Novel detectives, killer plots and criminal tales to die for...

From Vera to Inspector Rebus, ahead of this month’s Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, supported by the Daily Express, some of the world’s leading thriller writers reveal the inspirations behind their much-loved sleuths

ADRIAN MCKINTY

THE image came first before the character. A paragraph came into my head while I was staring at a blank computer screen: Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic bullet guns.A distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship.The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the afterlife.And all this through a lens of oleaginous Belfast rain. My next thought was who is watching this and when? I began to piece together the character of a jaded 30-year-old Catholic policeman in the largely Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary. I called him Sean Duffy and put him in the house where I was born and grew up: 113 Coronation Road, Carrickfergus, during the Hunger Strikes of 1981.The rest of his character was easy. I’d give him a personality that would generate the most friction with his neighbours.And thus he became a sarcastic, bohemian hipster, music-loving Catholic cop because I knew that would give me the most material in Protestant, Bible-mad Carrick. I knew he and his colleagues and neighbours could come to understand each other and that would be fun.

●●Adrian McKinty’s The Chain was crowned crime novel of the year in 2020’s online Harrogate festival. He is currently working on his seventh Sean Duffy thriller, The Detective Up Late

SAIMA MIR

WHILE Jia Khan is not a detective, she is the one to find her father’s killer in my book,The Khan.A controlled woman, with a mind like quicksilver, her foresight gives her an edge and her cool, calm exterior allows her to navigate the two cultures that she has straddled since birth.As a British woman of Pakistani heritage this is no mean feat, but one that she pulls off with style. She is an independentminded, Oxbridge-educated barrister, and the estranged daughter of criminal kingpin Akbar Khan.When he is killed, and her brother kidnapped, she finds herself drawn back into the underworld, having to answer to, and appease,The Jirga – her father’s men. She does this in order to save her sibling, and maintain the family business, and she manages to keep her head throughout. Jia is inspired by every brilliant, smart, and savvy woman I have ever met.Women who navigate the world of patriarchy, family, and loyalty and still manage to achieve everything men do and more.

●●Saima Mir’s debut thriller, The Khan, is published by Point Blank and out now