An Interview with Author, Russ Thomas

By Sarah Morgan, July 2024

He may have been born in Essex and raised in Berkshire, but Russ Thomas has a strong claim for the title of Honorary Yorkshireman – not only has he lived in God’s own county for years, he sets his acclaimed series of crime novels, featuring DS Adam Tyler and DC Mina Rabbani, here too.

“You can tell by my accent that I’m from much further south,” he smiles when we meet in Harrogate during the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival. “I came to Sheffield as an undergraduate in 1995 and did my degree at Sheffield Hallam University.

“I did go back down south for a couple of years and went travelling for a year or so. I was looking for a place to buy in the London area, but couldn’t find anywhere. Also, I realised all my friends had moved on, so I thought I’d go back to the place where I’d been happiest, and moved back to Sheffield, bought a flat, and I’ve been there ever since.

“It’s such a fabulous place. You’ve got the Peak District close by, and really easy access to London or Manchester. And you’ve got the rest of Yorkshire of course, it’s such a great county, so big and varied. It’s a great thing to be a part of.”

If he wasn’t writing books, maybe Russ could get a job on the local tourist board… However, with three titles in the series already out and a fourth, Sleeping Dogs, heading our way in October, it seems he won’t need to be visiting the job centre any time soon. Instead, he’s living a long-held dream.

“As soon as I realised people wrote the books that I loved, I wanted to do the same thing,” he explains. “I don’t think my parents took it very seriously, although they were always very encouraging. I studied a lot of writing units at university, went and did an MA in creative writing, and I worked in a lot of bookshops. Not to get published, but to immerse myself in books because if you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader first, or at least it helps.

“I was always writing, bits of diary and short fiction. Tried my hand at poetry once, but probably never again! I was always fixed on ‘I want to write a book, I want to write a book’. But it didn’t happen until I was in my forties.”

“Throw a body in”

He had, however, had unsuccessful attempts at getting published before then, with a sci-fi epic and even a Tom Baker-era Doctor Who novel.

“At the time, the TV show wasn’t being made, but the BBC was putting out these books, and it was one of the few places that would accept unsolicited manuscripts.

“So I sent it off, and within a week, I got a note saying, ‘Unfortunately, because there’s a new TV show about to go into production, we’re not longer accepting unsolicited manuscripts’. I was gutted! I do still have it though, so who knows?”

Although a huge sci-fi fan, Russ is also a long-standing crime fiction enthusiast.

“It’s a bit of a cliche, but the first thing that got me into crime reading was Agatha Christie. My dad used to have a villa in Spain that we went to during the summer holidays, and there was one newsagent nearby that sold English language books – they were all Agatha Christies. So I just used to go in and buy one, then go back and buy another.”

With that in mind, it may come as a surprise to hear that Firewatcher, the first book in the Tyler/Rabbani series, wasn’t meant to be a crime novel at all.

“It started with these two elderly spinsters, and I knew there was a mystery to their past that they were keeping secret. My tutor at the time, while I was doing the MA, said, ‘I love your writing, you’ve got a really strong voice, love your characters, but where’s your plot? There’s nothing happening!’

“I thought back to all of those Agatha Christies I’d read as a kid, and Patricia Cornwell and lots of other crime writers I’d subsequently read, and I thought, ‘I know, I’ll throw a body in, because then there’s a story’.”

Tyler appeared later: “I came up with the idea of a cold case specialist. I knew I wanted to write about a gay character, because at that point I hadn’t read any crime fiction where the main protagonist was gay.

“I’d like to explore other things”

“But I really struggled to get a handle on who Tyler was because I made that classic mistake that beginning writers do, which is I made him too much like myself. And I would be the worst detective in the world! He had a different name then as well, and was a much softer, gentler character. And I thought ‘no, I need to make him tougher’. From that, he started to come to life.”

Sleeping Dogs is, according to Russ, “a bit different” to the detective’s previous outings. His colleagues have to come to the fore after he’s left in a coma following an attack by an unknown assailant – in the beautiful but, sadly, neglected Abbeydale Picture House in Sheffield. The team members are investigate the secret case he’s been working on for half a year so they can figure out what’s happened to him.

“The novel goes for them across one week, but for him, it tells the story of the past six months. It flicks back and forth across past and present, which was a lot of fun to write.”

But will Tyler be back for more? Russ isn’t telling: “Well, that’s a spoiler, isn’t it? It depends on if he survives, but yes, there are plans to do more in the series. I can’t say much more than that!”

If he does return, it won’t be for a while – the author is currently juggling four different projects.

“A couple are what you might call speculative crime, or crime fantasy, or something like that.,” he teases. “I’ve never considered myself exclusively a crime writer. I’d like to explore other things.

“Of course, once you get known for a series, people are clamouring for another one, then you feel obliged to do that. But because I’ve told quite a bit of the story that I wanted to, I felt I needed to recharge before carrying on with that same thing. So in the meantime, I’m just having real fun and seeing where things go.”

‘Sleeping Dogs’ by Russ Thomas, Simon & Schuster UK, will be published on the 24th October 2024