Guest Blog - Fiona Veitch Smith

At Harrogate in summer I was pleased to meet, at a gathering of fellow Northern crime writers, Fiona Veitch Smith. Fiona is based in the north east, and I'm glad to welcome her to this blog. She's written a guest post about her new book, The Death Beat, which is published by Lion:

"Synchronicity (noun): The simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.

Origin: 1950s. Coined by psychoanalyst CG Jung (who has a cameo in The Death Beat)

I began researching The Death Beat in November 2015.  Set in 1921, I planned to send Poppy, a young London journalist, to New York for three months, with her editor, Rollo. I intended to reveal Rollo’s back story, thrust Poppy into the world of speakeasies, early radio and cinema, and explore the contrast between wealthy and poor immigrants. At the time, the tragedy of the Syrian civil war was all over the media, and the debate in western nations about how many refugees to let in was reaching fever pitch. This was a useful parallel for my poor Jewish immigrant characters, Mimi and Estie, who were fleeing the Russian civil war. I was intrigued to read about the 1921 US Immigration Restriction Act which placed restrictions on immigrants from certain ethnic, religious and national groups.

In October 2017, with the release date only two weeks away, synchronicity struck again. One of my unsympathetic characters is a man called Archie Weinstein, created 18 months before the name became infamous. But if that isn’t enough, another character is a Hollywood film producer. Pure coincidence, but an odd one. Now I wait to see how it will all be received…"