Accidents Will Happen marks a big departure for me as a ‘noirish’ writer. My two most recent novels, All Down the Line (2020) and After the Bridge (2024), were based in Manchester. I lived, worked and played there for most of my adult life with my partner-in-crime, Catherine. But in Accidents, I swapped rainy city’s intense urban underworld for Northumberland’s isolated rugged cliffs and windswept coastal landscapes. Despite this dramatic shift in locations, my grim noir DNA runs throughout a short taut gritty novel that starts with a simple premise: did a talented classical violist jump or slip off a cliff? 

When I am writing crime fiction, I am inevitably faced with the precarious balancing act of trying to ensure my hard-boiled double-espresso novel doesn’t become a dreaded decaffeinated cosy crime story.

One of the more controversial climaxes of the publishing industry year used to be the annual Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award — which appears to have taken a permanent vacation in 2020 when the magazine claimed people had been ‘subjected to too many bad things’ during the Covid pandemic.