Biography
I'm a criminal lawyer and I'm a writer. During the day I go to court. At night I write crime fiction. It is as simple as that.
The story started in 1965 in Mexborough, a small South Yorkshire mining town, when I was born above a shoe shop, the middle son of the manager and his teenage bride. We didn't stay long though, and after a brief period following my father's career in the retail trade, my parents moved back to where they started, Wakefield in West Yorkshire. For them, it was a homecoming. For me, it gave me an accent and a love of rugby league.
Kettlethorpe was where we lived, a council estate on the edge of the city, a rough edge on a tough city, but that isn't how I remember it. It didn't have a city feel, it was no concrete jumble, and I spent my childhood in the woods and fields around Kettlethorpe, at places like Roly-poly Hill and Billy Goats Hill, the former so-named because we would roll down it, the naming of the latter being a complete mystery - it was a small clay bump in the land overlooking the estate, and I never saw a goat on it.
19 Rockley Drive, the family home
Wakefield was an archetypal northern city in the seventies, surrounded by coal mines, and it seemed like most of my friends' fathers were miners, tough men with missing fingers and coal dust etched into the lines around their smiles. It was different in my house. My father was dressing shoe shop windows and filling the house with books: sci-fi, horror and history books. And if it wasn't words, it was Johnny Cash that filled the home. He was the sound of the weekend, the deep rumble of his voice waking us up every Saturday and Sunday. My father didn't like anyone else, just Johnny.
It seemed like I followed all my father's likes and dislikes, at least the ones that were suitable for young children. I went every week with him to see Wakefield Trinity, as much a curse as a pleasure, and got to like the railroad rhythms of Johnny Cash. As I get older, I turn to Johnny Cash more and more. And I followed my father into books.
It was mysteries for me, from Enid Blyton's Famous Five to Alfred Hitchcock's Three Investigators. I had a Sherlock Holmes phase, followed by Agatha Christie. I had occasional diversions, I collected all the Jennings books and most of the Doctor Who novels, but still it was crime that fascinated me.
We left Wakefield when I was twelve and moved to Bridlington, a dodgem and chips town on the Yorkshire coast. I had some great years though; it was a great town to go drifting in, and I spent most of my time there just drifting. I got bored of school, although I'm not really sure why, and left when I was sixteen with just the one O level. I found out that one O level doesn't take you very far, so I spent the next seven years drifting between jobs, although the work was so far apart that it came as an interruption, not a blessing. Occasional factory work, building work, things like that. If the Thatcher years were about the haves and the have-nots, then I didn't have it. Maybe that was my fault, I don't know.
Bridlington
I'm not sure if it was a creeping thing, or if I just woke up one morning with a plan, but I knew I had to get out. I left Bridlington, returned to Wakefield, and returned to education. Law sounded good, although it depends on how you get your kicks, and this took me over the Pennines to Preston, where I completed a law degree and met my wife. College was fun, almost too much fun, but I got through it. I missed reading though, as if the page was going to turn, it had to be about law. Leaving college and becoming a solicitor let me read again, and then once I had rediscovered that joy, it dawned on me that I ought to write.
It was back in 1994 when the thought first planted itself. I was on holiday in the Canaries, and my bright idea sent me to the local shop in pursuit of a pen and some paper.
My first attempt at writing
Then followed four sides of A4 that never saw the light again, but it got me started, and I got a tan as I wrote them. A small typewriter came next, and I banged out a few hundred pages that also never saw the light of day. I realised that writing wasn't just about putting words on a page; it was a craft that would need work and practise. And I tried it, every night writing and correcting, until eventually I wrote something that seemed like a finished piece of work. In my head, agents beckoned, publishing, awards. The future was, at last, bright.
The rejections came in fast though, clattering onto the mat most mornings, so that the list of people I wanted to harm was longer than the chapters I was sending.
But I carried on, writing and correcting, all the time working as a lawyer, my colleagues wondering why I spent most days yawning. A marriage came along in the middle of all this, and then three children, and still the rejections streamed in.
I was on holiday in 2006 when I got the call from my agent (I had secured one by this stage), which seemed quite apt, twelve years on from that first holiday purchase of pen and paper. Avon Books were interested, an exciting new division of HarperCollins.
I drank some beer that night. The rest I suppose you can guess. I'm still working, as a prosecutor, rugby league and Johnny Cash are still clogging up my weekends, Wakefield Trinity still my curse, and I spend my nights writing crime fiction, three children providing the noise.
The Dagger Awards 2008, with Claire Seeber, Lee Weeks, and Helen Black
Fallen Idols was released in July 2007. Lost Souls followed in May 2008. Last Rites was published in April 2009, and Dead Silent is pencilled in for early 2010. What next after that? Who knows?
Neil White2009