‘Origins Of A Crime’ A Guest Post By Mark Roberts

I was introduced to Mark Roberts by the lovely Clare, Campaigns Assistant, at ‘Head Of Zeus‘ publishers.

I found myself totally absorbed and intrigued by Mark’s thoughtful guest post, which introduces ‘Day Of The Dead’, the latest book in the ‘Eve Clay’ series.

Despite joining the series some three books in, it looks to me as though each episode is going to work fine as a stand alone story for ‘dippers’ like myself. Whilst for those of you who enjoy a strong character back story, Eve’s is one of the most complex and interesting I have come across in a long time.

Check out the blog tour banner below for some of the other stops on this excellent tour.

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‘DAY OF THE DEAD‘ (DCI Eve Clay #3)

Vindici is a hero to many. He is also the nation’s most dangerous criminal…

The man who calls himself Vindici broke out of prison last year. Now he’s filmed himself torturing and killing paedophiles in Liverpool’s affluent suburbs. Half the city are celebrating: now the streets are safer for their children. But for DCI Eve Clay and her team at the Merseyside Police, it’s a nightmare. Their job is to solve the crimes and lock up the killer – hard enough without being despised by the public they are trying to protect.

And now, just when they think they’ve cracked the case, they receive a photo of Vindici, at a Day of The Dead parade in Mexico. So if Vindici is 5,000 miles away, who are they hunting in Liverpool? DCI Eve Clay must draw on all her cunning to unmask a killer who is somehow always one step ahead…

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Hi! I’m MARK ROBERTS

I was born and raised in Liverpool and was educated at St. Francis Xavier’s College.

I was a teacher for twenty years and for the last thirteen years I have worked with children with severe learning difficulties.

Before my first adult crime novel The Sixth Soul was published in 2013, I had spent most of my time as a writer producing three children’s novels and theatre plays, receiving  a Manchester Evening News Theatre Award for best new play of the year.

I am the author of What She Saw, which was longlisted for a CWA Gold Dagger.

Blood Mist, the first in my DCI Eve Clay series, went to number one in the Australian kindle chart.

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It doesn’t matter what the stone cold truth is, what people believe is the thing that really drives the bus. This is what I like to explore in my novels. People, in crisis, good versus evil, levels of distorted and different consciousness, the power of belief to crank up the horrific way that people treat each other.

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EVE CLAY – “ORIGINS OF A CRIME“

The inspiration for the Eve Clay series came from my profound interest in cults and the dynamic around abandoned babies.  I wanted to write a strong female lead detective and to set her world up in a place I know very well, my home town Liverpool.  When I was in the early stages of the project, I had two big what if? moments.

What if Eve was born into a Satanic cult?

What if Eve was abandoned as a baby?

The what if? moments were quickly followed with questions that followed through from the two premises.

Who would save her when she was a baby?

Would Eve ever learn the identity of her birth parents?

In the back story that flows through the series, she was rescued by a kind but strong Roman Catholic nun called Sister Philomena, who is well-placed to take care of Eve because she is in charge of a small orphanage, St. Claire’s, where all adult Eve’s earliest happy memories are lodged.  Philomena loves Eve and that love is absolutely reciprocated.

In the prologue to Blood Mist, the first novel in the Eve Clay series, Eve is six years old and in the office of Mrs Tripp, the head of St. Michael’s Catholic Care Home for Children.  Eve is being delivered into Mrs Tripp’s care because Sister Philomena has died.  On Mrs Tripp’s desk there is a bulging card file marked Evette Clay, full of documents relating to her past.  Mrs Tripp indicates that it will make interesting reading.

Through the series, pieces from the file return to the adult Eve but whenever she sees the file during her childhood, she notices that it is getting thinner and thinner.  Documents have been stolen and, as Eve tries to piece together the narrative of her birth family, she understands that her card has been marked by the people caring for her after Sister Philomena’s death.

With this premise for the series, each novel is inspired by another question.

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Blood Mist … what if the wheel comes full circle and the serial killers Eve and her team are pursuing have an agenda that is rooted in the woman hunting them down?

‘BLOOD MIST‘ (DCI Eve Clay #1)

Two massacred families, with signs of ritual killings.
A nine-year-old-child, abandoned in the snow.
An imprisoned murderer, holding information he wont give up.

As Liverpool holds its breath, DCI Eve Clay hunts a sadistic killer who knows more about her past than she does. 

Her search will take her down into the tunnels beneath Liverpool, boarded up and forgotten since World War 2. There, deep underground, she will come face to face with true evil for the first time.

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Dead Silent …  what if child abuse proves to be the engine that drives a serial killer’s journey?

‘DEAD SILENT‘ (DCI Eve Clay #2)

HIS LIFE WAS DEVOTED TO ART.
HIS DEATH WAS A MASTERPIECE.

Leonard Lawson was a respected professor of medieval art. He lived a quiet life in a suburb of Liverpool with his grown-up daughter. As far as anyone knew, he had no enemies.

Louise Lawson watched her father die. Before she blacked out, she saw his body mutilated and deformed, twisted into a hellish parody of the artworks he loved.

Investigating a killer bringing medieval horror to Merseyside, DCI Eve Clay must overcome her own demons to unpick the dark symbolism of the crime scene. A fifty-year silence has been broken – with a message written in blood…

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Day of the Dead … what if the killer Eve and her team are tracking down is a hero to the public because he or she is killing paedophiles?

‘DAY OF THE DEAD‘ (DCI Eve Clay #3)

Vindici is a hero to many. He is also the nation’s most dangerous criminal…

The man who calls himself Vindici broke out of prison last year. Now he’s filmed himself torturing and killing paedophiles in Liverpool’s affluent suburbs. Half the city are celebrating: now the streets are safer for their children. But for DCI Eve Clay and her team at the Merseyside Police, it’s a nightmare. Their job is to solve the crimes and lock up the killer – hard enough without being despised by the public they are trying to protect.

And now, just when they think they’ve cracked the case, they receive a photo of Vindici, at a Day of The Dead parade in Mexico. So if Vindici is 5,000 miles away, who are they hunting in Liverpool? DCI Eve Clay must draw on all her cunning to unmask a killer who is somehow always one step ahead..

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In Day of the Dead, I wanted to reach out beyond Liverpool and England and engage in exploring Mexican culture, particularly the festivities from mid-October to early November, the Day of the Dead, a time window in which the killer is going to take down more paedophiles.  I weaved the Day of the Dead into the fabric of Eve’s third novel because the image system and meaning behind the imagery were well suited to what I intended to achieve.

I also wanted to write a crime novel with a strong ambiguous idea that conflicts both the detectives in the novel and the readers reading the novel: the serial killer as anti-hero.  The Robin Hood of serial killers who seeks to make the world a safer place for children everywhere by acting as paedophiles’ nemesis.

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