'Miss Marple meets Downton'
Crime mystery series is born
They did a scan and found I had been bleeding for nine hours
THE serendipity of a conversation overheard at an office Christmas party helped Ali Carter land a three-book deal. It all came about when the Forres-born artist-turned-author joined her husband for festive drinks with his publishing colleagues at a
Soho pub in London.
Carter, 35, got chatting about her work as a pet portraitist to the head of sales. “She said: ‘Oh, will you draw my husband’s dog?’ Listening in to our conversation was the crime fiction editor, who then got very excited about the idea of a series involving pets and murder.
“I left the party and said to my husband: ‘I’m going to get us a book deal’. That Christmas I wrote a few chapters about an artist who draws pets and solves murders.”
And with that the Susie Mahl mystery series was born. Carter’s debut novel, A Brush With Death, is published this month billed as
“Miss Marple meets Downton Abbey”.
The cosy crime read charts the adventures of an artist-meets-amateursuper-sleuth attempting to solve the riddle of how a wealthy earl met a grisly end with his trousers down in a village graveyard.
Carter sums it up as “an escapist, light-hearted and humorous poke at the British class system”. Books number two and three are already in the pipeline, with East Sussex-based Carter the first to admit it’s all been a bit of an unexpected whirlwind (or in her words “incredibly fluky”).
“The embarrassing thing is that I had never read an Agatha Christie before I got the deal,” she says. “I have now read lots and really use her as my role model. I wish Miss Marple was younger, but I think she is a very good, stable main character. I find Agatha Christie very amusing.”
Her day job is as a fine artist specialising in oil paintings from life with an emphasis on colour. “It is mainly still life and landscapes,” she says. “It sounds pretentious, but I am trying to capture a moment of calm.”
Carter is also much in demand for pet portraits, which is where the lines of life and art blur slightly. In fact, there are a few similarities between her and main protagonist Susie Mahl.
“Well, I like to try and tell my mother it is definitely not me and not my family …” she says, laughing. “But yes, Susie lives in Sussex, I live in Sussex. We’re both fairly alike and I have had great fun developing her character in a way that mine isn’t. She gets her paintings in places I never get in.”
In the book, Susie dabbles in pet portraits to subsidise a “penchant for expensive underwear”. Is that a semi-autobiographical nugget sneaking in there too?
“I always find buying underwear, the really lovely stuff, is so expensive,” says Carter. “You can never quite justify spending what you would like to on it. So, I always think that if one had masses of money what fun to be able to buy your favourite underwear.”
Despite the old adage of never work with children or animals, Carter clearly enjoys her chosen profession. Do the animals sit for her or does she paint them from photographs?
“What I do, much like Susie, is to meet the pet otherwise you never see their character,” she enthuses. “It is important for me to see how the owners interact with their pets too. I spend quite a lot of time with them doing drawings and taking photographs.
“I’m a real troubled artist, I go through great pains. My husband will say: ‘Oh, you just are going through that stage of thinking it is no good …’ People love their pets and if you can really capture it, they are so happy.”
The middle of three children, Carter spent her early childhood near Girvan, South Ayrshire. Her father Jonathan Warrender is an artist known for his landscape paintings, while her mother Fiona runs the family farm.
Carter studied art history at St Andrews University and. after graduating, embarked on an eclectic career path that included a stint in investment management and retail.
“I never enjoyed it,” she reflects. “You do earn good money – I have never earned so much money as I did in my first two years after leaving university – but it is long hours and you think: ‘What on earth am I doing this for?’”
HER next milestone was co-founding video production start-up bizzibox.com. “We made marketing videos for people to put on their websites and information videos for anything from cosmetic surgery to training your dog,” she recalls.
But life changed irrevocably when Carter had a catastrophic cycling accident in 2011. She required major brain surgery and underwent a lengthy recovery period.
“I came off a bicycle in London,” says Carter. “It is unknown what happened, but the big thing was that I got a blood clot between my brain and skull. It wasn’t identified to begin with because I seemed to be making complete sense.”
She was taken to hospital and kept in overnight. The next morning Carter told a nurse her head didn’t feel right. “They did a scan and found I had been bleeding for nine hours,” she says. “Then they went into overdrive and I had major brain surgery.
“My poor mother came down from Scotland and was told either I would be brain-damaged or not get through it. Miraculously, I got through it and wasn’t brain-damaged.
“It did take an awfully long time to recover. Until I could spend a lengthy day awake, it was about two years.
Now I suffer from chronic fatigue, so I couldn’t have a 9 to 5 job. I get migraines and various other issues, but I’m so lucky to be alive.”
As part of her recovery, Carter set herself the challenge to walk solo from Canterbury to Rome, a three-month pilgrimage covering more than
1,200 miles.
“I knew I would never go back to my