Peter Zander-Howell Interview Published on: 04, Sep 2023

I was born in London, but brought up in Suffolk. (For US readers, that’s the most easterly county in England.) I’m old enough to remember sweets still being rationed! Between the ages of five and seven I went to a little village school – one teacher and probably twenty children aged between 5 and 11 in one class. Common enough then, but unheard of today! Many disadvantages, without doubt, but I doubt if any child left without being able to read and write, and have the basics of arithmetic. If the 11-year-olds were practising multiplication tables, so were the 5-year-olds!

I then attended primary school in Felixstowe – the venue for my third book. From there, I went to boarding school (on a scholarship).

Alas, my mother died long before my first book was published. As for peers, only a handful of friends and my immediate relatives are aware that I write.

Not much to tell. At the age of 50, I was reporting to a director of a FTSE-100 company. I loved the job, but was often away for meetings in London or elsewhere. I decided to get out of the ‘rat race’. I was able to take early retirement, and although for a time I missed the people – it was a large company and I had many super colleagues and numerous subordinates – I never seriously regretted leaving.

With my wife, I started a new business. We built that up very successfully, and survived the problems of Covid. 25 years later, we decided it was time to for me to retire for the second time, and sold the business (which is still going strong).

During a period of ‘lockdown’, I had tried to prove the old adage that ‘everyone has one book in them’, and wrote The Bedroom Window Murder. I enjoyed writing, and so when I stopped my other work I somehow gravitated to my computer again and wrote some more.

Sitting in two different magistrates’ courts, and sometimes on appeals in the Crown Court, I obviously learned about the legal system. That apart, I’m not sure that my experiences on the Bench have had any significant influence on my writing! I think I’ve been influenced far more by my reading novels from the 1930s to 1960s.

I also took a master’s degree in Criminal Justice some years ago, but again it was only for interest – at the time I had never considered writing.

When I left the magistracy (on reaching the compulsory retirement age). I wrote a short piece about my experiences. It’s never been seen – perhaps I’ll publish it one day!

However, although magistrates, judges, and lawyers appear as characters (very important ones, sometimes) in several of my stories, I hasten to say that none of them are based on people I actually met.

To be honest, I don’t know. I began to read crime fiction – Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle – when I was still at school. I loved Marple and Poirot, but for some irrational reason detested Holmes. Perhaps he decided me that the later period was more to my taste. Later I discovered writers like Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh, and was hooked on the genre. Much more recently, of course, the spate of reprints by, for example, the British Library, has provided a cornucopia of reading matter (some still riveting, some sadly dated and even turgid).

A simple answer to this is impossible. However, some months ago I wrote a monograph on how Bryce came to be. It’s been sitting in my computer, again unseen by anybody. I’ve updated it, and attach it now. It may or may not be of interest!

I’ve never considered this as a challenge. Having started with The Bedroom Window Murder set at a particular time, it seemed only logical to take some the same characters and move on a month or two.

However, as I explain in the attached monograph on Bryce, it may be that I jump ahead with a couple of books, and then go back again. There are five more books largely written but currently being edited by my competent wife. Three follow on in time from the latest (and I think my best!) book, Machinations of a Murderer. These are This Village is Cursed, Town and Country Murders, and The Amateur Detective. Two – Demands with Menaces and Murder in Academe – are set a couple of years later. It seems likely that these last two –– will be ready before books 7, 8, and 9.

I shouldn’t dream of comparing myself to C S Forester in literary terms. But it is interesting that after writing several books about Hornblower ranked as a captain, Forester went backwards and wrote about his hero as a midshipman and then as a lieutenant. Later, after Hornblower was an admiral and a peer, Forester went back again and wrote another book with him as a mere captain. So I take from that that the actual order of publication doesn’t necessarily have to follow the chronology of the protagonist.

I have to confess that having got the idea for Death in an Office Kitchen, I quickly realised that I could never stretch it out into a full-length novel. So, as the number of pages was about one-third of what a book would require, I simply decided to write two more novellas to publish with it.

The Office Kitchen follows The Felixstowe Murder in sequence, and Death in the Public Baths likewise. Incidentally, the latter story is set in a real building, one of great architectural merit although little-known (it’s now ‘listed’).

Town and Country Murders will also contain two novellas – Suspicions of a Patrlourmaid, and The Norfolk Railway Murders.

Padding out a story to make it fill a standard length book doesn’t seem a good idea to me!

I toyed with the idea of going back pre-war, when Bryce was just starting out as a policeman, but happened to be reading about a real-life experiment involving a London bus. To use that as the central point of a story meant it had to be set in 1946. So for Bryce to fit in, he had to be ‘demoted’, and I also based him in an ordinary London ‘division’ rather than at Scotland Yard.

I didn’t attempt to ensure ‘continuity’ – the story simply predates all the others.

There are indeed many picturesque landscapes. Dedham Vale, the setting for some of John Constable most famous works, is perhaps the best known. However, the absence of mountains – or even hills – rather limits the possibilities. Most of East Anglia is as flat as the proverbial pancake. The highest point in Norfolk, where I live, is Beacon Hill on the Cromer Ridge, a mere 344 feet above sea level. (There is a village in Cambridgeshire which is 9 feet below sea level.) Most of my county is only a few feet above the sea – which is eating away at the coastline every day. It’s true that most people – including me – see beauty in the Norfolk Broads, or in acres of growing corn, or fields with grazing cows, sheep, or pigs. But as I understand it, what has attracted artists to this area for several centuries has at least as much to do with the ‘quality of the light’ as to than the actual landscapes.

But anyway, only one of the six books published so far is set in East Anglia, and although Bryce does visit Flatford Mill (once run by Constable’s father) the story doesn’t rely on landscapes. Apart from the hotel where the crime occurs, there are probably more pages dealing with the sea than the surrounding land! Incidentally, although the hotel has been given a different name in the book, it too is a real location, albeit no longer a hotel – and the cover photograph depicts the building as it used to be.

Two of the yet-to-be published books are set in Norfolk, but one is centred on the long-gone railways that used to cross the county, and the other the seaside town of Hunstanton. Alas, anything picturesque in the setting hasn’t significantly affected the atmosphere and mood of my writing!

‘Creativity’ and ‘engaging’ sound good! I don’t have any set pattern to writing. If we aren’t doing anything else – looking after grandchildren, or shopping, or gardening, then I might just sit down and do some writing. Sometimes I sit in my study using the desktop computer, at other times I go into the dining room and write on my iPad Pro via a supplementary keyboard. Everything goes into Dropbox, so I can pick up what I was doing on whichever machine I choose to use.

Often my wife will be sitting opposite, editing one of my books. Being in the same room is convenient, because she can then easily query an ambiguity, or ask me what on earth I meant by something.

Unfortunately, I don’t really engage with readers. After publishing my first book, I was advised to create a Facebook page, but not being of the social media generation, I don’t actually use it. I have 263 ‘followers’ on my Amazon Author page, but apart from posting when a new book is published, I don’t communicate with them either. I’m pretty hopeless at that sort of thing, I know! It was one of the reasons I joined AllAuthor, actually, in the hope that someone else would help me to communicate – or communicate on my behalf.

I described above the five books in the Bryce series which I’m currently working on.

I’ve just started working on a book with a completely new protagonist, set in the 1930s. Inspector Tommy Rees is a completely different character to Bryce. He is not a Scotland Yard man – he works in a rural county. The provisional title is Death of a Safebreaker. Whether that will be a one-off, or become a series, I can’t say.

Only a couple of months. I love the mock-up samples you send, although I confess that up to now I haven’t made any use of them. I’m in the process of changing the book covers, and look forward to seeing new examples. I keep promising myself to get into this social media stuff!