Celebrating my Return with `Cambridge Black', by Alison Bruce

I’ve decided to start blogging again after a gap of many months, now that I’ve finally finished the major rewrite of my thriller, Her Silent Throat, with an additional POV. To celebrate this return to the land of the enjoying, I took myself down to Heffer’s bookshop in Cambridge (where I now live) for the launch of Alison Bruce’s new book, Cambridge Black.

This is the seventh and last in the series featuring DC Gary Goodhew and cleverly named, since the first in the series was called Cambridge Blue. She said that despite the title, she hadn’t felt able to kill him off and he would now feature in a couple of short stories. He’s at a crossroads in his life and the cover depicts Alison Bruce herself walking away from the camera, down her chosen twilight path, an elegant and lone figure.

We celebrated the event with wine and- somewhat quirkily- pink and violet-iced cupcakes with a black seven in the centre.

She spoke a little about how she came to write the series. She was walking in Cambridge in 1989 and came up with an ingenious way to murder someone. She imagined this murder as a film plot and therefore went on a script writing course, but learnt that it’s hard to sell a script if the story hasn’t been published as a book first. Her idea eventually became the third in the Gary Goodhew series and may explain her skill in painting such a vivid portrait of Cambridge. She’s been credited with doing for Cambridge what Colin Dexter did for Oxford. As for the character of Gary Goodhew himself, apparently a friend rang her up and asked whether he could be in the book, only he wanted to be younger and better looking than in real life.

And then she needed an agent. She very sensibly made a shortlist of authors she enjoyed reading who loved their agents and Broo Doherty at DHH Literary Agency came top of the list. She then approached Broo, who did become her agent in time and they’ve been together ever since. Cambridge Black is dedicated to Broo: `thank you for having faith in Goodhew, the series and my writing.’

I bought my copy of Cambridge Black- discounted by £4- and stood in the queue to have it signed by the author who sat behind a table with a flower jauntily tucked behind her ear. She clearly has a loyal fan base and some people I spoke to had travelled for up to 2 hours to attend. I found it refreshing that several seemed not to have been to a launch before, but had come to know Alison through her husband’s music and had seen her scribbling away at gigs. Four had clubbed together to buy the hardback with the fastest reader being allowed first dibs. One man was a delivery driver and attested to the accuracy of her settings- he even knew the lockups where several bodies were discovered in a freezer in one of her books.

I look forward to her next book, a new venture, which is out later in the year. As the Independent said of her writing, sounding a bit like Morse himself: `It’s all orchestrated (from opening adagio to allegro finale) with authority.’