When I wrote my debut novel between 2006 and 2014 (yes, it really did take me 8 years) no-one told me I should write to genre. Consequently, Gorgito’s Ice Rink ended up as a quest novel with elements of history, romance and mystery. A bookseller’s nightmare. But I published it myself and it was Runner-Up in the Self-Published Book of the Year awards, so I must have done something right.
However, when I began the next book, I knew a bit more and placed myself firmly in the thriller category. I modelled that book on the Women’s Murder Club series by James Patterson. If you’re going to be influenced, then why not by the best? Even more so when I realised that Counterfeit! was not a standalone story, but part of a trilogy, the Jones Sisters thrillers.
By the time I’d published Deception! and Corruption!, it was 2018 and I’d been sharing headspace with the Jones sisters for more than six years. I needed a break, so spent a year writing non-fiction, hoping they would get bored and go away in the meantime.
But that didn’t happen. Charlie in particular refused to leave. So I retired her and her family to a pub in Devon and allowed her to set up an amateur sleuthing group. My Coombesford cosy crime series was the result.
In June 2023, I had finished the pre-launch activities for cosy #3 and sat down by the pool in Greece (a tough life but someone has to do it) to plot out cosy #4, which I planned to write during NaNoWriMo in November and which would come out for the Christmas 2024 market.
But six chapters in, I realised I wasn’t plotting a cosy at all. I was working on the fourth part of my thriller trilogy. So I was now in the position of working on two series at once, both crime, but in very different sub-genres. And with a cross-over of characters between the two.
It’s been a busy fifteen months since then. Most of the time, I was only working on one book at a time and was able to remember whether I should write about chocolate chip cookies and the family’s adopted dog, Bertie; or put Charlie in yet another critical situation featuring a car chase, an explosion, or both.
In the end, I think I got it right. A few times I realised I was straying into the wrong territory and had to delete and rewrite. But if any reader spots a stray paragraph where the tone doesn’t quite sound right, then I hope they’ll understand why it happened.
Elizabeth Ducie’s explosive new book Retribution! is available now. To order a copy, click here.
