I have a really successful friend – a wine expert, no less – called Sophie. We caught up at the end of March for the first time in around ten years. She travels the world as a professional wine writer and I'm just a hobbyist. But we certainly encouraged each other, and I made a solemn promise to write something about my novels.
I see my novels as something from the past, but they're not really. I have also resolved to finish book two in my crime series. I wrote half the book in the summer of 2021 when the world was still grappling with a pandemic, and I wrote it on a Yorkshire campsite in a really fancy hardback notebook in pencil. Then I stopped and lost the thread. I now hope to finish it in time for Christmas 2025.
The problem with fiction is that unless you have a major publisher, it doesn't really make any money. And I had a new problem in the autumn of 2021: a real publisher had offered me an actual book deal for a nonfiction book on a topic I knew nothing about. That coincided with me discovering (and then getting obsessed about) the killing in West Cork, Ireland, at Christmas 1996, of French film producer Sophie Toscan du Plantier.
I was writing on Medium about that case and people like Jim Sheridan saw it and made contact. So suddenly my nonfiction, which had always been in the background, leapt into the foreground, where it remains today. It wasn't until this year, in February, that I revived my music writing, with surprising results.
So after Cyrena Wages started asking me about my past during our recent interview, I decided to finish this article off: I have added a new section at the bottom on my nonfiction.
My Fiction
Before I was anything else I wrote short stories. I sold one (aged 18) to a magazine and got unreasonably excited. I had found a career, a way to get rich. I was wrong.
At university my whole friend group fell heavily for the X Files, especially for Gillian Anderson in her role as Agent Scully. As usual I fell more heavily than anyone else and wrote a novel about her. My Gillian was the wife of the main character, Peter Flynn, and she really was abducted by aliens. From Beyond Belief is the story about what happened next, and the lengths a husband might go to help his wife.
In 1996 there was a terrible yet mysterious plane crash off the coast of New York. TWA800 exploded and fell out of the sky. Could it have been a bomb? Kicking Tin, my second novel, analyses several crashes including TWA800 and the Lockerbie bombing. I came up with a different explanation but I found it was the research for both novels that I enjoyed more than making up some story.
I stopped writing novels when I started work in London but I was storing up stories. I was living ‘for the narrative’ as Sophie (my friend, not (yet) a murder victim in West Cork) sometimes says. I did everything, in every country, in all kinds of hotels, and remembered all of it.
When my daughter was born I found myself with more time on my hands. When she was about one I wrote Ogham Forest, a children’s story about a family holiday with some magic thrown in. She read (some of it) when she was older and voiced a chapter of the audiobook herself.
At the same time I wrote Ernest Zevon, a story about a man who might be a little bit like Warren Zevon (though less wild, and British not American) and an Australian female sax player whom I will not name here. You can hear a trailer for that book right here, voiced by the inimitable Miranda Keeling.
In lockdown I fell heavily for American noir private eye thrillers and wrote a spoof one set in Hull. The Gun Slipped was written fast in a single draft and is one of my proudest achievements.
Anyway, book two in that series is back in the works, aiming for a Christmas 2025 launch. The Bad Heist features an all-female gang called the Forty Kites and book three will be called The Tailor of Kingstown.
My Nonfiction
I had written on Medium since 2015. I loved Medium back then, before it lost its way, and I needed a place for my ramblings, those articles which did not fit anywhere else.
Earlier this year I duplicated all of that content here on my main site, because this is the first time I have self-hosted my own writing platform and I want to keep all that stuff if I have to delete Medium if, say, they are bought by Musk.
Considering how 2025 has gone, it is fitting that my first article on Medium in 2015 was this one: a profile of Maria McKee, which Maria read and shared with her followers on a site then known as Twitter.
I did nothing else on Medium until 2017, one of my "up" years, and a year in which I found the bravery to apply to Airbnb to become a spy tour guide in London. They were launching their activity platform, called Airbnb Experiences, and I managed to catch that wave before they launched. I had time on my hands that year and I made really good money doing two or three spy walks every weekend that autumn. I really felt like I had found an outlet for my writing in leading those tours, while keeping fit by walking and getting fresh air.
I loved it. Until Airbnb got weird. I started to feel like I was working for them, far from being self-employed, and they insisted that every review was a 5-star hagiography. Clearly they don't understand Britain at all because even friends would only give me 3 stars for a good walk. Four if they were pissed silly and 5 stars only if I paid them twice the price of the ticket and then got them pissed silly at my expense. I lost faith with Airbnb, and anyway they steered away from boring old walks, which saved me the bother of breaking up with them.
Anyway at that time I was getting more involved with some friends in NYC. We founded an online zeitgeist-catching magazine called The Z Review. God we had such a blast that year, 2017, and our articles really turned some heads. Jessica Dorfman Jones, still a hero of mine, got the attention of Rose McGowan who shared Jessica's piece about the nascent Me Too movement. We suddenly had traffic. Another of my co-conspirators was Dan Bukszpan, now better known as the unofficial biographer of Ozzy Osbourne. I wrote a hilarious piece about my hatred of eggs that they still remember today.
After The Z Review I took a step back from writing, and started to recharge my batteries. I really got going again in 2020, the year of lockdown, and wrote a daily lockdown diary on LinkedIn that I later moved to Medium. In the summer of 2020 I watched I'll Be Gone In The Dark, a tragic true crime series featuring the late Michelle McNamara. I felt called. I just needed my own case.
Sometime during the spring of 2021 I discovered Murder at the Cottage, Jim Sheridan's fascinating and compelling examination of the killing of Sophie Toscan Du Plantier. I had always loved both crime drama and true crime, and this was my cue to hit Medium once again. Crime Guy was born.
That Christmas I wrote a 5-part podcast series about the music of Hull, a very personal look at my home town musical inspirations voiced by the incredible Lynsey Frost. It was never intended to extend, but perhaps it sowed some seeds for this year's music revival.
When Substack started to look interesting, sometime in early 2022, I copied all the Crime Guy articles over from Medium. Could I really start to make some money writing about true crime? At least Substack had a rational model to make more than a few cents. By then, Medium had become like Spotify: each article would make about $0.20 if I was lucky. Substack offered a possible route to proper side hustle money from my writing for the first time.
As is the way in life, the publisher Pen & Sword found me when I was not looking for them and offered me a contract to write about something linked to Peaky Blinders, a series I knew a little bit about, but was by no means a die-hard fan of.
Instead of writing a book about Sophie Toscan du Plantier, I was writing about long-dead British villains from the 1920s and loving it. That book finally came out in October 2024 and I started thinking about writing volume two, which became Blitz Gangs: a book about the two years of World War Two when criminals ran amok in war-torn London.
It was at this point, in February 2025, that Jonathan Crain interviewed me on his Substack and we talked about true crime. Soon after that, the podcast On Creative Writing interviewed me about AI. AI is my day job so it rarely crosses over into my writing, until now! I was on a roll.
It turns out that writing hardback nonfiction on gangs and crime is not quite as gripping the second time around. I am making strong progress. I'm on course, but I needed something else. I was full of energy and needed a new topic.
I think you have the full story now. I have come full circle. It was in February that I wrote a profile of Lilly Winwood, someone whose music I had been listening to on repeat all winter. That was the start of Tennessee Vibes, my latest Substack. And that is where I am today, hoping to somehow turn my affection for Americana music into another nonfiction book.
PAUL DETTMANN