A Moment With… Tony Bassett

Published January 17, 2023 | By Laura

I am pleased to be welcoming Tony Bassett to Novel Kicks. He’s here with the blog tour for his novel, Out For Revenge.

When notorious gangland boss Tadeusz Filipowski is released from prison, several people start looking over their shoulder.

A volatile character, not shy of picking fights, Filipowski plans to expand his drugs empire and put his competitors on a backfoot. That’s until he turns up dead. Very dead.

DS Sunita Roy of the Heart of England police is handed the case but it’s a challenge to find the killer of a man with so many enemies.

DCI Gavin Roscoe would lend more support but he is busy nailing down suspicions of corruption plaguing the force.

Soon, however, the investigations will bump into one another. And unless Roy and Roscoe can get to the bottom of the mystery, they could well become the next victims.

OUT FOR REVENGE is the fourth gripping standalone mystery in the Detectives Roy and Roscoe crime fiction series by Tony Bassett.

*****

Without further ado, it’s over to Tony to talk about his writing process when writing his crime series.

The days of the fictional English male detective bustling round quiet country villages solving murders are almost certainly numbered.

Books based on popular characters like Morse and Barnaby will, of course, always sell extremely well.

But writers new to the crime genre have to accept such characters may be a dying breed. This is why, in such a competitive market, anyone wishing to write crime novels with any chance of success has to be more inventive.

That explains why I chose for my series of crime novels set in the Midlands a female detective from a West Bengali background.

Detective Sergeant Sunita Roy is a twenty-five-year-old law graduate who has recently joined her Midlands CID department.

My first novel, in the series published by The Book Folks in January 2022, was called Murder On Oxford Lane. As police strive to solve the mystery of a missing Warwickshire property tycoon, Sunita gradually forges a good working relationship with her boss, a middle-aged Brummie called DCI Gavin Roscoe.

Since then there have been three other books – the latest of which, Out For Revenge, has just been published.

Sunita, originally from Leicester, is enthusiastic, hard-working and has a razor-sharp mind which she uses to resolve her challenging investigations.

One reason I created this character with an Indian and Hindu background is that I was very impressed by the amazing career of Neil Basu.

He has served as an Assistant Commissioner with the Metropolitan Police and is currently a director of the College of Policing. Here is a man who has quietly risen through the ranks from being a beat bobby to become Britain’s most senior Asian police officer. Like Sunita, he comes originally from the West Midlands.

My latest book, Out For Revenge, sheds light on the sordid world of Birmingham’s drug gangs.

It partly concerns police efforts to avoid a war between gangs which they fear is about to erupt after a notorious drug baron is released from Winson Green Prison. Later in the book, this arch criminal, who is in league with a corrupt detective, is found murdered.

I spent several months researching the drugs trade in Birmingham. Unlike London, where drug crime is sadly widespread across 33 boroughs and details of major gangs are not common knowledge, there is a small number of organised drug gangs operating in Birmingham.

They are widely known about since there have been a series of court appearances by gang members.

I thought this would make an interesting subject to cover in the novel since drug dealing and drug crime is such a major issue currently.

Police are also seen using covert operations to trap a corrupt detective in Out For Revenge. I had some experience of these techniques while working in the past for the investigative department of the Sunday People newspaper. So I was able to use my knowledge of working undercover as a journalist when writing the “entrapment” scenes, which take place inside a police station and in a country pub.

About Tony Bassett –

I am a semi-retired journalist who was born in West Kent. While growing up, I spent hours reading and writing, and, from an early age, nursed an ambition to become first a journalist and then novelist. My theory was that, in order to write novels, one had to have life experiences to colour one’s writing and one could obtain those experiences through journalism.

I was fortunate enough to be named Time-Life Magazine Student Journalist of the Year in 1971 in a competition organised by the National Union of Students. At the time, I was editing the student newspaper at Hull University, where I gained a BA Honours degree in History and Political Studies.

After six years working on provincial newspapers in Sidcup, Worcester and Cardiff, I became a freelance journalist in London. For 24 years, I was a reporter on the staff of the Sunday People (now part of Reach plc, formerly Trinity Mirror). Over the years, I sold tens of thousands of stories to the national newspapers, including the Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, The Sun, Daily Star, Daily Telegraph and London Evening Standard. I helped cover the Jeremy Thorpe trial at the Old Bailey for the Evening Standard. I broke the news in a Sun newspaper exclusive in April 1989 that Bill Wyman, the Rolling Stones guitarist aged 52, was to marry 18-year-old Mandy Smith. I bought 200 blank MOT forms to expose a trade in fake certificates.

My speciality was tracking people down. For instance, I found evidence about Rod Stewart’s secret love child Sarah Streeter by tracing a retired adoption agent through a library ticket. On one occasion, I took an escaped gangster back to prison. Some of my stories can be read on my website (see below); others are generally available online. For thirty years, I was also employed as a birth and marriage researcher mainly for the Mail on Sunday, Sunday Mirror, Sunday People and The Sun.

I have a grown-up son and four grown-up daughters who all live in South Wales.

Say hello via my website, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Click to buy Out For Revenge on Amazon UK and Amazon US.