Tag: Dan Laughey

Blog Tour: Chloe: Never Forget

Today I help close out the blog tour for Chloe: Never Forget by Dan Laughey. I will be sharing an extract of the novel.

Book Description:

An off-duty detective gunned down. A dead woman. A student missing, feared dead. And now, a former policeman in search of his past. All these people, dead or alive, have one thing in common. D.I. Carl Sant must discover what it is.

A series of cold-case enquiries leads D.I. Sant and his colleagues to investigate a botched assassination plot dating back to the 1980s. The deeper they dig into the case, the more secrets are revealed, including shocking connections to the infamous National Front. 

Meanwhile, the memory of former P.C. Tanner, survivor of the assassination horror, is beginning to recover. Sant must find Tanner, and find out who is behind it all – before his superiors lose their rag and more lives are lost.

Purchase Links:
Amazon US
Amazon UK


The following extract is from Chapter 5 of CHLOE: NEVER FORGET. It’s from the point of view of an elderly gentleman who has spent his later life trying to forget his former years as a policeman. But then someone visits, and now he’ll never forget.

Your name is Nigel Fleming. You think.

Your visitors are few and far between.
The consultant specialist or whatever she’s called pops her head around the door once in a while. The postman is a friendly chap too. The neighbours stick their noses into your business too often, but that can’t be helped.

What you almost never get is a new visitor.

You never answer the door to cold callers or charity beggars or meter readers. For all you know, the cretins might invite themselves in, raid your fridge, piss in your toilet.

God forbid.

And yet the other day, believe it or not, a new visitor did come your way. A young lady. Or was it two? One girl or two? Perhaps two was wishful thinking.

Ha ha! Mrs Fleming will be jealous!
Yes, you were flattered. Don’t deny it, Nigel.

And they asked you so many questions. And showed you pictures of their lives. Other people’s lives any road. Stories of lives once lived.

And they played music to you. Other people’s music any road. Not very good music. But music all the same. They even gave you an iPod thingy.

And then they showed you a video. A home video. Their video. Not a very good video. But a video all the same. They didn’t give you that.

The whole experience was exhausting quite frankly.

Frankly, it was.

Can you remember any of it? Not much, sadly.

But you do remember one thing. They warned you to keep a low profile; not to speak to strange people; not to answer suspicious calls.

They did have a way with words. And they were so sincere. So utterly fretful about your welfare.

They’ve done something to your brain, Nigel. Those two young ladies, if you weren’t seeing double, have frazzled your senses something rotten.

And now you’re sat up in bed and the nightmares have returned and you don’t know what’s hit you. Not yet.

TICK TOCK TICK TOCK.

Your body clock is ticking, but your brain-dead head is coming to life.

Halloween, Nigel. Buses, Nigel. Police officers killed, Nigel. Police officers wounded…

And now it’s on the radio. The news is playing tricks with your mind.

TICK TOCK TICK TOCK.

They’ve found a dead body, Nigel. A dead woman, Nigel. A dead woman called Marie Jagger, Susan Smith, Sheila Morrison.

Sheila, Sheila, Sheila.

Is that really her name? Her real name?
What is your real name?
Nigel Fleming? No.
What is it?
It’s time you remembered.


About the Author:

Dan Laughey is a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University where he teaches a course called ‘Youth, Crime and Culture’ among other things. He has written several books on the subject including Music and Youth Culture, based on his PhD in Sociology at Salford University. He also holds a BA in English from Manchester Metropolitan University and an MA in Communications Studies from the University of Leeds.

Dan was born in Otley and bred in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, a hop and a skip away from the Leeds setting of his Chloe novels.

His crime writing was purely academic to begin with. He’s written about media violence and tackled the age-old concern about television and video games influencing patterns of antisocial behaviour in society. After years of research and theoretical scrutiny, he still hasn’t cracked that particular nut.

He’s also written about the role of CCTV and surveillance in today’s Big Brother world, the sometimes fraught relationship between rap and juvenile crime, football hooliganism, and the sociocultural legacy of Britain’s most notorious serial killer – the Yorkshire Ripper.

All in all, Dan’s work has been translated into four languages: French, Hebrew, Korean and Turkish. He has presented guest lectures at international conferences and appeared on BBC Radio and ITV News in addition to providing expert commentary for The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph.

Contact Dan:
Twitter:
@danlaughey

 

Blog Tour: Chloe: Lost Girl

Today I am part of the blog tour for Chloe: Lost Girl by Dan Laughey. He will be sharing how the past affects the present and also the future and how it affected his writing in Chloe: Lost Girl.

Book Description:

A missing student. A gunned-down detective. A woman in fear for her life. All three are connected somehow.

Detective Inspector Carl Sant and his fellow officers get on the case. But what links the disappearance of a university student, the death of an off-duty police sergeant, and a professor reluctant to help them solve the case?

Their only clue is a sequence of numbers, etched by the police sergeant Dryden on a misty window moments before he breathed his last. Soon it becomes clear that Dryden’s clue has brought the past and present into a head-on collision with the very heart of Sant’s profession.

Racing against time, D.I. Sant must find out what’s behind the mysterious events – before the bodies start piling up.

Purchase Links:
Amazon US
Amazon UK


T. S. Eliot once wrote that the best poetry requires a sense ‘not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.’ I would argue that the best crime fiction requires that same sense. A sense that history is not merely how things once were, but on the contrary, history is here and now, living in all of us from this day forward.

A living, breathing history pokes its head through all the best stories of our times. There is no better crime writer out there than the late, great Ross Macdonald. Inspired by Raymond Chandler, Macdonald carried the genre to new heights by blending history into murder mysteries and murder mysteries into history. He did what very few writers can do: become very popular and at the same time write very important novels. Novels which made very deep impressions on readers and other writers who followed him.

My own use of history as an inspiration for what happens in CHLOE: LOST GIRL is something I’m deeply aware of. A real crime – the murder of a police officer in the city of Leeds, West Yorkshire, back in 1984, when I was still a child – was the launch-pad for my first stab at crime writing thirty years later. I should emphasise that the relationship between my characters and the real people caught up in that past tragedy is purely arbitrary, but certainly the 1984 crime and its subsequent investigation inspired the cold-case enquiry that forms the subplot to my main storyline about a present-day murder of a detective and disappearance of a university student.

Bringing a cold-case investigation to bear on a contemporary murder mystery was a concept I found intriguing. This phenomenon of the historical crime that can be revisited, reassessed, and throw up revelations that effectively rewrite the past, and the present with it, is a fairly recent one in the evolution of our justice system. The idea of what’s gone before informing the here and now is integral to the way I see things in my imaginary looking glass. Cold-case enquiries are cropping up all the time, but not a lot of crime fiction has tapped into this.

No doubt Eliot would have been just as good at crime writing as he was at poetry. That historical sense never left him. It should never leave any writer who wants to connect with the world around them; the world of yesterday, today and tomorrow; and more importantly, the world inhibited by readers.


About the Author:

Dan Laughey is a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University where he teaches a course called ‘Youth, Crime and Culture’ among other things. He has written several books on the subject including Music and Youth Culture, based on his PhD in Sociology at Salford University. He also holds a BA in English from Manchester Metropolitan University and an MA in Communications Studies from the University of Leeds.

Dan was born in Otley and bred in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, a hop and a skip away from the Leeds setting of his Chloe novels.

His crime writing was purely academic to begin with. He’s written about media violence and tackled the age-old concern about television and video games influencing patterns of antisocial behaviour in society. After years of research and theoretical scrutiny, he still hasn’t cracked that particular nut.

He’s also written about the role of CCTV and surveillance in today’s Big Brother world, the sometimes fraught relationship between rap and juvenile crime, football hooliganism, and the sociocultural legacy of Britain’s most notorious serial killer – the Yorkshire Ripper.

All in all, Dan’s work has been translated into four languages: French, Hebrew, Korean and Turkish. He has presented guest lectures at international conferences and appeared on BBC Radio and ITV News in addition to providing expert commentary for The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph.

Contact Dan:
Twitter @danlaughey

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