The Story Behind The Cracked Wall
The Cracked Wall
CSI Eddie Collins has spent his career looking at the dark side of humanity, but he has never encountered anything quite like this.
A predator is watching - not just anyone, but someone who has turned a hidden observation point into their own personal theatre of cruelty. When Eddie stumbles upon the site, he realises he isn't just looking at a crime scene; he has found the secret hiding place of a killer.
Now, Eddie must race against time to unmask a predator who thinks they are invisible. But in a world where even a crack in a wall holds a secret, the most dangerous place to be is exactly where you are.
I’d finished the second draft of the latest CSI Eddie Collins novel; the one entitled The Dead Sister. Strangely enough I began writing The Dead Sister like I do most books – by pouring a scene into the computer and growing a story from it. It’s usually a scene I’ve been thinking about for a while, something spooky or gross or just interesting.
This particular scene featured Eddie appearing in court as an expert witness, and getting shot down in flames because he was being flippant with a stern judge. I recall a year or two ago, reading in the news where the parent of a murdered child walked into court brandishing a gun and gave her own kind of justice to the defendant – and this inspired me because that kind of summary justice is the kind of justice I’d like to mete out in similar circumstances (God forbid I ever find myself in similar circumstances).
Anyway, this is the scene I wrote for the book that turned out to be called The Dead Sister. It was a reasonably good scene with a bit of humour in it, a bit of drama and a soupcon of tension. When I’d finished The Dead Sister I realized it had no place in the book at all, and there was no way I could make it fit without drastic surgery to both the scene and the book. So I took the scissors to it and ousted it from the manuscript.
I was looking around for a new novella idea, and of course this one dropped into my lap. You might know that all my short stories and novellas featuring Eddie are written in first person and have the same ritualistic type of title: ‘The ’ Yes, the title always begins with ‘The’ and there’s always a four-letter word following it. Don’t ask – I have no idea why I came by that little quirk, but it’s there anyway.
Now, this novella, having been cut from a novel, wasn’t written in first person, and consequently didn’t fit with that tradition at all. So it’s a stand-alone novella, if you will. This being the case, it’s an ideal candidate for a new freebie for the newsletter sign-ups.
But anyway, back to the story. It centered around Eddie in court – indeed it was the opening scene – and one of the lines mentioned by a prosecuting barrister was asking Eddie to describe what he saw at a particular crime scene. I scrubbed out the reference to The Dead Sister’s story and inserted, “A dead woman with a knife in her back.” From there I asked a series of probing questions about the knife, the woman, the locale, etc., and came up with a smart little story that I’m quite proud of.
The title of this novella is The Cracked Wall: Your Killer is Watching you. I found it chilling to write, and I tried to add more humour, more drama, some tension, and quite a bit of emotion. It’s a satisfying circular ending. All the evidence Eddie finds leads him and DS Regan Carter nowhere, so Eddie’s forced to really think about the scene and the case and come up with something revolutionary to try and nail the killer before he strikes again.
It’s around 19,000 words and was enormous fun to write.
Oh, one last thing that’s unusual about this story… you can’t buy it anywhere. It’s available only to my new and established newsletter subscribers. If you’d like to get your hands on the story, please go tot he front page of my website, and sign up. When you’ve done that, The Cracked Wall will drop into your lap shortly afterwards. I really hope you enjoy reading it.