A Fatal Crossing: A Guest Post from Tom Hindle

{{ product: 9798217185740 }}

A 1920s cruise liner, bound for New York. A dead passenger. A stolen painting. And two investigators who can’t stand the sight of each other.

These are the ingredients at the core of my debut novel, A Fatal Crossing. And as core ingredients go, it has to be said that they were a dream to work with.

As a reader of mysteries, I’ve always loved the sense of a game being played between the author and the reader. Can you catch the killer before the big reveal at the end? Can you spot the clues and see through the lies? It would be no exaggeration to say that this to-and-fro is the reason I read crime. But being on the other side of that process – being the one who sets the game – was an altogether different challenge; one that I found so satisfying I’ve since done it five more times. I’ve written whodunits set in country houses, European castles, rainforest lodges... But with that first novel, the set-up of a stolen painting aboard a 1920s liner was a particularly generous canvas on which to paint.

Where did A Fatal Crossing first come from, though? Well, for all of my pontificating about how tantalising a premise it provided for a novel, it might interest you to know that this story was initially conceived as something else entirely. Specifically, it actually started out as a play.

To take you back for a moment, I was sixteen years old and eager to write something that my friends and I could put on at school. I’d been watching Jeeves and Wooster, with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, and rather enjoyed the idea of a stolen artwork aboard a Jazz-Age liner, with a hapless aristocrat trying desperately to get the painting back before the ship docked in New York. I thought that with some sound effects – seagulls cawing, foghorns blaring, waves churning – we could quite easily stage it and then put on a performance that would sell out for three nights in a row. Was I wrong about that? I suppose we’ll never know. In the end I managed only the first half of a script before my friends and I finished our exams and went off to university. The story stayed with me, though. And a few years later – one Christmas, as I recall – I set myself the challenge of writing it as a novel instead.

Even now, I can remember the January morning when I nervously typed the first few words, a stack of Agatha Christie books beside my laptop for moral support. It was a long process, working, as I was, around a busy office job. I couldn’t tell you how many evenings and weekends were spent writing suspect interviews at my kitchen table. Lunch hours devoted to planting clues and red herrings. Commutes spent speaking dialogue aloud to myself in the car, just to get the rhythm right. But it paid off. Two years later, I had the first draft of A Fatal Crossing. And now, in what feels like a true full-circle moment, this story is yours. The story that made me a writer. The story that holds such a special place in my heart. Seventeen years ago, as a high-schooler in Yorkshire, I first imagined a liner setting out for America. And now, at long last, it’s finally arrived.