Meet Geraldine Evans and Learn About Her and Deadly Reunion

 

Overview of my Rafferty & Llewellyn crime series.

Detective Inspector Joseph Aloysius Rafferty is an ordinary ‘Joe’ – a working-class, lapsed Catholic Londoner who moved to Essex (England) as a child. He is cursed by coming from a family with a love for dubious ‘bargains’ and other pursuits on the fringe of illegality. Some of his family are of the opinion that – if they must have a copper in the family – he might at least have the decency to be a bent one. He is partnered by Detective Sergeant Dafyd Llewellyn, a university-educated Welshman who is Rafferty’s moral, intellectual and social superior. Although they no longer have the clashes their new partnership evoked in the first book in the series, they still have their moments.

What inspired your latest book, Deadly Reunion

I suppose it was the proliferation of social networking sites nowadays.I’ve succumbed and joined several as well as Friends  Reunited.  Although we’ve all read in the press about the young love that has been rekindled  through such sites, being a crime writer, my mind immediately turned to thoughts of murder. So I came up with a school reunion where murder, rather than love, is evoked.

My Background

My background is Irish-Catholic working-class. I was born and brought up on s London Council estates, like Joe Rafferty. I went to a basic secondary school and left at sixteen. A series of dead-end jobs followed.

When I knew I wanted to be a writer

My ambition to write came about, I suppose, because after all the boring dead-end jobs, I yearned for something else. I had always been a reader, so I was naturally inclined to the written word. It was a comment by Morse author Colin Dexter that pushed me in a writerly direction. He said that he became a writer after he read a particularly poor crime novel during a wet weekend in Wales and thought that he could do better. Thus began a whole career. My path has been the same, only, so far, without his great success, alas!

Path to Publication

When I started writing I aimed for the romantic Mills & Boon market. Failure followed failure. After six books and six years of rejection, with only one romance published (and not by Mills & Boon), I turned to crime and was almost immediately sprung from Macmillan’s slush pile and published both in the UK and the States. But when they were taken over by a firm of German publishers, I and about a third of the list were dropped and it was to be another six years before I had any novels published again. In the interim, as well as several novels, I wrote and had published articles on a variety of subjects.

What advice would you give an upcoming writer?

This is advice I have given before, but it is very pertinent to new writers. And the advice is to never be easily satisfied with your work. Do not make the common mistake of thinking a first draft means the book’s finished. That’s only the first stage. To write the best book you can several more drafts should follow where you round out the plot, the characters, the backstory, etc. You need also to weed out repetitions, awkward phrasings and poorly-chosen, strained metaphors. Writers, myself Included, seem to go for similar names; my weakness is having surnames ending in the letter ‘s’, which, in the possessive form, can make for more awkwardness. It goes without saying that you should present a ms that has correct spelling and grammar.

What do you do to promote your books?

I give talks and interviews. I do signings if asked. I have a website, of course and a blog. I have a monthly newsletter. I hand out flyers and bookmarks to the audience at talks. I send out postcards to libraries and booksellers. I send out news releases. I make video book trailers. I’ve just finished a 17-date Blog Tour where I have visited the blog sites of other authors and posted about a variety of things to do with a writer’s life, such as how I created my first crime series and how I set about publishing my out of print novels as ebooks and how I created my own video book trailers, as well as tips for writers and other things. I hold contests with books as prizes. One I had that ended at the end of January was to write the first 250 words of a crime novel. The winner won three signed copies of my books as well as a critique of her entry and the promise of a free critique of the whole novel if she finishes it. I keep so busy with all of this that I scarcely have the time to write the novels!

What do you do for fun?

I paint portraits. I garden, growing vegetables and flowers from seeds or cuttings. I like photography and have even sold a few pictures. I like to dance, if I get the opportunity. I taught myself to play the keyboards though I’m afraid I’ve forgotten how as I haven’t touched them for ten years.

LINK TO MY PAGE WITH THE BLOG TOUR DATES:

http://www.geraldineevans.com/wednesday_14_december_2010_035.htm

Deadly Reunion

A Rafferty & Llewellyn crime novel by Geraldine Evans

Publication: 24 February 2011 (UK) 1 June 2011 (US)

Blurb

Detective Inspector Joe Rafferty is barely back from his honeymoon before he has two unpleasant surprises. Not only has he another murder investigation - a poisoning, courtesy of a school reunion, he also has four new lodgers, courtesy of his Ma, Kitty Rafferty. Ma is organising her own reunion and since getting on the internet, the number of Rafferty and Kelly family attendees has grown, like Topsy. In his murder investigation, Rafferty has to go back in time to learn of all the likely motives of the victim's fellow reunees. But it is only when he is reconciled to his unwanted lodgers, that Rafferty finds the answers to his most important questions.

Links:

amazon.com:  http://tinyurl.com/4qjgay4

amazon.co.uk:  http://tinyurl.com/4f56pxp

ebooks on amazon.com:  http://tinyurl.com/4re8apo

ebooks on amazon.co.uk: http://tinyurl.com/6du98kq

Geraldine Evans’s website:http://www.geraldineevans.om

Geraldine Evans’s blog:       http://www.geraldineevanscom.blogspot.com

PRIZES

The draw of all the comments throughout the Tour will take place at the end of the Tour (end-Feb). There will only be three winners, each of whom wins one signed copy of Deadly Reunion, my latest hardback (fourteenth in my Rafferty & Llewellyn crime series), one copy of each of two ebooks that are the first and second novels in my Rafferty & Llewellyn crime series, that is, one of Dead Before Morning and one of Down Among the Dead Men. They will also receive a subscription to my blog (which they can let lapse when it  runs out).

BIO

Crime Author, Geraldine Evans

Geraldine Evans has been writing since her twenties, though only began to get novels published halfway through her thirties. As well as her popular Rafferty & Llewellyn crime series, she has a second crime series, Casey & Catt and has also had published an historical, a romance and articles on a variety of subjects, including, Historical Biography, Writing, Astrology, Palmistry and other New Age subjects. She has also written a dramatization of Dead Before Morning, the first book in her Rafferty series.

She is a Londoner, but now lives in Norfolk England where she moved, with her husband George, in 2000.

Deadly Reunion is her eighteenth novel and fourteenth in the humorous Rafferty & Llewellyn crime series. She is currently working on the next in the series.