Raymond Flynn

Page Updated: 17/05/00

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Raymond Flynn - Page 1

Over My Dead Body

pbk 18 May 00

The Body Beautiful

Busy Body

A Fine Body Of Men

A Public Body

About the Author (Photo by Nottinghamshire Constabulay Scenes of Crime)

Bibliography

Paperback - NEL (2000)

First British Edition Hodder & Stoughton (2000)

Over My Dead Body
The sixth Eddathorpe mystery featuring Detective Chief Inspector Robert Graham takes him to Nottingham: a city well known to his creator, a police officer with the Nottinghamshire Constabulary for many years.
Someone is blackmailing a local supermarket chain. And getting away with it, thank to a very clever payoff method involving hole-in-the-wall bank machines and a bit of glaring police incompetence. When the blackmailers descend on Eddathorpe Robert Graham is called in. He thinks it is an inside job - and sets out to prove it.
He doesn't know the case is going to escalate from fraud to murder. And that its unravelling could change his life…
Once again, sleepy, seedy Eddathorpe hides its secrets well - and once again, East Anglia's magnet for murder, Robert Graham, teases them out with his own unique combination of solid policework and brilliant intuition. Raymond Flynn spent twenty-six years with the Nottinghamshire Constabulary. Starting as a uniformed constable, he later move to the CID and then served for twelve years as the detective inspector in charge of Fraud Squad in Nottingham, where he still lives. He turned to writing after taking medical retirement. He was a finalist in the 1992 Ian St James Short Story competition and won the Gooding Prize for short stories in 1994. The first five novels featuring Detective Chief Inspector Robert Graham are now NEL paperbacks. They are: Seascape with Body, A Public Body, A Fine Body of Men, Busy Body, and The Body Beautiful.
Praise for Raymond Flynn and the Eddathorpe Mysteries
'He gives the police procedure an insider's expertise, including in-jokes... Flynn is the former head on Notts Fraud Squad. But his first book proves he's no PC Plod in the art of writing.' Sunday Express
'A solution as clever as any I've read this year. DI Graham, with his homicidal Lakeland terrier, is an unconventional copper form the same breed as Frost and Morse. On this form, like them he should win fans and keep them.' Val McDermid, Manchester Evening News.
‘Flynn has created an excellent detective and memorable setting ... extremely talented.' Yorkshire Post
'A welcome addition to the fictional police ranks' Sunday Telegraph
'Expertly done... Some very satisfactory policing set against acridly detailed background of out-of-season holiday town' Literary Review

First British Edition Hodder & Stoughton (1998)

Paperback - NEL (1999)

The Body Beautiful
DCI Graham is back..…
The crime rate is up again in Eddathorpe: Detective Chief Inspector Robert Graham is mugged when he's mistaken for a stalker, a peeping tom outsmarts the police force and a fast-talking barmaid disappears just like her one-time husband, the convicted rapist.
But it's someone quite different who dies, Shirley (alias Davinia) West had hoped to make her fortune as the winner of Paulie Parkes' Parade, Eddathorpe's version of Miss World. Instead she makes the headlines when she's murdered brutally under the noses of the police who were supposedly trying to thwart the stalker, the peeping tom and the paroled rapist.
Graham's suspicions fasten on Paulie Parkes, an unsavoury one-time television star before scandal reduced him to running fixed beauty contests in the less-than-fashionable resort town. But he soon becomes embroiled in a more complicated and sinister story - as devious, as seedy and as engrossing as Eddathorpe itself.
Robert Graham and his deceptively dangerous town come once more to gloriously entertaining life in this unputdownable new episond in the Eddathorpe saga.
'Graham, with his homicidal Lakeland terrier, is an unconventional copper from the same breed as Frost and Morse. Val McDermid, Manchester Evening News
'A welcome addition to the fictional police ranks. ' Sunday Telegraph

First British Edition Hodder & Stoughton (1998)

Busy Body
Raymond Flynn's Eddathorpe comes delightfully alive once more in a story of cold-blooded murder, warm-blooded love and hard-headed detection by Detective Chief Inspector Robert Graham.
No-one could possibly like Sir Jeremy Blatt, a chicken-and-frozen-vegetable baron and serial adulterer who was notable even in Eddathorpe society for his tight-fisted attitude to his money.
Indeed, someone disliked him enough to bash him on the head, pack him into a refrigerated lorry and despatch him on a North Sea ferry.
Robert Graham has too many suspects: several wives, one of them Sir Jeremy's own; nearly all the exploited employees of the Daisy Dew empire; a son who disliked Sir Jerry enough to change his name; even a policeman ... And that is without taking into account the animal rights protestors, the tenants in the Blatt-owned slums and the thefts that Sir Jeremy thought he had uncovered. The same thefts that had led him to hire Ron Hacker, Graham's favourite ex-detective superintendent, as his new security chief.
Graham picks his way through a sorry story of unhappy families, unchecked greed and illicit love and uncovers a situation that surprises even him.

First British Edition Hodder & Stoughton (1997)

Paperback - NEL (1998)

A Fine Body Of Men
See Review by John Boyles
In Raymond Flynn's third novel, Detective Inspector Robert Graham again investigates a murder in shamelessly seedy Eddathorpe. And once again, his unique mixture of tragedy and laughter is compelling from beginning to end.
The corpse in the plastic sack is the perfect climax to Graham's bank holiday weekend: the east coast is sweltering under the August sun, the town is full of trippers and the deceased has been dumped on the busiest part of the beach.
Vincent Stanley Lowther was the kind of promising young low-life that no-one at Eddathorpe nick will miss. When Lowther's prostitute girlfriend reveals his double life as a welfare scrounger and his day job as a pimp, this is only the beginning of the revelations surrounding the life of a busy nineties entrepreneur.
As the enquiry develops, a discredited psychological profiler from the Midlands sniffs a connection with a series of undetected sex crimes committed elsewhere. The problem, as Graham's sceptical colleagues see it, centres round one inescapable fact: Lowther was undoubtedly a boy, the other citizens were girls . . .
Loyalties become increasingly confused as Graham has to contend with a sniping campaign by a smooth-as-silk rival for promotion, a hostile press, an apparently unsympathetic CID chief and an investigation that refuses to throw up a convincing case against a killer.
And to make his life complete, Graham now has a reputation as a Jonah. Sleepy, sneaky Eddathorpe used to be peaceful until he arrived - now, according to some, it's becoming the murder capital of Europe. The town's tourist and information officer, not to mention the local business community, is far from pleased.
Once again, Flynn has confected a perfect story of crime and punishment, as gleefully, if more darkly accomplished as the first two Eddathorpe mysteries.

Paperback - NEL (1997)

First British Edition Hodder & Stoughton (1996)

A Public Body
See Review by John Boyles
In his second novel featuring the surprisingly criminal world of seaside Eddathorpe, Raymond Flynn's detective inspector hero Robert Graham is appalled when one of Eddathorpe's funnier scandals becomes a murder case.
Klondike Bill - more formally known as Councillor William Lynch - has been passed over for the office of Mayor of Eddathorpe in favour of his much-detested second wife Muriel. And has responded by going off on a binge with the Eddathorpe mayoral regalia: one cocked hat, one red robe trimmed with black rabbit and one silver-gilt chain with a gold and enamel knobbly bit at the end.
But the joke is a lot less funny when Muriel Lynch turns up dead - with Klondike Bill (and the regalia) carefully arranged in the next room. And less funny still when Graham's least-loved superior officer, Detective Superintendent Hacker, arrests Bill for murder despite a suspicious lack of blood in any of the right places.
Soon Graham - who longs only for a bit of time to mend his newly-restored marriage - finds himself delving into the more unsavoury aspects of life at the seaside. And coming up with more questions than answers.
Once again, former policeman Raymond Flynn has brought delightfully seedy Eddathorpe and its often-eccentric police force to enthralling, memorable life.

About The Author
(in his own words...)
I am 56 years old, and I was born in Derby in June, 1940, and I'm married with two grown-up sons. After trying my hand at writing as a child, as a teenager, and as an unqualified teacher in a secondary school, and following a short stint on a degree course in Birmingham, and an even shorter one as a labourer in a tobacco factory, I joined the police. The demands of policework and bringing up a family in the real world meant that I had to put my writing ambitions aside, apart from one or two articles on professional subjects from time to time, and a few pieces of unfinished, unpublished
I worked as a uniformed constable in a small town North of Nottingham, as a detective constable in the CID, and later on the Fraud Squad. I was promoted Sergeant, returned to uniform duties, served on the Nottingham Central Division, and within two years I was back as the Detective Inspector in charge of the Fraud Office where I remained for the rest of my twenty-six years police service. I liked working in fraud; one meets such a well bred class of criminal, you know...
During my time with the force I completed a Diploma in Politics, Economics and Social Science at Nottingham University, as well as attending many courses of professional training, including the first Staff College course in computer crime, and a course in running the HOLMES (Home Office Large & Major Enquiry System) in murder investigation. I lectured fairly widely an commercial fraud. I retired from the police an medical grounds in April, 1989.
After a year as an insolvency administrator (ugh!) I decided to 'retire' again and write. The result of my labours, magnificent as a police enquiry, was abysmal as fiction, and still remains in a drawer at home, carefully concealed under a pile of socks. I then joined a creative writing course at the local university, and I eventually had one or two poems and short stories published in ' little' magazines. In 1992 I was a finalist in the Ian St. James Short Story Competition, and in 1994 I won the SAMWAW Gooding Short Story Prize. Fame - well, a two book contract, eventually beckoned via a far-sighted (or crazily optimistic) Agent, depending on your point of view, and Hodder and Stoughton published my first full length novel, Seascape With Body, in November, 1995.
The rest, as they say, is publishing history... sadly, however, neither Ruth Rendell, Reginald Hill, or even Jeffery Archer have yet been reduced to begging me for tips. I am currently saving up for a Rolls Royce and (possibly) a yacht. And yes, you're right: a couple of very small-scale models will probably have to do!

Bibliography
N.B. dates and publishers in dark red indicate British First Editions. Dates and publishers in black indicate recent reprints.

Over My Dead Body (Hodder & Stoughton, 2000) NEL Pbk May 00 (Robert Graham)

The Body Beautiful (Hodder & Stoughton, 1998) NEL Pbk Jan 99 (Robert Graham)

Busy Body (Hodder & Stoughton, 1998) NEL Pbk May 98 (Robert Graham)

A Fine Body Of Men (Hodder & Stoughton, 1997) NEL Pbk Jan 98 (Robert Graham)

A Public Body (Hodder & Stoughton, 1996) NEL Pbk Apr 97 (Robert Graham)

Seascape with Body (Hodder & Stoughton, 1995) NEL Pbk Apr 96 (Robert Graham)

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