Scenes from a Murder

Imagine if you were a murder victim - or if you were the attacker. What might you have seen?

These are my ‘seens’ from a murder.

My mother was a great ‘who dun’ it’ and horror film fan and naturally, she brought me up to be the same. ’Scenes from a Murder’ was my first attempt to create my own thriller.

“I love a good murder,” Mum would often say, relishing suspense before gore and glaring at my father if he spoilt her late night television viewing by telling her the ending. She would affectionately refer to Alfred Hitchcock as “Hitch” because her family came from the same place as him, Leytonstone Church. I only came from nearby Wanstead. Perhaps that is why I give away who the murderer is right from the start.

It was quite a challenge to push the boundaries of old fashioned film by using a complicated studio set-up and then develop a complex photomontage technique in the darkroom.

Luckily, I had a good natured then boyfriend who agreed to play what for him, was the totally out of character part of a murderer.

I am so grateful to him now for putting up with me and my exacting instructions.

'Seens' From A Murder

This early example of my work has been enriched by revision. “What have I done?” the perpetrator now asks himself, looking on while his newly dead victim drifts away into oblivion. I used a domestic setting, where it is all too easy for abuse to become violence and terminal. I found that my underlying subject matter had a label and I had come to understand its consequences very well in later life.  

Having ‘Scenes from a Murder’ at the end of my web-site brings me back full circle to the ‘Writing’ section at the beginning. My first novel, ‘Gideon’s Game’ and the second,  ‘Accidental Murder’ still have murder-mystery and horror influences from my childhood in them. Even though I am now a street-wise sixty-five year old writing forty years later, I still love a ‘good’ murder.