Thank you to Rachel from Rachel’s Random Resources for inviting me to participate in the blog tour for Murder On Oxford Lane and a huge thank you to Tony Bassett for his guest post today!
About the book:
Murder On Oxford Lane
The peace of a Midlands village is upset when local businessman Harry Bowers doesn’t return from choir practice. More concerned than the man’s own wife, it would seem, investigating officer Detective Sergeant Sunita Roy becomes convinced he has met a sinister end.
There is no trace of the man – just a litany of evidence of an ailing marriage and a nose-diving business venture.
In charge of her first serious case, DS Roy will struggle to win the respect of her colleagues – in particular, her Brummie boss, DCI Gavin Roscoe. All that whilst fighting off the attentions of an increasingly desperate suitor.
Who had it in for the chorister? And is Roy tough enough to break down the defences and prejudices of Middle England? MURDER ON OXFORD LANE is the first book in a series of crime fiction titles by Tony Bassett.
Purchase Link
GUEST POST FOR READING TONIC
Author Tony Bassett, Bexley, Kent
Freelance writer & researcher
The days of the fictional English male detective bustling round quiet country villages solving murders are almost certainly numbered. Books featuring popular characters like Morse and Barnaby will, of course, always sell extremely well.
But writers new to the crime genre like myself have to accept such characters may be a dying breed. This is why, in such a competitive market, anyone wishing to write crime novels with any chance of success has to be more inventive.
As a result, I have been planning for some time to make the main protagonist in my forthcoming book a female detective from a West Bengali background.
I have carried out some research into the subject. I am familiar with A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee and other excellent works by this author. But his books concern the 1920s and are set in Kolkata. I don’t know at present of any modern-day crime fiction set in the UK with a West Bengali main character.
Step forward Detective Sergeant Sunita Roy, a twenty-five-year-old law graduate who, I’ve decided, is set to make waves as a new recruit at a Midlands CID department.
My first book featuring Sunita Roy is called Murder On Oxford Lane. It was published in January. Its sequel, The Crossbow Stalker, was released four weeks later.
Both books are set in Warwickshire and Worcestershire. This is an area which I believe has been rather overlooked by crime writers. It offers an author the chance to cover both rural crime and urban crime in the UK’s second city.
Sunita, whose family come from Kolkata, has a younger sister called Tulika, who is a trainee solicitor. Their parents hail from Leicester. She is enthusiastic, hard-working and has a razor-sharp mind.
The character of Sunita Roy is introduced in the second chapter of the book. She has been away visiting relatives in Kolkata with her cousin Daniel. On her return, she is thrust into her first major case – the disappearance of a property tycoon from a sleepy Warwickshire village.
One reason why I have created this character with an Indian and Hindu background is that I have been extremely impressed by the amazing career of Neil Basu.
He is currently an Assistant Commissioner with the Met Police. He has been touted as a possible successor to Dame Cressida Dick.
Here is a man who has quietly risen through the ranks from being a beat bobby to take charge of, formerly, the counter terrorism brief at Scotland Yard and, currently, specialist operations. He is Britain’s most senior Asian police officer.
Like my character Sunita, he was raised in the Midlands. For my research, I approached an Indian association in Kent and I found their members extremely forthcoming and helpful, providing me with information about the way people from West Bengali backgrounds live in Britain – the style of clothing, religion, culture and so on.
Since retiring from full-time work as a journalist in 2015, I have had two Kent-based novels published as well. The first, Smile Of The Stowaway (published by The Conrad Press in December 2018) concerns a Kent couple who discover an African stowaway beneath their motorhome when they arrive home from a holiday in France.
Instead of handing him to the authorities, they shelter him and find him a job. Then he is accused of murdering a work colleague on Guy Fawkes’ Night and the couple campaign to prove his innocence.
My second book, released in 2020 by The Conrad Press, is a spy novel called The Lazarus Charter. It features the same couple as in the first book, teachers Bob and Anne Shaw.
This time Bob Shaw is astonished when he spots a friend at a London Underground station whose funeral he had attended weeks before. Is the man at the station an impostor or did the friend fake his own death?
This book is dedicated to the murdered Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko and the innocent mother of three, Dawn Sturgess, who died from novichok in 2018. The families of both victims have kindly helped to publicise the book.
I first developed an interest in writing while at school and university. There followed a forty-three-year career as a journalist, spent mainly working for the Sunday People newspaper.
On one occasion, while working for the Sunday People, I took an escaped gangster back to prison. I hope that all the knowledge and experience gained during those years as a newspaper reporter will add flavour and realism to my books.
LINK TO MURDER ON OXFORD LANE (Book1)
LINK TO THE CROSSBOW STALKER (Book2)
Author Bio –
Tony Bassett, a former Fleet Street journalist, has written a gripping series of crime novels set in the Midlands.
The first book in the series is called Murder on Oxford Lane. Published by The Book Folks, it concerns the disappearance of a property tycoon from a sleepy Warwickshire village.
Middle-aged DCI Gavin Roscoe and his relatively inexperienced sergeant, DS Sunita Roy, are confronted by suspicious deaths as they struggle to uncover what has happened to the businessman.
The second book in this Midlands crime series, The Crossbow Stalker, will be released shortly.
Tony decided to set this string of novels in Warwickshire and Worcestershire after spending many happy years working as a newspaper reporter in Worcester.
He first developed a love of writing at the age of nine when he and a friend produced a magazine called the Globe at their junior school in Sevenoaks, Kent.
At Hull University, Tony was named student journalist of the year in 1971 in a competition run by Time-Life magazine and went onto become a national newspaper journalist, mainly working for the Sunday People in both its newsroom and investigations department.
His very first book to be published, the crime novel Smile Of The Stowaway, was released in December 2018. It concerns a Kent couple who harbour a stowaway and then battle to clear his name when he is charged with murder.
Then, in March 2020, the spy novel The Lazarus Charter, was released. It involves foreign agents operating in the UK. The book has kindly been endorsed by Marina Litvinenko, widow of the murdered Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, and by Stan and Caroline Sturgess, parents of the innocent mother-of-three poisoned with novichok in Salisbury in 2018.
Tony, who has written at least four other novels which are as yet unpublished, has five grown-up children. He is a Life Member of the National Union of Journalists. He lives in South-East London with his partner Lin.
Social Media Links –
www.facebook.com/tony.bassett.92505
Thank you to Tony Bassett for his guest post!
readingtonic 