Marigold Dark

This week I finally got round to pressing the big red button for my new novel Marigold Dark, a bleakly humorous detective novel eighteen months in the making. It's been a fun if gruelling ride bringing Marigold to life, largely due to the persistent efforts of my three year old twins, who seem to have developed an inbuilt radar system that blips to life the minute Daddy sneaks away to work on his computer. It's hard to write and edit well with one hand on the keyboard and the other occupied with various forms of toddler-mollification, but I got there in the end.

I've worked hard at this one. The initial idea for the novel - a shambolic drunk playing PI in his spare time and making a total balls of it - came a couple of years back, and since then I've spent my time tinkering with various edits and trying my best to form Marigold's story into a lively, coherent narrative with one eye on the page and the other on some imagined reader's reaction. If there's one piece of criticism I've taken on board from my previous efforts it's the need to grip one's reader and give them a reason to turn the page, and with that in mind I've done my best to score out the various digressions and irrelevant details of previous drafts, whittling the novel down as best I could into something fluid, sharp and - hopefully - entertaining. It's been a tricky process, and I've made sure to leave plenty of time between redrafts, time to spot the comic misfires, the plot contusions, those grey areas of character and place still in need of brightening.

As ever when assuming the role of author, editor and publisher, it can be hard to achieve a subjective distance from which to gauge one's efforts, and as such I'm grateful to three people for their feedback at various points along the way. My mother, for whom the novel 'took a while to get going'; my wife, who (rightly) balked at the crudity of some of Marigold's language; and friend and fellow author David Sellars, who pointed out that the gaps in my anti-hero's memory should not necessarily mean gaps in the reader's understanding. To all three - thank you for your suggestions; I acted on them all.

A final thanks to Daz Smith for helping me out once again with the cover. Daz has a way of instantly and imaginatively working a brief, and was instrumental in designing a cover that I hope will be as intriguing as it is unusual. I enjoyed stitching T.S.Eliot's Prufrock into the novel, an unintended consequence of having that 'raggedly clawed' thing on the cover. It suits Marigold to be thus, as I'm sure he would agree.

So wake up, Mr Dark - you've a case to solve, a daughter to save, an island to liberate. I wish you the very best of luck. If I refrain from reaching to raise a glass in honour of your publication it's only because I'm certain you'll have already got there first, spilt its contents down your chin and smashed it snarling against a wall. Fair enough; you've earned it.

Marigold Dark is available for purchase from Amazon HERE.