Meet the Author Monday: Tony Bassett

It’s Meet the Author Monday! Each week we meet a new author and get to know a little about them, their writing process, publishing experience, and tips for other writers. Today we’re talking to Tony Bassett, author of Out for Revenge.

About Tony Bassett:

Tony Bassett from Kent spent 40 years as a journalist, mainly working for the Sunday People, both in the newsroom and investigations department. Tony has never forgotten the great times he had as a young journalist working for theWorcester Evening News. So when he took early retirement from his reporting career, he decided to write a series of crime novels set in the West Midlands. Four have now been published. The first MURDER ON OXFORD LANE was released in January 2022. All the novels follow the fortunes of a middle-aged male detective and his twenty-five-year-old female sergeant.

Tony, from North Kent, has five grown-up children who live in South Wales.

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About Out for Revenge:

Following the death of a local thug, a simmering gang war quickly reaches boiling point…

When notorious gangland boss Tadeusz Filipowski is released from prison, several people start looking over their shoulder.

A volatile character, not shy of picking fights, Filipowski plans to expand his drugs empire and put his competitors on a backfoot. That’s until he turns up dead. Very dead.

DS Sunita Roy of the Heart of England police is handed the case but it’s a challenge to find the killer of a man with so many enemies.

DCI Gavin Roscoe would lend more support but he is busy nailing down suspicions of corruption plaguing a neighbouring division of the West Midlands police force.

Soon, however, the investigations will bump into one another. And unless Roy and Roscoe can get to the bottom of the mystery, they could well become the next victims.

OUT FOR REVENGE is the fourth gripping standalone mystery in the Detectives Roy and Roscoe crime fiction series by Tony Bassett.

The full list of books is as follows:

1. MURDER ON OXFORD LANE
2. THE CROSSBOW STALKER
3. MURDER OF A DOCTOR
4. OUT FOR REVENGE

All of these books are FREE with Kindle Unlimited and available in paperback from Amazon.

If you like reading Val McDermid, Elly Griffiths, David Pearson and Joy Ellis, you’ll love these books.

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Author Interview with Tony Bassett:

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1. Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book?

All the crime novels in my Midlands series featuring detectives DS Sunita Roy and DCI Gavin Roscoe are stand-alone books.  But inevitably there are common threads running through them.  Roscoe’s son decides to join the police so his training, his romance with another recruit and his eventual marriage are dealt with as a narrative through the series. The wrongful conviction of two men for the “body in the bath” murder and the shooting of DI Tom Vickers are touched on in both the third and fourth book, although each novel is complete in itself. Similarly, DS Sunita Roy’s search for romance runs like a theme through all the books.  

2. How many unpublished and half-finished books do you have?

I have nearly finished writing the fifth book in the Midlands series. I have given it the provisional title The Culverdon Curse. It concerns the rebel son of an aristocrat found brutally murdered after a row over loud music being played in his apartment block in Queensbridge.  I have also written a novel about an assassin which is set in London and a crime novel set in Sydney which is more character based and unlike anything I have written before. 

3. How do you select the names of your characters?

I chose the surname Roscoe because it is an eye-catching, memorable name and the first name Gavin seemed to suit it.  The name Sunita Roy was selected  because of the surname’s association with West Bengal, which is where Britain’s most senior Asian police officer, Neil Basu, hails from.  Many of the other names are ones I encountered while reporting for the Worcester News or they are surnames listed online as being common to the West Midlands. These include Bufton, Peploe and Deeley. 

4. How long on average does it take you to write a book?

It take me around three and a half months to produce the first draft of a novel. Then I send it to a group of personal reviewers for their reaction. I make numerous changes – partly based on my own thoughts and partly based on theirs. Finally I read the manuscript through several times until I am satisfied with it.

5. How long have you been writing?

Most of my life. I began at the age of nine, co-editing a junior school magazine called The Globe. While at grammar school in Kent, I edited my school magazine and wrote a play, staged by my local vicar. While at Hull University, I edited the student newspaper and won a student journalism award.  After that I spent more than 40 years working as a journalist – mainly for the Sunday People. 

6. What comes first, the plot or characters?

An interesting question. The answer is probably a bit of both. The team at Heart of England Police, led by DCI Roscoe and DS Roy, obviously feature in every book in the series.  My normal procedure at the start of writing a book is to devise a dramatic or intriguing situation. I then create and name new characters for the initial scenes. Somehow everything seems to fall into place after that with the characters driving the action forward.  Following the first few chapters, a plan for future chapters develops, but this has to be subject to change – depending on the whims of the characters and on fresh ideas that occur to me during the writing process.

7. Do you hear from your readers much? What do they say?

I’m delighted to say that nearly all readers seem to enjoy my books, as can be seen from a glance at the reviews published on Amazon and on Goodreads.

8. What were the key challenges you faced when writing this book?

Out For Revenge developed by accident out of the third book in the series, Murder Of A Doctor.  At one stage, the investigation into the death of Dr Scott Deeley and the tale of the corrupt detective, Seymour Trent, were due to form one novel.  However, it became clear when I had finished the first draft of Murder Of A Doctor that there was far too much plot for one book. So the investigation into the corrupt policeman became a book in its own right.  I’m so glad I separated the two stories.  I think both books are stronger as a result of this. One of the other challenges I faced was that I didn’t have a great deal of knowledge of drug crime in Birmingham, but I carried out a lot of research over several weeks and gained the information I needed.

To learn more about Tony Bassett, here’s where you can find him:

Website: www.tonybassettauthor.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/tony.bassett.92505
Twitter: www.twitter.com/tonybassett1
Instagram: www.instagram.com/tonyba1

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