Bill Scathlock stories

Bill is one of those characters I never intended to write about! He turned up in a writing exercise I did with a writing group I went to for a short while, and being the persistent sort of chap that he is, he refused to go away. What was more, he had worked his way into the minds of friends who read the short piece (not even a proper short story, which makes that all the odder), and I found myself being asked, “when are you going to write about Bill again?” I know I’m not the only writer who finds that their characters begin to take on a life of their own, but it’s quite disconcerting when it happens to you for the first time!

However, although I had made Bill a detective with my local West Mercia police force, I also knew that I didn’t have the background or the access to real police to be able to write straightforward police procedures – and to be frank, much as I love reading those, my imagination doesn’t run that way. So what happens to Bill mostly happens outside of his day job. It’s just that having his police background means that he tackles things rather differently to my female leads in the stand alone books I write. I’m certainly not short of ideas for strange situations for Bill, and so although this is not a series in the sense of you needing to read them in order, the books do have a common strand, and sometimes refer back to the previous cases.