This year Boldwood will begin publishing my four-book series featuring Joe Clayton, a former undercover cop with a price on his head.
The character of Joe was inspired by a real person. Years ago I had some friends who were getting married after twenty years together. The groom’s brother was the best man, and while I already knew he was a detective in the Met, it wasn’t until I met him in person that I discovered he’d done undercover work in the past.
Naturally I bombarded him with questions! It was extraordinary to hear him calmly describe how it felt to be in a room with criminals who would kill him if they knew his true identity. But what made it even more fascinating was the contrast between this real-life detective and those I was accustomed to seeing in fiction. In books and on TV, the detective hero is usually a brooding, dysfunctional loner with little or no personal life, whereas this undercover cop had married his childhood sweetheart and they had four wonderful children.
I knew at once that I wanted to create a protagonist who had the same close family bonds – and yet, as a thriller writer, I could hardly allow my character to enjoy a life of peace and stability, could I? Instead, we meet Joe several years after an undercover operation has gone disastrously wrong. As a result he’s been forced to live under a false identity, estranged from his wife and daughters, and forever looking over his shoulder as the gang he infiltrated – run by the vicious Morton family – try to track him down.
I realized that this gave me the scope for Joe to move around, having various adventures in different places, and essentially taking on the role of “knight errant”. And in this respect, the Jack Reacher books by Lee Child were a big inspiration. At that time I was devouring each new Reacher book the moment it was released, and I loved the challenge of trying to write something in a similar vein, albeit set in the UK rather than the US.
Physically Joe isn’t quite as superhuman as Jack Reacher, but what they share is empathy for the underdog, and a strong moral sense that means they can’t turn away from injustice or cruelty. As a result, Joe lands himself in some very dangerous situations, and all the while the Mortons remain determined to find him…
Start reading the first book in Tom Bale’s gripping series Shadow Hunt today: https://mybook.to/ShadowHuntBook