It’s time for another Friday Reads post and today’s featured book is the intriguing mystery novel Ten Years After by T.A. Belshaw. It’s the fifth book in the Amy Rowlings Mysteries series. So grab yourself a cuppa, get cosy and let’s get chatting to T.A. ☺️
Blurb
A derelict, long abandoned cottage has lain undisturbed in the woods for almost half a century.
Known to the local children as Creepy Cottage, its reputation means that even the toughest of the local kids keep away from its boundaries. Years before, as the children’s skipping rhyme recalls, a young boy had gone in through a window and had never come out again.
Now, in late August 1939, things are about to change. Following the most violent summer storm the town has seen for decades, a falling tree causes an end wall to collapse, revealing the skeleton of a young woman.
Creepy Cottage has begun to give up its secrets.
Following a botched initial investigation by an incompetent police force in 1929, young amateur sleuth Amy Rowlings and Inspector Bodkin team up again to investigate, but instead of opening a cold case, they find themselves investigating one that is seemingly frozen in time.
Suspicion falls on the members of the local Playhouse amateur dramatic club and a fallen star of the theatrical world whose career has been mired in scandal.
But will the few clues remaining and the fading memories of witnesses be enough to help Amy and Bodkin to bring a brutal killer to justice?
Buy Link. https://mybook.to/hCWb3h
Welcome to my blog, T.A. Have you always wanted to be a writer?
The short and long answers to this are both, yes, so for the patience of the reader I’ll stick to the short one.
I first started writing my own little scripts for my brothers and I to perform to our long suffering parents on a Sunday evening after tea. I think I’d have been nine, possibly ten. I seem to remember the odd deep sigh when I announced that they were to be lucky enough so be my sofa based audience once again. One of my three brothers could never remember the words, so made things up on the spur of the moment. I have to admit, some of his unprompted lines were seriously funny and did add to my parents enjoyment of the three to five minute plays.
My first proper written story was about a spaceship that was under attack from a squid type alien that fastened itself to the ship and fed off the energy. Star Trek used a similar plot line many years later but I didn’t receive any royalty payments for my hard work. The notebooks containing my stories were lost at some stage. Hmmm… I wonder…
At some stage in my teens I switched to poetry, hoping that my heart rending poems about unrequited love… or lust, would lead to me having the sort of fun that other teenagers around me were having. Sadly, they didn’t. When I did finally meet the love of my life, it had nothing to do with my writing. It seems she found my off the cuff humour amusing.
Family and work commitments, the usual obstacles got in the way of any serious attempts at writing publishable material until I was well into my fifties. Then I began a series of books about a nine year old trainee witch with a wonky wand called Magic Molly, and my literary journey was finally underway.
What do you like writing most?
I have two series on the go at the moment. Both sets have five books in each with a spinoff Christmas novel, Hopes and Fears, that features the lead characters from both series. The first series is a dual timeline family saga called Unspoken and the first book, which the series is named after, was written during lockdown in 2020. after a five year break from not writing anything at all. A family tragedy, followed by the death of my illustrator seemed to kill off any interest I had for writing. When I did start hammering away at the keyboard again, I found I had abandoned writing for children and was now telling the story of the Mollison family through the figure of the matriarch, Alice, who took on running the family farm at the tender age of eighteen following the death of both parents. The story flits between the late nineteen thirties and the present day where we meet Alice’s great granddaughter, Jessica. A virtual clone of Alice, she has exactly the same problems with men that Alice had all those years ago. As Alice is 99 when book opens and is in ill health, her story through the rest of the series is told via her wartime diaries which Jessica finds in the attic. Books two to five continue the family saga as Jessica tries to keep her dysfunctional family together.
The other series began as a spinoff of Unspoken. I felt that one of the bit part players, Alice’s best friend Amy Rowlings, was such an interesting character, and that she had been severely underused. So, I decided to give her a series of her own and the Amy Rowlings, Golden Age, Mystery series was born. As Amy’s best friend, Alice herself appears in every book.
Amy, a feisty twenty one year old lover of American imported music and the novels of her literary hero, Agatha Christie, helps love interest, the ruggedly handsome Inspector Bodkin, solve the perplexing murder mysteries that land on his desk.
Amy, a working class, highly intelligent young woman, works as a machinist in a clothing factory known locally as The Mill. She takes no nonsense from the entitled men around her who seem to think that she would be better suited to having children and looking after a husband. She is an enlightened young lady for the times and she is determined to have the best life she can before finally settling down to married life.
The books are set in the fictional town of Spinton in the north of Kent. The town itself is a clone of Ilkeston, the industrial Derbyshire town I grew up in and many of the characters are based loosely on people I knew back in the day, when I was living on a Victorian street that ran between the ironworks and the coke ovens.
Amy uses some of the techniques of her fictional hero Hercules Poirot as she sets about helping Inspector Bodkin solve the trickiest of murder mysteries.
In the first book of the series, the lecherous son of the factory owner where Amy works, is found murdered in the repair shop. Suspicion falls on one of Amy’s friends but she is determined to prove his innocence
Are you a pantster or a plotter?
Definitely a Pantzer. The basic elements of the stories always come to me in that strange dimension between sleep and wakefulness, but the plot and characters themselves turn up when I’m sat in front of the screen. I like to see where they are going to take me and I allow them to go wherever they want to, within reason.
If I plotted out a story in detail and made copious notes and chapter highlights, the books would never get written, as in my brain, it would appear that I’d written the story already and with no surprises to come I wouldn’t be able to amass the enthusiasm needed to actually type the whole thing out, and the story would just sit in a folder on my hard disk, unloved and mostly forgotten.
Is your writing ever inspired by your family or real life incidents?
Most of my characters are very loosely based on the people around me when I was growing up. Women were particularly strong and needed to be as many of the men thought their wage packets should be handed over the bar of the local pub, not over the dinner table to the grateful hands of their wives. The women performed miracles with the meagre amounts they were given and every one of them managed ‘tick’ credit line at the local shop. They often had to sweet talk the tallyman who came around every Friday in an effort to persuade them to allow the rent to be paid at a later date. Every single one of those women would regularly go without food themselves so their children could be fed. Meanwhile in the pub, the men of the street boasted about how they wore the trousers in their homes. They didn’t. The women made decisions on a daily basis that the men knew nothing about. Men came home from work to find a hot meal on the table, thought they had done their bit for the family and fully deserved the copious amounts of beer they would consume when the scraped together dinner had been eaten.
What time of the day do you write best?
Afternoons. My brain doesn’t wake up until lunchtime no matter how early I get out of bed. When I start a writing session it can last for anything from three to ten hours with stops only to ease bodily needs and to top up with caffeine. All of my books start relatively slowly but by the time I hit twenty thousand words, the sparks begin to fly and I can knock out anything between three and five thousand words a day. Good words too. I tend to edit at the end of every session so much of it is done before I send the tome off to my lovely editor, Maureen.
What are you writing at the moment?
I’m between books at the moment. The fifth Amy Rowlings Mystery novel, Ten Years After was released by SpellBound Books in late September and the second book in the series, Death at the Lychgate was published in audio format by Soundings, part of the Ulverscroft group of companies. Murder at the Mill, was released on audio in April 2024. The books are narrated by that wonderful stage and screen actress, Gemma Lawrence.
The next Amy Rowlings mystery will be a bit of an homage to Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express and will tell the story of a murder on a train stuck in the snow. In my story, the murder will be solved at the nearby Maidstone Orient Hotel, not on the train itself. The book has the working title of Death on the Dover Express.
What advice would you give to other writers?
Keep going. It’s going to get tough, then tougher still but remember you can’t become a published author unless you finish what you started. When you do eventually type, The End, go back over it repeatedly until it is as good as you can make it. Don’t trust to friends and relatives when you finally muster up enough courage to let someone else read it. They are always going to tell you it’s wonderful. Join a writer’s group, whether online or a more formal one in the town. You’ll get good advice from fellow authors who have been there and done it.
Great advice, T.A. Thanks for dropping by to talk to us today. Wishing you lots of success with your writing.
Meet T.A.
Author Bio
T A Belshaw is from Derbyshire in the United Kingdom. He is the author of the well-received, Amy Rowlings Golden Age mystery series, which includes Murder at the Mill, Death at the Lychgate, The Murder Awards and Murder on the Medway.
Trevor is also the author of the Dual Timeline Family Saga, Unspoken. The four-book series includes, Unspoken, The Legacy The Reckoning and the 2023 fourth book in the series, Betrayal. His Christmas Novel, Hopes and Fears, set in 1940 features the same characters found in both the Unspoken and Amy Rowlings series.
His short stories have been published in various anthologies including 100 Stories for Haiti, 50 Stories for Pakistan, Another Haircut, Shambelurkling and Other Stories, Deck The Halls, 100 Stories for Queensland and The Cafe Lit Anthology 2011, 2012 and 2013. He also has two pieces in Shambelurklers Return. 2014.
His poem, My Mistake, was rated Highly Commended and published in an anthology of the best entries in the Farringdon Poetry Competition. Various articles have been published in magazines as diverse as Ireland’s Own, The Best of British and First Edition.
In 2021 Trevor signed a multi-book deal with Spellbound Books Ltd.
Contact Links
https://blog.trevorbelshaw.com (my review blog)
Twitter @TABelshaw
Insta @TABelshaw
Bluesky. @tabelshaw.bsky.social
Karen King 