My career was in the law. I started writing fiction many years ago, as a relief from all the technical legal writing I was doing, but I only got really serious about it some ten years ago. Along the way, I had the usual number of rejection letters, before a publisher finally liked two novels I’d written: Removal, and the first in my Ben Schroeder series, A Higher Duty.
If you had to give an elevator pitch for Walden of Bermondsey, what would it be?
The book that answers the question: what would Horace Rumpole have been like as a judge?
I've read that you have previously been a judge amongst other positions, how much of yourself is in Charlie Walden?
Not too much, although I was a resident judge at the end of my career, and quite a lot of the book is based on personal experience. But Charlie is a composite of two or three people (as my characters always are: I don’t use a single person). But there is a serious aspect to Walden. Charlie shares my own frustrations. He knows how much irreversible damage is being done to the court system because of ideological cuts disguised as economic measures. People are at a greater risk of suffering injustice now than at any time since the nineteenth century, because of attacks on legal aid, cutting back of courts and staff, cutting corners, and disempowering the judiciary. I think he has something of my own sense of humour, too, and hopefully he shares my sense of why his job is important, and why it’s worth fighting to make sure justice is done in the court system.
