Author - Nick Quantrill

The A63 Revisited

Nick Quantrill

Nick Quantrill

Extracts of all of Nick's work are available online, and full electronic copies are available on request by contacting: hullcrimefiction@hotmail.co.uk.

To access Nick Quantrill's personal site, click here.

Nick Quantrill is a prize-winning Hull crime fiction writer whose work is highly-rated by all who come across it, with one notable exception - himself. However, even Nick reckons that his upcoming novel 'Broken Dreams' is a belter (he's right - see below).

Nick started out as a short story writer, winning the 2006 HarperCollins Crime Tour Competition for 'Punishment', an elegant 1,000 word piece which plonks an evil twist down onto the table. Other short stories include ‘Buried Secrets’, a tale of members of a 1960s Hull music band – sort of The Aces, or something – and of the one who was discovered walled up in a city development, and ‘Cinch Hand’, another twisty piece about a former accountant turned private eye (well, Nick is an accountant, so we’ll see where it takes him, especially if you happen to catch him parking outside your house late at night with his raincoat collar starched up to his nose and the regulation mug of cocoa in his hands). ‘Merry Christmas, Here’s A Present’ is more of a seasonal exploitation number, and more predictable, but a neat little story for all that, with some decent atmospherics and indecent protagonists who are clearly moving in on Danny Birch’s ‘Clipped’ manor (or vice-versa).

The first longer piece was the novella-lengthed ‘Complicity’ about drugs and bugs in the city, corruption and blackmail. It features DS Coleman as the cynical, honourable old copper not beyond losing his temper at the frustration and wheeler-dealing of combating crime in a modern metropolis (or however you might wish to describe Hull).

We meet DS Coleman again in the full-length ‘Black & White’, a crime thriller that takes a few paces to get a move on, but which is pretty fit when it does, around page 50. Nick’s prose style is good hardcore gritty TV cop show, his dialogue is excellent, and his plotlines are both surprising and convincing, glossed with a fashionable scepticism as to the value of police work in a murky world – “heroes led by donkeys,” as they used to say.

In his first published paperback, ‘Broken Dreams’, to be released in March 2010, Nick hasn’t entirely abandoned the hapless DS Coleman, but this time he is a walk-on in a tale of a private investigator, Joe Geraghty, who gets closer to a murder scene than is strictly comfortable.

Nick Quantrill - Broken Dreams

To be released March 2010

'Broken Dreams'

To be published March 2010.

Over the last couple of years, Nick Quantrill has made an enviable reputation for himself as a highly accomplished true-to-the-gospels (of St. Elmore Leonard and St. Raymond Chandler) crime fiction writer who reliably delivers precisely crafted plots, authentic hardboiled dialogue and classic PI fisticuffs action in tales suffused with an atmosphere of compounding tension which slices through the shifting dynamics and corkscrew effects of the narrative and where the characters will inevitably find themselves hanging upside down in their own story.

After many successful and celebrated shorter tales, Nick wrote the full-length e-book ‘Black & White’ which started out in leisurely fashion but soon got into its stride as a police procedural investigation of the dark fate of a body found in a dockside container. I particularly enjoyed the accompanying side-story of the relentless stress of the anti-heroic DS Coleman’s working life being exacerbated considerably by his wife’s undermining resentment of her husband’s all-hours, underpaid job (not a new theme, but tenderly done).

In his first paperback novel, published by the recently-established Caffeine Nights imprint, we get to catch DS Coleman from another angle, as an incidental character, while two new characters step to the fore - the private detective Joe Geraghty whose wife died during an arson attack two years previously, and the City of Hull itself.

Nick has a tremendous knack of making his prose sound like it is pounding the streets as he types but this time he has raised it to a pitch which is almost CCTV, where you can follow Joe Geraghty in telescopic close-up as his footsteps echo against the tarmac amid the faded after-life of the Hessle Road distributaries, in the sleazy town centre of casinos and massage parlours offset by the glistening St. Stephen’s Centre, and in the aspiring trendiness of the Newland Avenue bistro and bar zone. This book looks Hull, smells Hull, sounds Hull, and maybe even tastes Hull, meticulously rendered as it is in reams of flat, blunt, staccato, wry dialogue which dominate the text.

Whereas ‘Black & White’ tarried awhile to establish its premises, its successor ‘Broken Dreams’ fizzes and crackles from the first page as it outlines the puzzle to be solved – a murdered wife, a mysterious embezzlement and a missing daughter, soon to be supplemented by loads of other seedy and tragic goings-on. The side-story is much more lusty too this time as it tracks the increasingly affectionate relationship emerging between Joe, still seeking closure for the death of his wife, and his partner Don’s more than attractive daughter, Sarah, whom Joe will be required to invite to join him in a swingers’ club to assist him in his enquiries - something for Joe to get worked up about!

Between scenes of continual action and painstaking investigation Nick interweaves the thick atmospheric thread of the history of Hull itself and especially that of the shattered fishing industry once the raison d’être for the vibrant, tough and close-knit Hessle Road trawling community. To readers brought up with Hull folklore in each nipple, the stark realities of a trade classified as casual labour carrying with it no fringe benefits, no accident or redundancy compensation and sometimes not even any pay, and yet in its day representing the most dangerous and brutal industry in Britain, will come as no surprise. To foreigners from beyond the borders of the East Riding of Yorkshire these details will add an enthralling documentary underpinning to the story, enhancing its already earthy credibility.

As someone who also has a book – ‘Missio’ - which has just come out and which uses the Hull fishing industry as its back-plot, I was delighted to find that our facts and takes matched impeccably almost to the point of repetition, as did our respective side-swipes at the dissipated state of the Hull Royal Infirmary. I have noticed that in his last couple of outings Nick has been increasingly willing to have his characters snarl provocatively at unsatisfactory features of the city, adding pleasingly to the spicing of his literary concoctions while no doubt discomforting its targets accordingly – no Hull Tourist Board (sic) sponsorship there.

Apparently Nick’s next book is already progressing even more smoothly than this one, to which I can only comment that if it turns out to be better still, it will be beyond brilliant. (TR).

You can download Chapter 1 by clicking here.

The following photographs are by Roland Standaert, an exciting new Hull-based photographer .

Click on picture to go to extract

"Black & White" (novel)

Called to Hull’s King George Dock on a cold, miserable autumn morning by his new senior officer, Detective Sergeant Richard Coleman is confronted with the puzzling discovery of a body in a cargo container. Due to be moved the following day, the container triggers an investigation that sees Coleman and his colleagues explore the murky underground world of counterfeit goods.

Click on picture to view extract

"Punishment" (short story)

Won the 2006 HarperCollins "Crime Tour" competition.

The place stinks, absolutely reeks. I look around. The barn was how we had set it up earlier. We’d placed the table in the middle of the room, leaving a couple of nasty looking saws on its edge; just to build up a bit of atmosphere. It was freezing, we might well need the petrol that we’d thoughtfully placed at the foot of the table.

Click on picture to view extract

"Lessons Learnt" (short story)

DS Richard Coleman pulled into the lay-by and headed towards the flashing blue lights. An hour later it would have been someone else’s problem. But it wasn’t. An articulated lorry had been isolated from the other vehicles, cones placed around it, linked together by barrier tape. A mobile generator providing power to the small floodlights had been hastily erected to illuminate the lorry’s cab, along with a white Scene of Crime tent to preserve the forensic evidence. Nobody other than the Scene of Crime Officers would be allowed near the cab of the lorry, not until they’d completed their work.