Nick Quantrill (1/2) By Tim Roux www.a63revisited.com

(1/2), (2/2).

Nick Quantrill is a prize-winning Hull crime fiction writer whose work is highly-rated by all who come across it, with one notable exception - himself. However, even Nick reckons that his upcoming novel Broken Dreams is a belter (we'll see what he says about it in a year's time). Nick started out as a short story writer, winning the 2006 HarperCollins Crime Tour Competition for Punishment, an elegant 1,000 word piece which plonks an evil twist down onto the table.

Other short stories include Buried Secrets, a tale of members of a 1960s Hull music band - sort of The Aces, or something - and of the one who was discovered walled up in a city development, and Cinch Hand , another twisty piece about a former accountant turned private eye (well, Nick is an accountant, so we'll see where it takes him, especially if you happen to catch him parking outside your house late at night with his raincoat collar starched up to his nose and the regulation mug of cocoa in his hands). Merry Christmas, Here's A Present is more of a seasonal exploitation number, and more predictable, but a neat little story for all that, with some decent atmospherics and indecent protagonists who are clearly moving in on Danny Birch's Clipped manor (or vice-versa).

The first longer piece was the novella-length Complicity about drugs and bugs in the city, corruption and blackmail. It features DS Coleman as the cynical, honourable old copper not beyond losing his temper at the frustration and wheeler-dealing of combating crime in a modern metropolis (or however you might wish to describe Hull). We meet DS Coleman again in the full-length Black & White, a crime thriller that takes a few paces to get a move on, but which is pretty fit when it does, around page 50. Nick's prose style is good hardcore gritty TV cop show, his dialogue is excellent, and his plotlines are both surprising and convincing, glossed with a fashionable scepticism as to the value of police work in a murky world - 'Heroes led by donkeys', as they used to say.

So what about Broken Dreams? Well, Nick hasn't entirely abandoned the hapless DS Coleman, but this time he is a walk-on in a tale of a private investigator, Joe Geraghty, who gets closer to a murder scene than is strictly comfortable (betcha he did it, knowing Nick's sneaky little ways). Broken Dreams will be published in paperback later this year. Here is the synopsis:

Joe Geraghty, Private Investigator, is used to struggling from one case to the next, barely making the rent on his small office in the Old Town of Hull. Invited by a local businessman to investigate a member of his staff's absenteeism, it's the kind of surveillance work that Geraghty and his small team have performed countless times. When Jennifer Murdoch is found bleeding to death in her bed, Geraghty quickly finds himself trapped in the middle of a police investigation which stretches back to the days when the city had a thriving fishing industry.

As the woman's tangled private life begins to unravel, the trail leads Geraghty to local gangster-turned-respectable businessman, Frank Salford, a man who has a significant stake in the city's regeneration plans. Still haunted by the death of his wife in a house fire, it seems the people with the answers Geraghty wants are the police and Salford, both of whom want his co-operation for their own ends. With everything at stake, it seems some would go to any length to get what they want, Geraghty included. *****

Extracts of all of Nick's work are available online, and full electronic copies are available on request by contacting: hullcrimefiction@hotmail.co.uk. Nick Quantrill's personal site is www.hullcrimefiction.co.uk

Photographs are by Roland Standaert

Continued.. Next Page (2/2).

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