Mo Hayder Newsletter - July 2010 (Edition 4)

Hello everyone! Thank you so much for subscribing to my newsletter and I hope this finds you well. Things in the UK are bleak, and I’m all too aware that while I’m relatively shielded from the horrendous circumstances, other people are not. In the nineties I went through a very difficult few years of struggling to find work, and working for such little pay that I had to do 60 hour weeks to get by. Now, hearing about job losses and threatened  job losses, I try to cast my mind back to what that was like in those days. I realise what kept me going was escapism – reading and writing. You cannot underestimate the value of a good book to curl up with – the ability to remove yourself from your own world and enter someone else’s. And maybe the chance to witness someone else dealing with the problems you’re dealing with.  In those days I loved escaping from my life through reading, but I also escaped by writing. In fact my first novel, Birdman, came out of that period. Now I look at adverse scenarios like that as being potentially fertile territories, from which amazing things can spring.

The novel I’m working on at the moment hasn’t come from a place of adversity, but from a fascination for a murder case I was told about recently by a friend. As the friend is a serving police officer I’ve changed the names to retell it – even though it has already gone through the legal system. If you want to do some detective work you’ll be able to find the real names connected to this story no problem, but for the time being let’s call my friend PC Brown.  Let’s call the village Littleton.

In 1983 PC Brown became the village policeman for Littleton. On his first day, as he was moving his belongings into the police house, he got a phone call to say there’d been a murder in the village and that the Detective Chief Superintendent was on his way down to speak to him personally. Being a level headed sort of person, and knowing the rarity of murder cases in ANY police officer’s life, let alone in a village like Littleton, he laughed at the prank and hung up. Half an hour later a car drew up outside with the Detective Chief Superintendent inside. At which point the truth dawned on him. It wasn’t a joke. There really had been a murder.

Let’s call the victim Yvonne.  Yvonne had been brutally beaten and was found in the blood spattered hallway of her bungalow. There were no clues. The case became one of the biggest manhunts in the history of the Avon and Somerset constabulary. It was only weeks later, when a young man who worked in a foundry came forward to report an interesting exchange he’d had with a work mate, that the story unravelled.  

The young man had been asked by his colleague – let’s call him Sven –  to help kill Yvonne. It emerged that Sven had been offered money by a private detective for the killing. It was, in short, a contract killing. The phrase ‘contract killing’ always conjures for me images of mafia and high powered drugs rings. This killing was anything but: in fact it was a contract set into motion by another woman – who was infatuated with Yvonne’s boyfriend. Sven, the killer, was the weak link. Not only had he asked his work mate to help, he had also been witnessed using the foundry furnace to burn evidence of the killing later.

What interested me, in a nerdy way, was that in his defence case Sven stated he’d lost his nerve and couldn’t carry out the contract. The night of the killing, he claimed, he’d decided to attack Yvonne but not kill her (in the hope he’d receive some money for the attempted murder). He said the plan had gone awry when Yvonne fought back – and that he’d killed her in self defence.  This presented the court with a complex legal conundrum, involving the two elements of criminal liability actus reus and mens rea (guilty act and guilty mind). Sven maintained he’d never had the ‘mens rea’ – or the intention to kill – and therefore couldn’t be found guilty.  The court case, not just his defence but the defence case of the woman who hired him, was so unusual that it is often taught in law schools. A shame, then, that ‘Sven’ didn’t get away with it.  He was still convicted of Yvonne’s murder.

The novel that the case has inspired has the working title of The Gamekeeper. It features two sisters in their thirties who’ve led very different and separate lives, but get forced together by a series of unexpected and violent events. It’s due for release in spring 2011. And on a side note – if anyone wants to do some sleuthing themselves, I wonder if you can work out from this skeleton story the real names and faces involved?  If you do uncover the real case you could post it on my forum? I’d be fascinated to see what you come up with.

Last but not least – I have a NEW LOOK website. Hurrah! I did it ALL myself. Am I not a genius? Seriously, the wonderful Steve did it, as I’m not the sharpest knife in the set when it comes to ‘the information superhighway’. Steve, on the other hand, knows his technology inside out. What a guy! I hope you all like it as much as I do.

Take very good care of yourselves until next time,

Mo xxx