KJ Lyttleton — Crime Author

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KJ Lyttleton

Some of the true stories that inspired The Man In the Wall

Chances are, if you read something in The Man In the Wall that felt a bit far-fetched, that’s the bit that really happened…

Here are some of the things that made this book possible.

Private Eye did a podcast

When I was cooking up the plot of The Man In The Wall I wanted to tell a story about corporate malpractice that would draw on a lot of the scandals happening out there in the real world right now. That’s because back in 2016 I listened to an episode of the Private Eye podcast that burned itself into my brain thanks to the absolutely preposterous details.

In PF-Eye, journalists Solomon Hughes and Jayne Mackenzie described the myriad failings of an outsource firm that had been brought in to manage a clutch of schools. This included things like installing fire doors that didn’t close properly and throwing up buildings that fell down. In one eye-popping section, Jayne Mackenzie talked about a school in Liverpool that was closed due to low pupil numbers, but, thanks to an insane contract with the council, the management firm continued to bill for the maintenance of an empty school.

So Private Eye gets the credit for sending me down the PPP path, which led me to…

A school wall that collapsed in Edinburgh

In The Man In the Wall some of the story revolves around wall ties, which maybe doesn’t sound that thrilling, but did lead to a dramatic outcome: that is, the entire wall fell down revealing a dead body inside. If this sounds mad, then check out this story about how the  wrong wall ties were used in 17 schools in Scotland under a PPP contact which led to one school wall to collapse in a storm.

I briefly worried that this tale of ineptitude sounded too unlikely, but luckily (for me and no one else) another almighty blunder wasn’t far behind in the form of the RAAC scandal. Remember that? When literal DAYS before term was due to start in September, over a hundred UK schools were closed/partially closed due to reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC). It turns out, constructing a building using something that is closer to an Aero bar than a block of concrete isn’t actually the cleverest idea after all. In the end over 200 schools were affected.

Thankfully, no children (or adults) were injured in either scandal.

A builder told me a horrible story

The central story in The Man In The Wall revolves around two bodies being found in these badly built school walls. Even worse, Clive McGinty, Phil’s dad, was alive when he fell (or was he pushed?) down into a wall cavity. It’s a grisly enough tale and I’m slightly loath to admit it was inspired by a true story.

Here’s what happened.

My builder (also called Phil just to confuse things), has worked as a Health & Safety Officer (HSO) on building sites. This means he has seen some things – and boy does he love making my squirm by telling me about the grimmest of them.

One story he told me was about a poor man who was discovered in a cavity wall on a building site around 17 years ago. The coroner could not establish why this builder was on site that day. Builders are meant to work with at least one labourer when on a site and, besides, it was a weekend and the site was closed.

Did he fall? Did he kill himself? No one knows. Even how he fitted into such a tiny space was a mystery.

I looked for this story in old news reports so I could give you an original source, but couldn’t find it. I did, however, find some pretty unpleasant similar stories. And from what I’ve been told, things like this happen all the time and are hushed up pretty quickly.

Phil the builder, by the way, is also the inspiration for the ever-moving, ever-grumpy Doug Graves, the HSO who knows more about Clive McGinty’s death than he’s saying. Phil the builder claims that HSOs are all grumpy, but when he’s round our house he’s a cheeky Welsh rogue (which is lucky because he might as well live with us in our money pit at this point).

[Intrigued? Buy your copy here]

I worked in HR

Not content with expecting the reader to care about wall ties, outsourcing firms and health and safety certificates, I have also put in an awful lot of human resources. Write what you know, they say, which is why, having spent many years working with senior leaders in human resources, I included the HR team in the tale.

I should say that these people are all delightful and did not inspire any of the characters. Actually, the inspiration for Andrew, the ex-head of HR at Virtua Services, came from the many hours I have spent reading virtue signalling posts on LinkedIn from people hoping to get a plethora of ‘celebrate’ handclap emoji reactions.

I had some really dodgy temp jobs

I once spent a summer sorting through letters for a utility company ahead of their audit (with the boss coming in regularly to extract the piles that hadn’t been responded to and, presumably, rehousing them in a skip). Six of us hunched over a table in a tiny room for six weeks, reading spidery handwriting and going slowly insane.

After that, I moved to a windowless room at a different utility firm and worked with the pipe investigations department. In the book, Mick from The Man In The Wall is inspired by the sole man on our team (who, I should add, was very nice). He was one of those tall, fit older men who could definitely take most people in a fight. He had retired from the army and then did a few different jobs outside jobs before ending up labouring over a keyboard in a windowless room.

So there we have it! Just some of the true stories that inspired my first novel. And if you want to know the true stories that inspired A Star is Dead – the second book in the series – you may have to wait a while. I’m not sure I want to get sued by anyone just yet…

A Star Is Dead. What happened in Room 301 of The Marchmont Hotel?

One June afternoon in 2009, a thin man dressed in black boarded a bus to Sligo, a small coastal town not far from the Irish border. Three days later, after a quiet weekend spent largely alone, the man was dead – his passing the first act of a mystery that has now baffled and compelled police forces, journalists, film-makers and internet sleuths for over a decade.

So begins “The Man Who Deleted His Past Before He Was Found Dead,” a Vice article by Francisco Garcia that has haunted me for nearly six years. The article tells the story of a man, known as Peter Bergmann (since that’s the false name he gave at the hotel) who can be seen on grainy CCTV footage disposing of all identifying documents so that, by the time his body washed up on a secluded Sligo beach, every trace of his past had been eradicated.

He made his way to the bus station and, on arriving, read notes on scraps of paper he’d picked out of his pocket, before tearing them up and depositing them in a nearby bin.

What did the notes say??! And who received the letters he was seen posting in the days before his death?

We will probably never know, but boy does that man’s story leave a mark. So many unanswerable questions.

But what does the death of the man known as Peter Bergmann have to do with the news that A STAR IS DEAD, MY SECOND BOOK, IS OUT?!

Well, I’ll get to that. I promise.

Death and hotels

When I started my first ever novel, I simply began writing1. A young woman walked into hotel on the south coast and tried to blag her way past the front desk to find out the room number of a rising British Hollywood star. I wanted the young woman to be a bit of a fraud, someone willing to live in the grey areas, someone who uses her natural gregariousness to get on the right side of people. Phil McGinty, the main character of my Aldhill Mysteries series came to life that day. She’s not perfect, but I can’t help liking her, youthful mistakes and all – and I hope you do too.

But Phil didn’t arrive alone. When she strode into the hotel that day, she came up against Judith ‘the dragon on the front desk’ a woman who has deployed a disarming smile herself in days gone by and isn’t about to fall for any of that nonsense.

And then, along with Judith and Phil, came a man who had caught a bus into town and booked himself into The Marchmont with a plan to remove all trace of himself from the world. Less the anonymous Man In Black, more the invisible Man In Beige. And, after the Man In Beige made his journey into the tale, a cast of other (more colourful) characters appeared, not least Oli Cromwell, the deeply flawed highly charismatic Aldhill-boy-turned-Hollywood-A-Lister whose mysterious death lies at the heart of the mystery.

A STAR IS DEAD was the first novel I ever wrote (or finished, I should say), although it has entered the world as book two in the Aldhill Mystery series. It was inspired by many things, but the story of the Sligo Man haunts its pages. I don’t know how to justify using the death of a real person as the inspiration for what is ultimately meant to be an entertaining story (just as I didn’t know how to feel about the poor man who inspired THE MAN IN THE WALL). I also don’t know how Peter Bergmann would feel if he discovered that, by attempting to delete all evidence of his very existence, he turned himself into a story that will live on in local folklore.

Anyway, brr, shake it off – this has all got a little bit grim, hasn’t it? (Do you think my slight aversion to darkness is going to be a hindrance to my crime writing career?) I hope you’re all having a lovely Tuesday, and that you’re in exactly the right mood to not only BUY MY BOOK, but also TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW ABOUT IT!

Paperback readers will need to wait a few weeks, but don’t worry, I will be banging on about it when it launches.

They’re knocking down Roosevelt Court

Philippa ‘Phil’ McGinty from the Aldhill Mysteries series is proud of her family and home, so I’m not sure how she would feel to discover that the building that inspired her home in Aldhill-on-Sea – Roosevelt Court, looks like it may well be knocked down.

The Four Courts, Hollington © Copyright David Anstiss and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

The real Roosevelt Court in Hollington, St Leonards-on-Sea, directly inspired the fictional version in Aldhill-on-Sea. It’s one of the Four Courts, four monolithic structures that loom over Stonehouse Drive and the nearby houses. Built in December 1962, Roosevelt Court and its chums, Churchill, Kennedy and Bevin, stand like monuments to post-war Britain’s concrete efficiency.

Each tower is 17 storeys tall, housing 98 flats arranged with mathematical precision: four two-bedroom apartments and two single-bedroom flats per floor, all clustered around the central lift shaft. (Source) Unfortunately, it’s this layout that might be partly responsible for the demise of the Four Courts, since modernising the structures is – according to Southern Housing, quoted in the Hastings Online Times:

Essential upgrades such as lifts that stop on all floors and are large enough to enable ambulance crews to exit residents are not feasible within the current buildings. The design and layout of flats doesn’t meet modern mobility standards, and the physical constraints of the buildings restrict the opportunities to modernise these blocks.

Phil loves living at Roosevelt Court. Her family is there – her grandmother is in a flat right next to them – and, along with the excellent community spirit, she loves the views out over the rest of Aldhill-on-Sea. I expect, like the four-hundred or so other tenants, she would love the building to be modernised, but also like them, I’m not sure she’d be keen to see her home razed to the ground without any clear idea of where she might be moved to.

Roosevelt Court
Roosevelt Court © Copyright Oast House Archive and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.
© Copyright Oast House Archive and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

Meet KJ Lyttleton. Vital answers to questions about my favourite food

Hello lovely humans!

I was recently asked to do a “Meet the Author” interview for the UK Crime Book Club group on Facebook (where lovely people dwell). So, in the spirit of utter laziness, I’ve pasted it in here.

The questions were set by Kath Middleton, one of the admins. Her words are in bold. (Also, I’ve added footnotes to this version)

In my spotlight today is Katie Lee. I’ve read her crime book, due for pre-order soon, and I loved it.

Katie, tell us about yourself, where you live etc.

I’m the youngest of six children (five girls) and I’m the mother of two girls. My husband is the children’s author and illustrator Alex Milway. We’ve got a very friendly, very loving, very barky miniature schnauzer called Aggy.

I’ve lived all over the place, but I moved to St Leonards-on-Sea near Hastings (which inspired the location for my new series), in 2020 during the Christmas lockdown. It was the best decision ever! It’s a fantastic place to live.

Would you tell us about your writing journey to date?

In my twenties I was a consumer technology journalist, starting on What Laptop magazine and then going on to write for most major newspapers and lots of magazines. With the confidence of youth, I co-founded the UK’s first commercial blog publishing company back in 2004, including the world’s first gadgets website for women (Shiny Shiny). We raised proper VC funding and everything.

I was seen as a bit of a novelty thanks to my age and sex, which meant whenever I did an interview as a tech entrepreneur/writer I nearly always got a wink-wink-nudge-nudge question about “gadgets for girls.” Despite that, it was a very fun time to be a tech journalist: lots of press trips abroad and new tech to play with.

Once, I was invited to the launch of the Queen’s website at Buckingham Palace. It was only when the footman sent us through a door and said, “It’s ma’am to rhyme with ham,” that I realised I was actually going to meet the woman in charge! I was the first one through the door and I was so shocked, I just said “Hi,” as I shook her hand. The Queen’s face lit up and she giggled, and despite thinking I was totally ambivalent to royalty, I fell in love with her on the spot. Then she had to click a mouse to open her website, which she thought was a hoot. It was all very silly.

Later, I went down the client route and I’ve spent the past decade doing a lot of ghostwriting for senior executives. They don’t write anything themselves, you know! It’s been a really quiet year for that, however, and I consciously took the opportunity to finish all these books I’d half-started. It’s been scary taking the plunge, but also liberating.

Back in 2016 I also had a go at screenwriting and managed to get a screen agent. I’ve been shortlisted for BAFTA Rocliffe three times (screenwriting award) and Funny Women once. I’ve developed a few TV adaptations with producers in the UK and Germany and sold an option for a very creepy horror story.

I switched to books more recently as it’s very hard to get things away as a new screenwriter – especially if you’re a middle-class woman of a certain age. You’d be amazed by the things producers and agents will actually say to your face about your age and gender! I’ve been pretty lucky in that regard, but some of my friends have heard some outrageous stuff.

Do you have a writing routine?

My routine is to fail to write for most of the day and then berate myself for all my inadequacies before bashing out a load of words. Some days, I’ll hit peak productivity and absolutely blast through my word count, but tomorrow comes and I’ll just fritter it away reading too many articles and get behind again. Then I get eye strain and have to dictate for bit, which is brilliant and something I’m trying to get better at. I know you all know JD Kirk2, who was once the children’s author Barry Hutchison. Well, I had a post-it note on my computer for a long time that said, “Be More Barry,” in a bid to channel his insane productivity levels, but eventually I had to conclude that being a flakey daydreamer is congenital and I’ve actually been more productive since I accepted that.

Any favourite or go-to authors whose work you admire?

I’m a sucker for crime writers who give a lot of interior lives stuff. People like Belinda Bauer and Kate Atkinson and Lisa Jewell. Outside the world of crime, I worship Hilary Mantel, Susanna Clark and Elizabeth Strout. As a teen, all I read was fantasy, so Tolkien and Mervyn Peake were huge for me. And recently I’ve been reading everything I can by Adrian Tchaichovsky. Oh, and I think Janice Hallet is so clever.

Hallet and Bauer both switched from screenwriting to crime (and I’m sure I could guess why), so they’re big inspirations. I’d pay to be even half as good as them. And I couldn’t not mention the ex-kids’/YA author gang, including JD Kirk, David Gatward, Alex Smith, TG Reid, William Hussey and the whole crew. Watching their meteoric rises has been a proper thrill and privilege. They all know how to tell a good story.

Why crime?

If you’d asked me five years ago, I’d have said I wasn’t interested in crime. But I saw so many of my husband’s peers exploring it and I started reading their work. And it was all great! Then I realised that of course I’d already read crime – Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie and Kate Atkinson etc. Even something like the Gormenghast trilogy is crime in some ways. I think people are often really resistant to trying different genres, but it’s a mistake! I know that mentioning sci-fi immediately puts people off, for example, but a good story is a good story. I’ll try anything now.

Plotter or Pantser?

I’m a reformed pantster. I started writing the first chapter of my first crime novel and just carried on from there. Terrible idea! It took me far too long. Then, for reasons of sheer insanity, I decided to write the prequel, and that turned into another plotting nightmare since I created continuity errors that I had to go back to the other book to fix. After that chaos, I took a break and wrote a comedy sci-fi that I forced myself to sit and plot first. Thanks to that, it only took me a couple of months to write.

It helped when I realised plotting doesn’t actually have to be a strict structural thing: it can be as simple as just writing down everything you know so far. I just splurge it all out and it’s amazing how much more starts appearing and how the pathways open up. I’m not an organised person, so I don’t hold myself to any of it. I can change as I go, but getting down everything I know first is surprisingly similar to putting together a good basic plot. Let’s hope the third crime book goes more smoothly now I’ve reformed my ways.3

Any hobbies apart from writing?

Oh god, too many. I sometimes get stressed about how many hobbies I have! I have a home veg plot AND recently took on an allotment. I have a very neglected YouTube channel about it.4 I sew, crochet and knit. I read a lot – not enough books and too many articles. Substack is an addiction (reading them and writing my own). I like cryptic crosswords. I do visible mending on clothes. I really need to stop doing things that use my eyes. Thank god for audiobooks.

Favourite food and drink?

My dad was an Anglo-Indian from Pakistan5. Curry is a vital component of my life. My husband’s been making this amazing sweet and sour Sri Lankan fried paneer curry recently that is out of this world. The boiling water tap we got recently means I just mainline different teas. My friend got me a Pukka tea advent calendar, which was the perfect gift.

Thanks, Katie. That really makes you a three-dimensional person for me. I’ll let everyone know when that book is up for pre-order.6 Katie writes under a number pseudonyms – Katie J Lee, KJ Lyttleton.

So there you go! That’s a bit about me. I hope you’re all well and safe and aren’t reading too much news (because it really won’t help, you know).

Katie

1 Kath was a Beta reader and picked up some excellent typos. You can thank her for the fact that DI Lee Hudson no longer “wraps his knuckles.”

2 Yes, I probably talk about Barry too much, but until he issues a restraining order, I’ll probably continue.

3 So far no

4 Watching myself back on camera was a real insight into the haphazard Manic Pixie Insane Woman I am these days. The editing was a nightmare and took ages, which I why I haven’t quite kept it up.

5 Actually, from southern India, but they moved to Lahore before Kenya and then finally the UK.

6 It’s available now from Amazon.

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My dad’s ultimate act was to become an anecdote

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