In the window was this book. The face on the cover caught my eye. I recognised the face.

I often wonder why I’m so drawn to true stories and I think I can trace it back to this single moment, more than 50 years ago.

The year was 1975. I absolutely loved Laurel and Hardy. Their films were on British television all the time. Everybody at school loved them, too.

I lived in Kendal in the Lake District in the north of England, 25 miles from Ulverston, where Stan Laurel was born. As a young child, it seemed magical to me that this famous funny man should have come from where I came from.

On Christmas Day 1975, I unwrapped a present from my grandfather. It was the book I’d seen in the shop window: The Comedy World of Stan Laurel by John McCabe.

You may wonder why the dedication from my grandfather is by ‘Morning’. That was what I always called him. He lived with us and when I was very young, he would come down for breakfast and say, ‘Morning’. I took his greeting to be his name, and it stuck.

This book was the first biography I ever read.

Seven years later, in 1982, I visited the Laurel and Hardy Museum in Ulverston. I’d been visiting for years and knew the curator, Bill Cubin, who was very well known in Laurel and Hardy circles.

Bill gave me this book, at the time, a new biography of Stan Laurel. It was by American author Fred Lawrence Guiles, who had also famously written about Marilyn Monroe.

Bill signed the book and, as he handed it over to me, warned that it wasn’t a flattering picture of Laurel. I discovered when I read it that the comedian had endured a turbulent private life, littered with a string of failed marriages.

I was 13 and Bill was probably worried it might spoil my innocent enthusiasm for Laurel and Hardy.

**

Our next door neighbour in Kendal was a printer at the local weekly newspaper, the Westmorland Gazette. Late every Thursday night, he would push a fresh-off-the-press copy through our letterbox.

I was always first up on Fridays to read it.

In 1984, the Gazette published Laurel Before Hardy, researched and written by two of its reporters, Jenny Owen-Pawson and Bill Mouland. It told the story of Laurel’s childhood growing up in Ulverston.

Our neighbour, realising I was a huge L&H fan, popped a copy through the letterbox when it was fresh off the press.

The week after the book was published, the Gazette asked comedian Ernie Wise to write a review. (I was a big fan of Morecambe and Wise, too. Two months earlier, sadly Ernie’s partner Eric Morecambe had died.)

I think this book and the detailed reporting of Owen-Pawson and Mouland were a seminal influence and I eventually followed in their footsteps as a trainee reporter at the Westmorland Gazette.

**

Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I read an inordinate number of biographies. They were usually of Hollywood movie stars, comedians, singers and famous authors. I recall reading a lot about Peter Sellers, Samuel Beckett and the Beatles.

Looking back, they were a gateway to the worlds of art, film, music and literature.

I became fascinated by the lives of historical figures. I learned that a life has a natural, in-built narrative. Short lives, long lives. The one constant in all of our lives is change.

In essence, isn’t that what stories are?

This, I think, is why I am drawn to true stories. They have everything we need as a reader, and a writer. As much as I love fiction, often it is a pale substitute.

In future articles, I hope to talk more about the biographies — and biographers — I have enjoyed and admired over the years.

Five years ago I published my true crime book The Jigsaw Murders.

This is the thing about writing nonfiction compared to novels — the interest in your book’s subject matter never truly dies away, assuming you’ve chosen the right subject.

So it has proved for me with The Jigsaw Murders. The book’s subtitle is: The True Story of the Ruxton Killings and the Birth of Modern Forensics.

My original objective for the book was to go deeper and wider than anybody previously had done on this landmark murder case.

Sure, the Ruxton story had been written about and discussed many times before in true crime magazines and newspapers. It had been the subject of a couple of flimsy books and the source of much social media debate.

But I felt there wasn’t a single, definitive (as far as that was possible) account. That became my goal. I was convinced that we’d only seen the tip of the iceberg and that there was a mass of unseen documents and archives out there waiting to be tapped into.

American biographer Ron Chernow — famous for his doorstopper biography of Alexander Hamilton, which inspired the hip-hop musical Hamilton — often takes on subjects who have been widely written about previously. According to Chernow’s friend Roger Lowenstein: “Ron often uses the phrase ‘Never underestimate the laziness of your predecessors’.”1

The more I dug into the story the more I realised Chernow’s observation was true. Often biographers rehash the same old material without properly digging up new material.

One of the first places I looked was at Lancaster City Museum. They had a few artefacts relating to the Ruxton case. The one with the richest pay-off was Dr Buck Ruxton’s 1934 pocket diary, in which he claimed his wife Isabella was poisoning his coffee.

I dug into the archives of the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and pored over thousands of old newspaper pages in search of the lost story of the Ruxton murders. I was amazed at how much material was out there.

I spent four years researching and writing the book. It was published in 2021. It garnered a fair bit of attention, was optioned for television and was nominated for the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction.

I was thrilled by its relative success, especially as it was my first book.

The case at the heart of the book was that of Dr Buck Ruxton, who murdered his wife Isabella and their children’s nanny Mary Rogerson in Lancaster in 1935. The subsequent police and forensic science investigation proved revolutionary in terms of police and forensic science techniques.

And then readers from all over the world started contacting me with additional information. I was sent copies of letters Dr Ruxton had written. I received family anecdotes. I ended up interviewing a 93-year-old cousin of Mary Rogerson, who remembered the teenage nanny and the devastating impact her death had on her family.

I was able to work this new material into the paperback edition of the book, which was published in 2022.

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of returning to Lancaster City Museum to give two talks about The Jigsaw Murders to sell-out audiences. This is a case that happened 90 years ago and yet the level of fascination it inspires still staggers me.

The interest is especially intense in Lancaster, naturally, because that is where the crimes were committed. I was thrilled to be able to share elements of my research and answer the audiences’ questions.

Although I’ve now moved on from The Jigsaw Murders and am writing a new book, I suspect I will continue to be invited to speak about this case for some time to come. Indeed, the archives on the case are due to be made public in nine years’ time, in September 2035. Cue more interest.

In my next article, I will tell you some more about the evidence I showed the audiences at my recent talks.

How Tarantino shapes powerful stories

I’m working on a new book at the moment. My previous books have been narrative nonfiction, specifically true crime. But this one is different.

It’s fiction.

Yes, it’s a novel but the central story is based on real historical events and the book is thoroughly researched.

I’m fascinated by the craft and process of writing. I’m always looking to improve and to learn from other writers and artists.

So, when I came across this clip of Quentin Tarantino talking about the importance of allowing a story to unfold, I was hooked.

He articulates exactly my own feeling about writing. The writers and filmmakers I hold dear are those who pull you into their stories and make you care what happens.

Tarantino does it every time I watch one of his films. The opening scene of Inglourious Basterds is a classic example.

This Tarantino clip is 30 years old. Was he right then? Is he right now? What are your thoughts?

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“Messy humans in the mix”

In my last post I made the point that I think the human race will always value art that has been created essentially by a human mind rather than something generated by a machine.

Charlie Brooker made pretty much the same point this week, too. He says: “I have to believe that people want audiences, want humans communicating with them, not just the machine. So I kind of have to believe that you're always going to want the messy human in the mix. I can see sort of the value as maybe as an analytical tool.”

I agree with him.

But I do think — and my heart slightly sinks at the thought of this — that the role of the artist, the writer and the musician will inevitably be redefined in the coming decades.

I think AI machines will become collaborative aids and future generations will accept that the artist is the person who inputs the intellectual prompts, questions and moral concepts and allows the machine to join the dots and deliver something interesting.

In essence, future generations may well lower the bar of expectation of what they consider to be original art.

When Andy Warhol made Campbell’s soup tins into screen prints it shocked the purists by challenging exactly what art is.

Each generation must redraw its own boundaries, set its own values and judge its own standards.

It might go against my purist sensibilities but I am of my time and what I think will be irrelevant 100 years from now.

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Why Michelangelo Still Matters in the Age of AI Art

On holiday last week in Rome we queued for hours to see the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel painted by Michelangelo.

There were hundreds of people in line wanting to see the great Renaissance artist’s work, especially the most famous part: the Creation of Adam. As you’d imagine, it was stunning to see in real life.

And it made me think about the fears we might have about AI-generated art, writing or music.

We might have serious concerns that machines are about to replace human creators, yet those hundreds of humans waiting to see a piece of art created by a human artist 500 years ago are validation that we as a species will always seek out something that was created by a fellow human being.

Generally you don’t see crowds of people queueing up to stare at objects that were mass produced by machines, do you?

I believe now and in the future we will value most highly that which has come from the human imagination first, not a commodified unit that was spat out by a machine dependent upon being fed the entrails of something already in existence.

What do you think?

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What visiting the Sistine Chapel reveals about the timeless value of human creativity in a world of artificial intelligence

Inside Britain’s Most Forensically Significant Murder House

In the annals of British murder houses, 2 Dalton Square in Lancaster is up there with the most notorious.

Think of the blackest addresses in this country’s murder history and you think of John Reginald Christie’s 10 Rillington Place, Dennis Nilsen’s Muswell Hill flat and Fred West’s Gloucester house of horrors in Cromwell Street.

But Dr Buck Ruxton’s surgery and family home in Lancaster is arguably the most significant in forensic science terms.

The investigation into the double murders committed by Ruxton in 1935 led to landmark breakthroughs in crime-solving techniques relating to fingerprinting, reassembly of dismembered bodies, photographic superimposition, the use of maggots in determining a murder’s timeline and a ‘Cinderella’-technique matching victims’ feet to shoes they wore in life.

The work of the police fingerprint expert was praised by J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI. The teamwork of the pathologists and scientists ushered in a new, modern era of forensic crime-solving.

It shifted the focus away from the hitherto ‘lone-wolf’ approach used by Professor Bernard Spilsbury wherein the expert view — often flawed as it turned out — was beyond question and reproach. Now, team-work was all-important because of its in-built checks and balances.

In 2020, when I was researching my book about the case, The Jigsaw Murders: The True Story of the Ruxton Killings and the Birth of Modern Forensics, I was given a tour of 2 Dalton Square by Lancaster City Council, the local authority which kept Ruxton’s former house as offices.

Haunted house reputation

After the murders, the building had lain empty for 40-odd years. The property attracted something of a ‘haunted house’ reputation in Lancaster, especially among children and teenagers.

Stories abound of young people, as a dare, entering the house through a broken rear window. These stories usually end with the illicit visitor making a sharp exit once the creepiness of the darkened building overcomes them.

Growing up locally in the 1970s and 80s, I was well aware of the story of Dr Ruxton and the murders in Dalton Square. It was one of the reasons I wrote the book.

The house is a handsome Georgian building and in the 1980s Lancaster City Council felt it should rescue it from its dark reputation, even if residential use was out of the question.

Clues remain of house’s murderous past

On my tour in 2020 I had naively believed the house would look as it did in Ruxton’s day. This was in part due to the fact the building’s exterior has not altered at all. You can still to this day see the screw-holes that held Dr Ruxton’s name plate and hours of practice to the wall next to the front door.

But inside, the house had a rather neutral office feel. There certainly wasn’t a dark atmosphere, which surprised me.

In 2023 I was promoting The Jigsaw Murders and gave a talk and book signing which was attended by David Hammond, CEO of Chiptech Ltd. He introduced himself and said his company was shortly moving into 2 Dalton Square. He asked if I’d come and give a talk about the building’s history to his staff.

I was initially cautious. I didn’t want to unsettle David’s colleagues. But he explained that plenty of buildings have dark histories. When we visit a castle, for example, we are aware of the bloody deeds that were enacted within its walls. Admittedly, those events are usually long in the past.

David’s wish was to rehabilitate 2 Dalton Square, to release it from its morbid past and generate some new, modern and happier associations. When he explained that, I understood.

And so I agreed to revisit the house and give my talk.

When I arrived, David and the Chiptech team were enjoying a staff summer barbecue in what was once Dr Ruxton’s back yard. This is where Ruxton had burned incriminating evidence, such as stair carpets soaked in the blood of his victims, wife Isabella and children’s nanny Mary Rogerson.

Today, this yard is a lovely, peaceful landscaped area for the office workers. It was here I gave my talk, the July sunshine lifting everyone’s mood.

Afterwards, David gave me another tour of the house.

Taking a tour of the house

The offices are today called Palatine Hall and incorporate not only Ruxton’s house but also what was formerly the County Cinema next door.

On the ground floor were Ruxton’s surgery, where he treated his thousands of patients — often forgoing his fee for impoverished patients (these were pre-NHS days) — his waiting room and also a dispensary which he communicated with via a speaking-tube linking the rooms.

We climbed the stairs — the original blood-spattered wooden set was removed to Edinburgh University by investigating pathologist Professor John Glaister in 1935.

On the middle floor of the house were Ruxton’s dining room and grand library. The doctor was giving an interview with a News of the World reporter in the library on the night he was arrested.

Also on this floor was the Ruxton family’s bathroom. It was in this tub that Ruxton dismembered Isabella’s and Mary’s bodies. This space is now a small meeting room for the Chiptech team. The original bath tub is in the Lancaster Police Museum at Lancaster Castle (well worth a visit; I gave a talk about the murders here a couple of years ago).

We continued up the stairs — the area just before you reach the top floor is where Ruxton murdered Isabella first and then Mary, whom it is believed was killed as she had witnessed Isabella’s death.

The top floor is now offices but were once the bedrooms. Indeed, David’s office was once Dr Ruxton’s bedroom.

David and Chiptech have grand plans for renovating 2 Dalton Square, hopefully releasing it once and for all from its chilling past.

Before I close, one last point, which I’m sure has crossed your mind as it had mine.

Is 2 Dalton Square haunted?

As well as speaking to David, I asked a number of the Chiptech team whether they had seen or heard anything strange.

And apparently one member of staff was working late on the top floor and heard footsteps on the stairs. There was nobody else in the building.

Security cameras have also recorded doors that were wedged open suddenly and without reason slamming shut.

It was a fascinating day at Dalton Square. David and Chiptech made me very welcome and I was impressed by the company’s determination to put the past behind them, to effect a form of healing.

I think this is a brave but noble aim. Lancaster is doing much to prevent these murders overshadowing what is a pretty part of the city. Each Christmas, a lovely, festive market, ice rink and ferris wheel are organised in Dalton Square. I wish Chiptech well.

I hope you found this insight into the story behind my book The Jigsaw Murders interesting. In a future post I will tell you about the drama that unfolded across Dalton Square, in the city’s original police station on the night Dr Ruxton was arrested.

Please leave a comment or a question about Dr Ruxton and 2 Dalton Square.

• The Jigsaw Murders: The True Story of the Ruxton Killings and the Birth of Modern Forensics, by Jeremy Craddock, is published in hardback, paperback and e-book by The History Press, and as an audiobook by W F Howes.

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It’s been quite a few months.

My new true crime book was shortlisted for a number of major awards and I also gave a talk about my first book in the house where the murders took place.

Read on to find out more…

I’ve not posted for a little while. I’ve been busy promoting my second true crime book, The Lady in the Lake: A Reporter’s Memoir of a Murder.

And I’m now at work on my third book, which is something of a departure (in due course I will reveal more but it’s early days at the moment).

Heady few months

So, let’s rewind.

The Lady in the Lake was published by Mirror Books last October and recounts the story of a murder case I covered as a young newspaper reporter in the Lake District in the 1990s and one that has haunted me ever since.

It’s the story of a woman’s body found in Coniston Water in 1997, which turned out to be that of Carol Park, a young schoolteacher and mother of three who disappeared in the summer of 1976.

From the moment of that grim discovery by amateur divers, Cumbria Police suspected Carol’s husband Gordon of murdering her. Her body had lain in the lake for 21 years and it would be another quarter of a century before the case was finally closed.

I was thrilled when The Lady in the Lake was shortlisted in two categories at the 2025 True Crime Awards: Book of the Year and Audiobook of the Year.

I had a great night at the awards ceremony in June at the Hilton Bankside in London with the team from my audiobook publisher W F Howes.

I didn’t win, but I was Highly Commended in the Audiobook of the Year category, runner-up to BBC journalist John Sweeney’s Murder in the Gulag: The Life and Death of Alexei Navalny

The following month I was back in London at the Connaught Rooms for the 2025 Crime Writers’ Association Daggers Awards.

The Lady in the Lake was shortlisted for the Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction and I was up against such luminaries as John Grisham and Kate Summerscale.

Again, I didn’t win (Kate Summerscale’s The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place was a very worthy winner — a great read if you’ve not already had a look).

This was an exciting event and I got to rub shoulders with such brilliant crime writers as Mick Herron (Slow Horses), M W Craven (Washington Poe series) and Kate Atkinson (Jackson Brodie series).

Dr Ruxton and 2 Dalton Square

The week after the Daggers, I found myself giving a talk about my first true crime book, The Jigsaw Murders: The True Story of the Ruxton Killings and the Birth of Modern Forensics in a most unusual place.

As you can see from the above photo, I spoke at an outdoor summer barbecue at the business premises of Chiptech Ltd, who are based at Palatine Hall in Dalton Square in Lancaster.

Those who have read The Jigsaw Murders will know that Palatine Hall incorporates number 2 Dalton Square, formerly the doctor’s surgery and home of Dr Buck Ruxton, the murderer at the centre of the book.

It was in this house that Ruxton murdered and dismembered the bodies of his common-law wife Isabella and their children’s nanny, Mary Rogerson.

When I was researching the book in 2020, I was given a tour of the house by Lancaster City Council as the building was at that time used as council offices. Since then it has been acquired by Chiptech, whose CEO David Hammond attended one of my talks and book signings in 2023 and asked me whether I would be happy to talk to his staff about their new premises.

I was initially cautious — would it be appropriate? — but David convinced me when he talked about his desire to rehabilitate such a historic building and release it from its dark past.

In my next post I will describe the experience of speaking at Dr Ruxton’s house, the tour I was given by David and a little bit of the history of this fascinating, if notorious, address.

If you have any questions about either of my true crime books, or just want to make contact, please leave a message below.

Thanks for reading.

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A how-to… on writing gripping true stories

David Grann and Ben Macintyre are two of the best writers of narrative nonfiction out there.

Grann’s magazine stories for the New Yorker and his amazing books Killers of the Flower Moon and The Wager are wondrous page-turners and have made him the darling of Hollywood.

With books such as SAS Rogue Heroes, A Spy Among Friends and Operation Mincemeat, Ben Macintyre has done the same thing, but from a UK perspective.

If you’ve not read their work, I heartily recommend you rectify that.

So, today I offer you a real treat. Here’s Grann and Macintyre in conversation, talking about finding story ideas, reporting and research, and bringing history to life in thrilling nonfiction.

Enjoy!

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I’m currently preparing for the first few speaking events to promote my new book.

As I put together my presentation slides — selecting the right images, queueing them in the most compelling sequence — I find myself in a quandary.

Do I reveal plot spoilers or do I encourage my readers to experience the story as if it’s for the first time.

I should explain.

Maybe the Titanic won’t sink this time

My new book, The Lady in the Lake: A Reporter’s Memoir of a Murder, is true crime, my account of the notorious Coniston Water murder from 1997. I was one of the first journalists to cover the case.

The details are in the public domain. But my book has been constructed for the reader so that he or she experiences the story as if it is unfolding before their eyes.

I want them to experience the sense of suspense, disbelief and horror of a crime story as you would when reading a fictional thriller.

You might think that’s an unrealistic goal for a non-fiction writer. But I would say, knowing that the ship sinks at the end doesn’t make James Cameron’s movie Titanic any less gripping. Perhaps it won’t sink this time, you think as you will on Leo and Kate to survive.

Even though the outcome of the Coniston case is well known, I think I will focus in my talk on how and why I came to write the book, rather than what actually happened. I don’t want to spoil the reader’s experience.

What do you think?

There is so much to consider. Care must be taken. It can be a delicate balancing act between telling a story that is compelling to keep readers turning the page and being respectful to surviving relatives.

In an interview I gave today with BBC Radio Cumbria, I touched upon these matters.

Take a listen.

The strangest English murder case of the late 20th century

My new true crime book is published today.

It’s called The Lady in the Lake: A Reporter’s Memoir of a Murder and it’s about a terrible case I reported on in 1997 when I was a journalist on the local newspaper in the Lake District.

The mystery was to become, in my view, the strangest English murder case of the late 20th century. In all, it would span five decades before it eventually reached its sad conclusion in 2020.

The book is published today (October 10) by Mirror Books as a paperback and Kindle e-book. It will follow as an audiobook, narrated by Mark Elstob, and published by W. F. Howes Ltd on November 7.

To mark the publication, I’m going to share with you one of the various newspaper features I’ve written to promote the book.

The woman who lay in a watery grave for 21 years

On a warm August day in 1997, three amateur divers broke the surface of Coniston Water, pulling behind them a canvas package trussed up with ropes.

The package was heavy but they managed to drag it on to the shore of the lake. With a knife, one of the divers cut through the outer canvas cover and an inner layer of bin liners. Pieces of lead fell out.

The men recoiled. Inside was a body. 

Later that evening, detectives were standing on the edge of the lake. The crime scene was illuminated by high-powered lamps. They peered down at the grim remains of a young woman. 

The body was that of Carol Park, a 30-year-old mother-of-three from Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria in the North of England. She had gone missing 21 years earlier in 1976. The case attracted media attention around the world.

I was a reporter for the local newspaper at the time. As part of the team that reported on the case, I was thrown into the biggest crime story of my career, trying to make sense of the unfolding events. 

The case was the strangest English murder mystery of the late 20th century, spanning five decades before justice was finally served. Headline writers, inevitably, labelled the case the Lady in the Lake, borrowing the epithet from Raymond Chandler’s famous crime novel.

Cumbria Police’s chief suspect was Carol Park’s husband Gordon, who was aged 53 in 1997, a retired teacher and married to his third wife. The only problem was, Park was on holiday in France.

Detectives wasted no time in securing a warrant to search Park’s home in Barrow, gaining entry through an upstairs window. Soon after, officers were seen removing computer equipment from the house and rope samples from the garage.

Meanwhile, Park’s children had been informed the body was their mother’s. Two decades of hoping she would return safely were cruelly dashed in an instant.

Carol’s son telephoned his father, Gordon, in France, to break the news. “Oh dear,” was Gordon Park’s reaction to news that his first wife’s body had been found at the bottom of a lake.

The police’s suspicion intensified after Park took four days to return to Barrow. Detectives made their arrest the following morning.

Park had been interviewed by police in 1976 when Carol first disappeared. She had frequently walked out of the marital home and at that time detectives could not be certain she was dead. Without a body, they were powerless. 

By the time officers sat down to interview Park in 1997, they had thoroughly done their homework.

Motive

They knew Park had a motive. Gordon and Carol had been unhappily married, both had been unfaithful but had stayed together only for the sake of the children. Park was known to be controlling and coercive.

He also had the wherewithal. He was a keen sailor with a boat on Coniston Water and was a mountaineer proficient in tying knots.

Detectives found Park cold and sarcastic under questioning. He did not present as someone innocent of killing his wife.

Within hours, Park was charged with murder. What might have seemed an open-and-shut case would prove to be one of the most complex and challenging in British legal history.

To the frustration of detectives, the Crown Prosecution Service felt the evidence was not sufficient to go to trial. 

In January 1998, the murder charge was dropped. Park wasted no time in trying to restore his reputation. The Mail on Sunday paid him £50,000 for an interview published 10 days later in which he taunted the police.

“I want her murderer caught. After all I’ve been through, the police owe it to me,” Park said. 

I saw first-hand Park’s cold demeanour when I reported on Carol’s inquest in 1998. I observed him when the coroner issued a warning to whoever was responsible for Carol’s death: “I hope that their conscience is troubling them.”

Gordon Park showed no emotion.

As the 1990s melted into the new millennium, Cumbria Police never gave up hope of securing a conviction. 

It would take another two decades to reach its conclusion, not least because of Gordon Park’s insistence of his innocence and the eroding effect of time on the evidence.

This is a case I could never forget.

Murder

My first true crime book, The Jigsaw Murders, detailed a landmark case from the 1930s. It was a case that saw new forensic and policing techniques developed, many of which are still in use today, 90 years on. That had been challenging as first-hand witnesses were all dead. Now, a book about a modern-day case, with ethical and sensitivity issues to consider, brought a new set of challenges

I researched the contemporary newspaper reports of the time and I conducted fresh interviews with witnesses and experts who had been there. I spoke to the Cumbrian detective who was first on the scene, to the coroner who conducted Carol Park’s inquest and to forensics experts. I also approached surviving members of Gordon and Carol Park’s families.

The Lady in the Lake is a book about a notorious murder case. But it is much more than that. It is a book about a now-bygone era of newspaper journalism and it is a book about the process of writing true crime and its attendant risks.

In writing this book, I also had to examine my own life and experiences. I was a child growing up in the Lake District when Carol Park disappeared in 1976. My parents were similar in age to Gordon and Carol Park. They were a family not so very different from my own.

Yes, this is a book about murder. But it is also a book about families, of mothers and fathers and the passage of time.

The outcome of the case and the fate of Gordon Park is well documented in the public record. But I hope readers will find the narrative style allows them to experience the story as if for the first time, with all the mystery and suspense of a good crime thriller.

The Lady in the Lake is almost here

My new book is out this week.

It’s exciting. I really don’t know what impact, if any, it’s going to make. Like my first book, it’s true crime, but unlike that earlier publication (about an Agatha Christie-era double murder), this one is about a murder case that I reported on as a reporter early in my career.

The book is called The Lady in the Lake: A Reporter’s Memoir of a Murder. The clue is in the word ‘memoir’. This is not just a straight recounting of a strange and notorious murder case. It is a story in which I play a (small) part.

Writing such a memoir brought a host of ethical considerations (which I will write about in a future post). It has also left me feeling somewhat exposed; I’ve never been comfortable writing about myself — I guess I’ve been a reporter for too long.

Nevertheless, the process of writing about my own experiences, my thoughts and feelings in the context of a book that is the first full account of the 1997 Coniston Water murder has been good for me as a writer. By stepping out of my comfort zone, I have pushed the limits — I believe — of what I can do.

Publicity

Much of my spare time in the past few weeks has been taken up with publicity for the book.

Working with the excellent publicity team at Mirror Books, I’ve sent out dozens of press releases (both generic and bespoke for specific local, regional and national media). I’ve pitched countless ideas for features to national and regional newspapers, and received commissions from several.

I’ve got dates to give interviews to BBC Radio and true crime podcasts.

It’s been exhilarating, but also exhausting (my day job is teaching university journalism students).

I can’t complain — this is what being an author looks like: publicising your work is a sizeable proportion of the job. Writing is only part of it.

So, my book is out on Thursday (10th October). I will post more details shortly.

Until then…

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To those of you who have been following this Substack for a while, I must apologise for the abrupt halt to proceedings back in the spring.

My daughter was very seriously ill and so I had to take time away from here to focus on my family. Thankfully, she is doing really well and I am now able to give some thought — and hopefully value — to my Substack readers.

And so with that in mind, I’d like to tell you about my new book!

Drum-roll

THE LADY IN THE LAKE: A Reporter's Memoir of a Murder will be published by Mirror Books on October 10.

It's another work of true crime (following my first book, THE JIGSAW MURDERS), and is about a real murder case from the 1990s that I reported on when I was at the Westmorland Gazette newspaper in the Lake District.

Here's a bit from the blurb:

A body in a lake. A wife missing for 21 years. A husband’s denial of murder. A crime reporter who was there revisits the shocking crime 25 years on.

The Lady in the Lake is a real-life murder mystery and true crime memoir that reads like a thriller. A dark secret resurfaces after 21 years in the English Lake District to devastate a family.

With powerful themes of murder and denial, the story spans five decades, from the 1970s to the present day.

In August 1997 Jeremy Craddock is a young newspaper reporter in the Lake District. When divers discover a suspicious package weighted down in Coniston Water he is thrust into the heart of the biggest story of his career, a haunting murder mystery that will stay with him for the next quarter of a century.

Watch this space

I’ll be talking more about the book and how I came to write it in coming newsletters, so for now I’ll love you and leave you.

Until next time…

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I’m not sure when I will resume the newsletter but hopefully it will return in the near future.

Thanks for all your support.

Jeremy

Paywall removed this week

As I’m into the final stages of writing my new book, this week I’m going to replay one of the paywalled newsletters from last year and give it to all subscribers as a thank you for all your support…

Bringing a true crime scene to life

I was deep into writing my true crime book The Jigsaw Murders. It was early 2020 and I had six or seven months until my deadline.

I’d reached the scene where Dr Buck Ruxton, the killer at the heart of the story, was arrested by detectives at Lancaster Police Station in the north of England in the late autumn of 1935. I had the transcript from Ruxton’s 1936 trial and some other old and dusty documents in which the Chief Constable of Lancaster related the events of that night.

But these were well used accounts, trampled over for decades by newspaper reporters and true crime magazine writers. They were essential foundations but I wanted more for my book. I needed a fresh perspective that had not been published before. Otherwise, why was I writing this book if I couldn’t offer something new?

That’s a tall order if the fresh eye-witness account doesn’t exist.

And then during my reporting a miracle occurred.

A woman responded to my inquiries. Her grandfather had been a doctor with his own practice in Lancaster in the 1930s. He and Dr Ruxton had been friendly colleagues; each would look after the other’s practice at those times, such as holidays, when they were absent. So, Dr Leonard Mather had often overseen Dr Ruxton’s practice in Dalton Square, which was the scene of Ruxton’s double murders.

Due to a convoluted sequence of events (you will have to read my book), Dr Mather was in the police station in Lancaster on the evening that Ruxton was arrested. Detectives had laid a trap to entice Ruxton to the police station, which stood on the opposite side of a cobbled square from Ruxton’s house. Not wishing to spook Ruxton and foil the arrest plan, a detective asked Dr Mather to stand in the shadows where he couldn’t be seen. And so Mather witnessed the dramatic moment Dr Ruxton realised he was suspected of murdering his wife and children’s nanny. It was a moment when the previously composed Ruxton crumbled.

Mather laid out his memories of that night in a letter to his granddaughter written almost 50 years later. Now, she was offering me the letters to use in my book. I read them, hardly believing my luck, the electricity of excitement pulsing through me.

Modern technology offers exciting new opportunities for writers

I was extremely lucky to have Dr Mather’s letters to work with. They enabled me to recreate one of the most dramatic and suspenseful scenes in the book.

Of course, when writing a true story from the 1930s, the best you can hope for is a letter or a diary entry. Photographs do exist, of course, and I was able to use press photos and personal snapshots to make my scenes vivid.

But imagine the verisimilitude that could be brought to the storytelling if a video or audio recording had existed.

New opportunities, new challenges

Journalist and author Mark Bowden — he most famously wrote Black Hawk Down — says that technology has shaped the way he reports a story.

“When I started as a newspaper reporter in the 1970s,” he says in his piece A Brave New World For Nonfiction Writers, “it was rare to have photo, video, or audio of anything I wrote about. Today, it is not rare. And while such material is a great boon to anyone crafting a dramatic story about a real event, it also poses challenges.”

He says that the problem with written documents is that they are often written after the event and rely on the memory of the author. He says: “Memory is always iffy. Records are sometimes wrong. I learned long ago to seek as many different accounts of a scene as I could before arriving at a version I could trust.”

And so a video or audio recording of what happened is a whole different ball game. Bowden first used audio tapes in Black Hawk Down about the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu. If you read his book, you will be immersed completely in the story. You are side by side with the US soldiers, thanks to the authenticity those tapes bring to Bowden’s reporting.

One of his best piece of longform journalism is A Case So Cold It Was Blue for which Bowden used police video interview tapes to reconstruct the incredible story of a respected Los Angeles homicide detective who was exposed as the killer of a young woman many years earlier. Bowden watched the moment on camera when Stephanie Lazarus realised her lies had been exposed and the game was up: she was under arrest for murder. Bowden beautifully and chillingly recreates that scene and it is edge-of-your seat stuff.

Storytelling

But Bowden adds a note of warning. He believes the time is not too far away when we can ‘dial-up’ a video of any event from anywhere at any time. That doesn’t mean we will learn anything from it.

“This will never negate the importance of telling stories, for making sense out of the raw material of real life,” he says. “We’ll still need storytellers. Their work will be more accurate, but not necessarily easier.”

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Show up, no matter how you feel

Don’t come too close this week. I’m full of cold!

I might be coughing and sneezing and feeling rotten, but I’m here to bring you this A-B-C Midweek Bitesize edition.

It’s going to be brief, but I have learned over many years of writing that even if you’re not feeling great, you need to turn up.

Even if you write only a paragraph and then return to bed…

Keeping up the momentum is vital.

I’m into the final hurdle with my new book. It has to be finished and sent to the publisher by March 1, so I’m going to have to push through.

Until the next time…

Don’t be scared to reach out to the greats

I’ve known I wanted to be a writer since I was very little. And from an equally young age I’ve met famous authors, encounters that forged my desire to become an author myself.

At school we had regular visits by poets and children’s authors. Many were known only locally; some had higher profiles. I remember Leon Garfield, the renowned author of gripping Dickensian-style children’s books coming to our high school. He was an entertaining speaker and I remember thinking: this is what I want to do.

I also got into the habit of occasionally writing to writers who had had an impact on me. When I was in the sixth-form at school in the Lake District in the north of England I wrote to poet Norman Nicholson, a very well-known English poet who lived not far from me (I was in Kendal; he Millom). He had been part of the generation of poets who came after T. S. Eliot and included Dylan Thomas.

I remember a tatty recycled A4 envelope arriving through my letterbox. I knew it was from Nicholson because the envelope had his name and address etched out on one side and my own scrawled in spidery handwriting on the other. Inside was a really badly typed letter full of wonderful advice about becoming a poet and a handwritten manuscript of one of his most famous poems, Scafell Pike. I was walking on air for days after receiving that letter. Sadly, Nicholson died a few weeks after he wrote to me.

I recently donated the letter and the poem manuscript to the John Rylands Library in Manchester, which has Nicholson’s collected papers.

In the years that followed I sent admiring letters to playwrights Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard (Pinter declined to reply, instead asking his agent to explain he was too busy; Stoppard did reply, but forgot to sign his letter, which is a shame).

When I was writing a newspaper feature about the late thriller writer Desmond Bagley, I contacted a slew of famous bestselling authors: Jack Higgins, Dick Francis, Hammond Innes and Duncan Kyle.

Jack Higgins telephoned me rather than writing back (that was a fun conversation), while I received lovely letters from Francis, Innes and Kyle.

I have two or three letters from legendary playwright Alan Ayckbourn, one of my writing heroes. They were written to me in his capacity as artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, on the North Yorkshire coast in England. They were very polite, very encouraging letters of rejection after I sent him a couple of my (not very good) attempts at plays.

In more recent times, I received a lovely handwritten card in reply to a fan letter from one of my favourite novelists, Anne Tyler, author of The Accidental Tourist and Breathing Lessons. I was a bit star-struck to receive that one.

Write to your heroes

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that you should contact your writing heroes. You may not get anything back, but chances are you will. Authors, in my experience, are generous folk and want to give the next generation a helping hand.

I’m going to share with you the lovely letters I’ve had over the next few newsletters (I’ll need to get them out of the loft!).

But today, I’ll start with perhaps my favourite: Anne Tyler’s note.

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Save one life and you save the world

Hello and welcome to this week’s A-B-C Midweek Bitesize. It’s a short one — a film recommendation.

Go and see One Life.

It’s the true story of Nicholas Winton, a 29-year-old London stockbroker whose efforts helped to save hundreds and hundreds of Jewish children to escape from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939.

It is one of the most powerful, emotional films I’ve ever seen. It moves between scenes of the young Winton played by Flynn and the much older man in the 1980s, played by Hopkins, when his incredible achievements are at last recognised thanks to the BBC television programme That’s Life.

The acting is incredible and at times it is hard to tell that Hopkins is acting; he is mesmerising.

The film takes the true events and organises them in a perfect narrative sequence ensuring there isn’t a dry eye in the house.

Masterful storytelling all round. As writers of narrative non-fiction we can learn a lot.

Writing a memoir is hard

Hello and welcome to the A-B-C of Writing True Stories.

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about the art and craft of writing a memoir. I’ve always loved life writing and my favourite writers of memoir include James Herriot, Joan Didion, Frank McCourt, Hunter Davies and Bill Bryson.

I have so many favourite memoirs. I could mention Jean-Dominique Bauby’s incredible The Butterfly and the Diving Bell, Eric Lomax’s The Railway Man and Neil Simon’s two fabulous books Rewrites and The Play Goes On. I could tell you about Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, about Elie Wiesel’s Night and about Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. And I still wouldn’t have told you about the works of Primo Levi.

What a wonderful library of personal writings there is out there. Go and take a look for yourself, dig deep into the shelves. You’ll be richer for it.

But writing a memoir, as I said at the top, is not easy. In fact it’s very hard.

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Come and write with me

Hello all.

Just a reminder that I will be hosting the second A-B-C of Writing True Stories Writers’ Retreat this evening (Thursday, February 1, 6pm UK time).

I will be talking briefly about the progress on my new true crime book The Lady in the Lake (I have to submit the manuscript by March 1 😟) and you can tell me a bit about your work-in-progress. And then we’ll dive into some writing.

I have a particular scene I want to write during the hour-long session: the events leading up to the arrest of the murder suspect. I’ll tell you more in the session…

The Writers’ Retreat is open to all paying subscribers of the A-B-C. Remember, a monthly subscription will cost you £5, or £50 if you go for the annual subscription, saving you £10.

A paid subscription gets you access to all my writing tips, reflections, interviews with writers and agents (a new feature coming soon), as well as opportunities to pick my brain. I’ve plans during 2024 to run special one-off courses for paid subscribers on writing true stories, memoirs, true crime and generating ideas, in which I will also talk about the experience of putting your work out to agents and the exciting possibility of seeing your work bought by TV and film producers.

All for £5 a month. That’s less than you’d pay for one takeout coffee every week.

It would be great to see you and you’d be most welcome.

In the meantime, all of you on free subscriptions, you’re also very welcome of course and I will continue to bring you lots of free content that I hope you will find useful and interesting.

Tonight’s Writers’ Retreat is at 6pm UK time. The link is below behind the paywall.

I look forward to seeing you there!

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