacekeeping force after the Kosovo War more than twenty years ago.

The decision to link a double murder in the North Pennines with the complex world of Kosovan politics and ethnic allegiances allowed me to place Harris and his loyal sidekick Detective Sergeant Matty Gallagher in a world that they do not really understand and which places them in mortal danger.

Weave in the way that they come to terms with the possibility of their deaths and the emotive aftermath of events in the Kosovo War in which Harris experienced the murder of children in a massacre at a forest village and you have, I hope, a compelling read.