Author Lesley McEvoy talks to us about her latest novel The Killing Song and the inspiration behind her protagonist, Dr Jo McCready.
Lesley McEvoy was born and bred in Yorkshire and has had a passion for writing in one form or another all her life. The writing took a back seat as Lesley developed her career as a Behavioural Analyst / Profiler and Psychotherapist, setting up her own consultancy business and therapy practice.
Lesley’s work in some of the UK’s toughest prisons was where she met people whose lives had been characterised by drugs and violence and whose experiences informed the themes she now writes about. Deciding in 2017 to concentrate on her writing again, Lesley produced her debut novel, The Murder Mile.
Lesley's latest book is The Killing Song which was published by Zaffre on 12 May. Lesley's books are also available to borrow on our catalogue.
As a child during the 60’s, my literary heroes were of their time. I had all the Enid Blyton books and devoured all the childhood classics like Treasure Island and Arabian Nights. I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t write. As a child, I remember writing stories and then sticking the pages together to make a ‘book’. I suppose at about 5 years old, I realised that books were written by people and when I was in reception class, the teacher asked everyone what they wanted to do when they grew up. I said I wanted to be like Enid Blyton and write books. Writing was a hobby all my life and I started seriously querying agents and publishers from the age of 19.
For me a plot always begins with a ‘What if?’ I hear a story on the news or read something in the paper and think ‘that’s interesting….I wonder what if…?’ It can bubble away for weeks, months or in the case of The Murder Mile several years. I also always start with the end in mind. Once I know how it will end and I have the ‘How done it’, I start to develop the rest. Yes, often there are several ideas and they can weave together to form a complicated series of plot lines, as happened in The Killing Song, or one can prove stronger than the others and forms the backbone of the story.
Yes! That episode triggered the idea for my debut novel. It was while carrying out a hypnotherapy session with a client, that I encountered an ‘alter personality’. A really dark character, that my client had no knowledge or memory of. It was as shocking as it was real and started a series of questions for me, which led to the plot for The Murder Mile.
Over the years, I experimented with various protagonists and began to develop my writing ‘voice’. Eventually, I found that writing in the first person flowed better for me. Although technically, it does present an author with certain challenges. In the adage of ‘write what you know’, creating a protagonist that was a therapist, or in that line of work seemed like the most natural fit and it was a world I inhabited, so gave me a wealth of experiences to draw on but I made Jo McCready different from myself.
I’m not a Forensic Psychologist. I’m a behavioural analyst and therapist, which is slightly different. But giving her a Forensic background, put her in a position to get drawn into criminal investigations, assisting the police in a way that would be unique to her line of work. That gave me a structure, a mechanism to put her at the heart of the plots. After that, she started to develop a story of her own – though admittedly with similarities to my own life.
Jo is called in to help the police investigate an attack on passengers at a busy train station. At the same time, she’s asked by a grieving family to look again into the death of their son, a prominent local artist, whom they believe was murdered. It’s an intricate weaving of various plot lines, that leads to an explosive and (I hope) surprising conclusion.
The Killing Song is book 2 in the Jo McCready crime series, but it needed to stand-alone too as people often read a series out of order. The book opens 6 months after The Murder Mile and finds Jo suffering from the fallout of how the last book ended. Not wanting to give any spoilers, but she’d gone through a traumatic experience at the end of book 1 and I wanted her to be fallible and human. Not a super-hero, immune to such things. I also wanted to explore how someone who works with psychology can find it very difficult to admit that they’re struggling with stress or panic attacks too and look at how that unfolds.
Book 3 is about a series of murders that seem to be committed by a copycat, re-creating the killing spree of a man now serving life in prison. From prison, Jo receives an invitation from the killer, offering to help her catch his imitator. But is his proposition all that it seems? Jo doubts it, but as the body count rises, she can’t ignore his tantalising bargain. What does he really want and can Jo find out before anyone else dies?
I always find these type of questions very difficult to answer, because art, literature and music are so personal. What works for me may not for someone else. In books, I suppose for me, as a proud Yorkshire writer, then a definitive piece of literature would be Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. I grew up near to Haworth and the village is very close to my heart and features in my Jo McCready books. The landscape so vividly described, evokes a powerful sense of the wild ruggedness of the moors that left a big impression on me. An area I grew up in and a place I love.
Wuthering Heights is a complex book that leaves a different impression on the reader depending on when they read it. As a teenager, I regarded it as a powerful love story – often described as the greatest love story of all time. Reading it later, as an adult, it’s themes of brutal revenge and domestic cruelty are more evident. It's a book that I think grows with the reader and matures and develops the more you read it.
A lady confessed that while reading The Murder Mile, she had to ask her husband to come to bed with her while she sat and read at night, as she was too frightened to read it on her own. She laughed when she told me and said her husband continues to tease her about it.
Best piece of advice on writing, is to read. You can’t understand what makes a book work, unless you read. Second, is to just do it. Sit down and start to write. Write every day, even if it’s just for a few minutes – but get into the discipline of doing it.
I’ve met and had a conversation with Bill Clinton. In 2001, just after he left office. It was a most surreal and fascinating experience.
