Please Welcome Crime Novelist John Worsley Simpson

with John Worsley Simpson

We are delighted to welcome crime novelist John Worsley Simpson to Omnimystery News today, courtesy of Partners in Crime Tours. We encourage you to visit all the sites on the tour through September and October; you can find his complete schedule here.

John's fifth novel is Missing Rebecca (CreateSpace, May 2012 trade paperback and ebook formats), a mystery of high crimes and dark shadows.

We recently had the opportunity to chat with the author on a number of topics.

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Omnimystery News: Your previous novels are all part of a series, but this new book is different. Tell us a bit about it.

Photo provided courtesy of
John Worsley Simpson

John Worsley Simpson: I do have four previous books in a series, which I plan to reissue through Kindle, that feature a curmudgeonly Toronto police detective, Harry Stark. My latest book, Missing Rebecca, may be a standalone, or it may end up being the first of a series. It depends on a number of factors, which I won't go into here. That a book is going to be another "Harry Stark" is driven by the character demanding to have another go at it. The latest book being a departure was prompted by plot. I came up with the nub of a plot and the setting and the protagonists/antagonists arose from that germ of an idea.

OMN: Do you consider Missing Rebecca do be similar in style to, or of the same genre as, the "Harry Stark" mysteries?

JWS: My books have all been police procedurals, although Stark has many of the characteristics of the typical hard-boiled detective. He likes to drink too much, he likes women, he doesn't suffer fools gladly. Missing Rebecca's "policeman" is a U.S. deputy marshal, who gets some help from someone in the Homeland Security agency. But, while it lacks policemen as such as protagonists, it would still be classified as a police procedural.

OMN: We're always told, write what you know … and sometimes write about who you know. How much of "you" is in your books?

JWS: Every aspect of my personality is in the characters in my novels. I might not be encapsulated in one character, but various parts of my persona are seeded throughout most of the personalities in my books. The glib, smart, controlled and vicious characters have nothing of mine in them. Perhaps that's why they invariably get harshly dealt with.

OMN: You mentioned earlier that Missing Rebecca was prompted by a plot idea. Is that where you typically start when writing a book?

JWS: I can't see how a crime-fiction author can write without a plot. The heart of crime fiction is a "plot" not just in the literary sense, but in the broader sense of someone planning to do some bad thing to someone else and trying to get away with it, while the solver of the crime is challenged with doing just that: solving the crime. Of course, you can cheat by having a deus ex machina approach with the protagonist tripping over the solution on his way to the drugstore. Having said all that, the plots that I compose before I start to write have NEVER ended up being the plots that I finish with. They take you along the first road, but as the wag said, "When you come to fork in the road, take it." I never know where the road is going to take me. In most of my books, some character that I introduce for one minor purpose ends up taking on an important role later on in the book. And I say to myself, "how would I have resolved this, if I hadn't introduced X in chapter three?!!"

OMN: How do you go about checking on the accuracy of the details you include in your books?

JWS: I fact check my books by myriad methods, largely now through the Internet. It takes a degree of practice and intelligence to use the Web skillfully to find answers to questions. When the Internet doesn't offer an answer I'm looking for, or doesn't satisfy me as to its reliability, I find experts, including forensic scientists, jewellers, cops, firearms experts and so on. My rule is that I don't have to be "right," but I should never be "wrong." There is some latitude for artistic license, of course, but not so much that a person in a field about which I write would say, "That's nonsense. We'd never do it that way. What an idiot!" If I were writing a courtroom drama, for instance, I would never have the lawyers asking leading questions or presenting evidence from the well of the court as if they were witnesses.

OMN: We regularly report on film or television adaptations of crime novels. Who do you see playing the principal characters in Missing Rebecca?

JWS: I would see Ryan Gosling as Liam Peters, the former SEAL whose wife goes missing, and Ben Stiller as Tony Reynolds, the deputy marshal.

OMN: What kinds of books do you enjoy reading?

JWS: I mostly read adventure stories: James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Louis Stevenson and so on. I always loved detective movies and as I got older, I read all the classics, Mickey Spillane, Mike Hammer, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Nero Wolfe. I read so many English mystery novelists, I couldn't begin to list them, except to say my favourite was/is Dorothy Sayers. I loved Eric Ambler and John le Carré and I've read every word that Horace Rumpole ever uttered.

OMN: What are your hobbies or outside interests? Have any of these made an appearance in your books?

JWS: I love jazz and I play the piano badly, and both of those things have figured in my books, although not in Missing Rebecca.

OMN: If we could have only asked one question, what would you have wanted to hear?

JWS: "Where do you get your ideas from?" I enjoy fielding that question.

OMN: You walk into a bookstore and see a new book that you have to buy right then and there. Who is it written by?

JWS: Elmore Leonard. I read everything by him. But my interests aren't limited to crime fiction, and I spend time browsing other sections of the store. I read classic literature, history, and economics/policy.

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John Worsley Simpson was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, England, emigrated to Canada at the age of four and grew up in Toronto. He has been a reporter and editor in major newspapers and news services in North America, England and Ireland. He is married and lives in Newmarket, Ontario. For more information about the author, visit his website at JohnWorsleySimpson.ca, or find him on Facebook and Twitter.

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Missing Rebecca
John Worsley Simpson

A Mystery of High Crimes and Dark Shadows

Death and deception. After a whirlwind romance, Liam and Rebecca marry, knowing almost nothing of each other's backgrounds. Only months later, on an afternoon shopping trip to a mall in the Buffalo, New York, suburb of Cheektowaga, Rebecca vanishes, seemingly abducted. Or did she make herself disappear? Was the marriage a sham? Was Liam a dupe?

This is a novel of high crimes and dark shadows, involving the immensely profitable drug industry in which exclusive access to the market for a medication can mean billions of dollars, and holding on to that exclusivity might lead to lies, deceit, corruption, payoffs, and even murder.