COULD YOU TELL THE TRUTH FOR 24 HOURS?
Updated: Nov 20, 2021
You think you could? What… even all those little white lies like:
No, really, that’s fine - you have the last doughnut.
Honestly - you look great in lime green!
I’d love to have your mother to stay for a week.
You haven’t aged a day!
Imagine you literally couldn’t lie - not even if your life depended upon it.
This was the initial thought that kickstarted A SHARP INTAKE OF DEATH…
As a former journalist in newspapers and also broadcast media, I’d always wanted to write a thriller involving a tabloid reporter.
Now - before I go any further I should point out quite vehemently that the vast majority of journalists I have worked with are decent, thoughtful, nice human beings - with a fully intact conscience.
Very few of them were the kind of hard-nosed, dirt-digging, gutter-sloshing hack that Archibald Tozer is. Just one or two, maybe…
And Archie isn’t all bad. He’s just shameless and indifferent to the pain he causes with his celebrity exposés. But he’s about to understand exactly how it feels to be on the wrong side of the press pack - and the law.
Because he ends up literally unable to lie - which causes a chain of catastrophic events, embroiling him in sex, murder and a reputation in tatters as he’s chased not only by the police but also by the press pack he was once part of.
A D Fox aficionados will know that I am always ransacking my own life experiences for some of the colour in my thrillers, and A Sharp Intake of Death is no exception.
One of my key characters is Lola Whittaker, a singer working her way around the clubs with her own microphone and recorded backing tracks. For a while in my late teens and early twenties, I was the girl singer in several cover bands. Here’s a bit of evidence…
I loved it - most of the time - but not all gigs are great and we used to play a lot of army and navy bases, where things would turn a bit lairy occasionally when the mostly male audiences got drunk.
The opening sequence in Chapter 2 is based on a true event. Let’s just say we had ways of dealing with drunk and overly-physical corporals…
FINALLY… ARE YOU INTO JIGSAWS?
Well, you’re probably a sociopath, then…
Naaaah, not really. But sociopaths and jigsaws will forever be connected in my mind after writing A Sharp Intake of Death. So much so that I currently have a nice 1,000 piece job on the go on my dining room table now. They can get to be a bit of an obsession, can’t they..?
Apparently jigsaws are the new mindfulness. Mindful? Hmmm… Just wait until you meet Mr Whimsy… ;)
I’ve got so obsessed I have ordered a Sharp Intake bespoke jigsaw puzzle and I’m very excited about it.
And if you would like to win it, along with a signed paperback of A Sharp Intake of Death, email me the answer to this question…
Q. In the puzzle world, what is a whimsy..?
The senders of the correct answers to ad@adfoxfiction.com will have their names put into the hat and the winner will be randomly chosen by labradoodle (as is now traditional) on 20th November 2021.
Happy puzzling
A D
