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The Twist #14
Don Blaney figured that he should share the sensational revelation that Freddie Black was a Special Branch agent with his friend George Hegarty (as the two men had been in regular contact since George’s arrest)but without betraying the man who had put himself at some professional risk to warn him. On neutral ground, Don met…
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The Twist #13: A Moral Dilemma
Let’s start with a dictionary’s definition of a moral dilemma: noun. A situation in which a difficult choice has to be made between two courses of action, either of which entails transgressing a moral principle. Don Blaney has many characteristics but naivety is not one of them. In his role as a youth worker in…
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The Twist #12
The trial was to stay in Cork and as with all criminal cases it began with an opening statement from the prosecution. When it was announced that Don would be facing a single charge of possession of ammunition the packed rows of media immediately began to thin: this was not the trial they had been…
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The Twist #11
When Don Blaney had recounted what was occurring to Joan Deitch, who had carried out the final edit of my debut novel, she was outraged. Joan is a demure and quietly-spoken Englishwoman who has also edited countless best-selling novels by the likes of Jackie Collins, Josephine Cox and the crime writer Martina Cole – to…
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The Twist #10: The Trial Part One
Before I get onto just why my novel What Goes Around found its way into this trial, I think it best to tell of the developments, both positive and worrying, for Don in the lead-up to his first appearance at Cork’s Circuit Criminal Court in Cork city in November 2008. On the positive side, his…
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The Twist #8
During the next three years Don heard little about the ammunition except for the one occasion when the sergeant who had arrested him turned up at his house one evening, a couple of days after his release from custody, to offer him a deal: tell him all that he knew about George Hegarty and the…
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The Twist #7
Don’s arrest and release made for some lurid headlines, fed to the press by the guards and fuelled by a crank call to a local radio station claiming that bank notes and been seen billowing from Don’s chimney, which then morphed into a story of unnamed neighbours claiming that there had been a fire in…
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The Twist #6
William O’Connor was a man in his seventies who had been disabled for thirty years by rheumatoid arthritis and had intermittently suffered bouts of poor mental health due to a terrible trauma he had experienced while only 17. I had met William some years before and he had told me that Don was more like…
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Crime Fiction: The genres within the genre
I was once asked why I had chosen to write crime fiction out of all the genres that were available to me. It took me a while to figure out an answer as it hadn’t occurred to me that I was writing crime fiction at that time. My reasons for writing my first novel What…
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Lee Child – A Personal Tribute to His Creative Processes
Little did I know that as I began to put down my first words of my debut novel What Goes Around that a writer – also from the West Midlands of England – was coming up with one of the great characters of crime fiction, none other than the iconic Jack Reacher. So, it was…
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Ralph Robb 