The Arrival of Miriam Ackroyd

In advance of the publication of Mortmain Hall, I was invited to contribute an original new short story in the Golden Age vein as a promotional exercise. The commission came from My Weekly, a magazine that I must confess I wasn't familiar with, and the brief was quite a challenge, because the word count was tight - the story had to fit into two pages of the magazine.

However, I found myself tempted, remembering that my very first published crime fiction was a very short (one page!) story for Bella, in the long gone days when that magazine published stories. I'd won a contest judged by Bella's fiction editor, and I can still remember how excited I was. And with that in mind, I decided to have a go.

I was clear that it wasn't practicable to write a story about Rachel Savernake and Jacob Flint. Their cases tend to be pretty complicated and I couldn't see how I could pare a story about them down, even if only one of them featured. So after some thought I decided to create a new character. And I called her Miriam Ackroyd, in tribute to...well, any detectives among you can easily guess!

The story was called 'Respect and Respectability' and it was published in the June 2 issue of My Weekly - and rather splendidly illustrated, too. Despite its brevity, I've received very good feedback and I've been invited to write more about Miriam. Whilst I don't have any specific story planned at the moment, I did enjoy writing about her, so it's quite likely she'll make a comeback one of these fine days.

Writing Competitions

I’ve been involved with writing competitions a good many times, mainly as a judge in recent years, but also sometimes as an entrant. An early version of what became the first chapter of my debut novel, All the Lonely People, was submitted to the Southport Writers’ annual seminar competition in the late 80s and got nowhere. Actually, that’s not quite true or fair, since I did get some feedback from the judge, Jessica Stirling (who was in fact a very likeable fellow, Hugh C. Rae) which offered some encouragement.

A couple of years later, the Southport Writers’ ran a short story competition judged by the senior fiction editor of ‘Bella’. My story, ‘Are You Sitting Comfortably?’ won – a truly great moment. The story was published in ‘Bella’ (which sadly does not take fiction any more) and in ‘Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’ and it helped to launch my career in print..

I’ve been asked to mention a writing competition run by that admirable organisation Mystery Women, and the details are here. Mystery Women does, I’m glad to say, allow men to join, but its special mission is to encourage women writers.

Is it worth devoting time and trouble to entering a writing competition? On balance, I think it often is – though it’s very important not to allow an initial lack of success to deter you from continuing to apply fingers to keyboards. Winning competitions and literary prizes is the icing on the cake – the ultimate measure of success is having readers who want to keep coming back for more of your work.

Writing Competitions

I’ve been asked to judge the annual story competition for Wirral Writers, a group to which I belonged in the 80s. The prize is the Maynah Lewis Cup – Maynah was a veteran professional writer who founded the group many years ago, and did much to encourage local authors on the Wirral peninsula.

I’m glad to be involved in something like this, because I do think Maynah was right, and that it is a Good Thing that writers continue to be encouraged – whether or not they have already had the experience of publication. I’ve been involved in judging prize competitions several times over the years, most recently for the Mace & Jones contest last year to celebrate Liverpool’s year in the spotlight as Capital of Culture. Of course, the judging process is inevitably very subjective, and this is something I remind myself of when I’m involved in competitions or awards in relation to my own writing.

I heard the other day that Hugh C. Rae, an excellent writer of many years’ standing has recently brought out a new book. Hugh judged the competition in which I entered an opening scene that later became the first chapter of my debut novel, All the Lonely People. I didn’t come close to winning, but I found his assessment of the piece very useful. And the first short story I ever had published was picked as a winner of a writing competition by the fiction editor of ‘Bella’. A few years later, as a published novelist, I had the pleasure of meeting Hugh at a couple of CWA conferences in Scotland - and he revealed that his most successful books were not thrillers, but romances written under the name of Jessica Stirling!

With every competition, there are bound to be more losers than winners. But my own experience makes me believe that there is something to be gained from entering competitions, even if one doesn’t succeed. And I hope that the current crop of Wirral Writers will include some stars of the future.