Tag: Private Detectives

Categories
Sam Smith Mystery Series

Sam Smith Mystery Series Characters #2

Dr Alan Storey

Dr Alan Storey provides the relationship strand to the Sam Smith Mystery Series. Alan is a psychologist who practices Humanistic principles, that is a belief in the positive attributes of happiness, contentment, ecstasy, kindness, caring, sharing and generosity. In his early forties, Alan is a widower with a teenage daughter, Alis. As well as the romantic element, Alan also provides psychological insight, when required, to the various people Sam encounters. Although there is a ‘whodunit’ element to the series, the books focus more on people’s behaviours and reasons for their acts.

shutterstock_91895072_kindlephoto-20869481

When Sam first meets Alan she is still raw and vulnerable after a difficult upbringing with her alcoholic mother and four years of violence with her abusive ex-husband. Therefore the early books in the series explore Sam’s attitudes to relationships as she tries to trust a man who she is wary of, but who is deeply in love with her.

Categories
Sam Smith Mystery Series

Sam Smith Mystery Series Characters #1

As all readers and writers know, stories develop from characters. So, over the coming weeks and months I thought I’d share my characters’ background information with you beginning with the lady herself, my narrator, Sam.

shutterstock_123387985_kindlephoto-235933713
Sam was born on the 1 April 1983. She has no memory of her father or any idea who he might be. Her mother’s husband was killed in the Falklands war and the dates of conception and birth make it highly unlikely that he was Sam’s father, despite her mother’s insistence that he was. At other times, Sam’s mother would claim that Sam’s father was an American soldier based in Britain. Despite exhaustive investigations, Sam can find no evidence for this claim.

Sam’s earliest memory of her mother is of a woman slouched in a chair with an empty gin bottle in her hand. Sam’s mother was an alcoholic and from the time she could walk Sam became her carer and the ‘woman of the house’. Caring for her mother disrupted Sam’s education and she dropped out of Secondary school. Instead of a formal education, Sam would spend all her free time at the local library and educate herself through books.

Sam was in her early twenties when her mother died. At that point she went to night school and trained as a secretary-typist. She joined an agency and obtained steady employment. Then she met a journalist, Dan Hackett. Handsome and charismatic, Dan charmed Sam into a swift marriage and a week into that marriage she discovered that he too was an alcoholic and violent. Despite many black eyes, a broken jaw and a fractured skull, Sam stayed in the marriage for four years. The turning point arrived when Sam suspected Dan of having an affair. She went to a private detective who was too busy to help, but he guided Sam through the basics and she completed the case herself. Impressed with her level of skill and determination, the private detective hired Sam as a secretary-assistant. Unfortunately for Sam, he also fell in love with her, and with his wife and three children in the background, Sam thought it was best to leave.

And so she started again. Free from Dan, she returned to secretarial work and built up her savings. Missing the buzz of detective work, she put her savings into her own enquiry agency. After five years of struggle, Sam’s agency is just about making a profit.

Independent, still coming to terms with her past, but determined to look forward to a brighter future, Sam’s story continues, with Sam’s Song , Love and Bullets, The Big Chill and Ripper.

Categories
Hannah's Diary

Love and Bullets Audio Book

Exciting times…production on Love and Bullets, the second Sam Smith Mystery Series audio book, is about to start. Once again, Suzan Lynn Lorraine will narrate the book and we aim to release it in mid-October. Suzan did an outstanding job on Sam’s Song so I’m delighted that she has agreed to narrate Love and Bullets. You can listen to a sample from Sam’s Song by following this link and if you only want to own one copy of the book I urge you to own the audio book version because the narration really is of the highest quality. Audio Book Link

samssongaudiobbookcover_hiresjpg

Categories
Female Detectives Private Detectives True Crime

The Queen of Disguise

The Queen of Disguise

Known as the ‘Queen of Disguise’, Annette Kerner was a leading detective in the 1940s. Born into a wealthy family, Annette trained as a mezzo-soprano with Ivor Novello’s mother, Clara, before opening the Mayfair Detective Agency in the 1920s.

Annette’s parents opposed her singing career so, aged seventeen, Annette secretly negotiated a singing contract with a nightclub in Geneva. While crossing the Channel to France, she flirted with a fellow passenger who told her that he was an intelligence officer keeping an eye on a suspected foreign agent. The passenger went on to explain that the agent’s briefcase contained vital evidence of his guilt. Eager to impress her new friend, Annette calmly stole the briefcase and presented it to him. The agent responded by contacting his London headquarters; he urged his bosses to employ Annette as a freelance, and they agreed.

Annette Kerner

Annette Kerner, in disguise

Drawn into the world of spying, Annette left the Geneva nightclub and sang instead at a Zürich club, a popular haunt of intelligence agents. She mingled with those agents with ease and when the time arrived for her to return to London she decided that a routine career was not for her and so opened her detective agency.

Although small in stature, Annette was a fearsome opponent and from her Baker Street office she mixed with criminals from all classes. During one investigation in the 1920s, Annette posed as an opium addict. She entered an opium den and to allay suspicion she sampled the drug. She was also held captive during the same investigation and had her wrists slashed, though ultimately she did assist the police in arresting the culprit.

In 1948, Leader magazine described Annette as ‘the woman of a hundred faces – at one moment she is a neat, matronly children’s nurse pushing a pram, only to confront a gentleman blackmailer, then she is an untidy waitress in a dingy backstreet restaurant mixing with fences.’ During her eventful career Annette took on the role of a cheerful char lady, a society vamp and a modest widow proving that female detectives can be as tough as their male colleagues, and just as resourceful.

Categories
Hannah's Diary

Raymond Chandler Quote

Raymond Chandler Quote

shutterstock_1439311091

“In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man (or woman H.H.) must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.

The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor — by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.

He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks — that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.

The story is the man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.” ― Raymond Chandler