Tag: The Yorkshire Ripper

The Wrong Men – published on March 28th!

My twisty 1979 murder mystery, The Wrong Men, is published by The Book Guild on March 28th 2026 – link to buy here: https://shorturl.at/JoiAh. You can also buy it, and all of my other books, at my bookshop, here: https://www.rjbarron.co.uk/bookshop/

If you read the book and like it, I’d be very grateful if you could leave a review on Amazon and spread the word amongst all of your reader friends. Reviews and word of mouth make a big difference.While you’re waiting, have a look at this interview with me about the book by The Creative Writing Programme in Brighton. I am a graduate of their two year programme of study. You can read the transcript below or visit their website here: https://www.creativewritingprogramme.org.uk/inspiration

New Novel From Alumnus Rob Barron

17 Mar

Rob Barron took the Creative Writing Programme from 2022 to 2024. His novel The Wrong Men is published on 28th March 2026. Here he talks about his writing life. 

Your novel The Wrong Men is out this month. It is about a hospital porter who discovers a murdered consultant in the mortuary. Could you tell us about the inspiration behind this story? It’s a story I’ve wanted to tell for over forty years, ever since I had a job as a porter in York District Hospital after leaving University. It was a fascinating experience – porters are the only staff members who go everywhere in the hospital and routinely interact with everyone, and hospitals are extraordinary places – this one in particular was full of larger than life characters. I also wanted to use my memory of living in York at the time when the Yorkshire Ripper was still at large, and the pervasive sense of unease this generated among many of the female students I knew at the time. It was an opportunity to write something in the guise of a murder mystery  that is really about growing up as a man at a time of institutionalised misogyny.

It is a detective story, could you tell us about your planning process and how you keep track of all the seeds you have to sow along the way when writing crime fiction? I decided to scatter lots of seeds, knowing that in the editing process some would be pulled up and thrown away. It requires meticulous rewriting and tracking the separate threads. I’m guilty of using a colour coded spreadsheet to double check that there were no loose ends and that the whole thing was coherent. Crime fiction seemed to need a very different process than that used in other genres. The first draft was about revealing the story to myself and all the other drafts were trying to conceal the story from the reader.

You grew up in the north of England and both your YA novels and The Wrong Men are all set in Yorkshire, could you tell us about the importance of setting in your writing? The first novel I self-published. Zero Tolerance is a contemporary satire set in south London, so I’m not wedded to the north, but, generally, setting is a crucial aspect of my writing. I love to create an authentic sense of place and time. For me it underpins the notion that fiction is a way of transporting someone from their current reality to somewhere else. The somewhere else in this instance is York, a beautiful historic northern city and a busy hospital at night. The sense of the end of the Seventies is also important.

Did you start writing this novel while doing the Creative Writing Programme? Yes. I was just about to finish my YA novel but I was excited about the idea for The Wrong Men so I started that as well. For a while I was writing them in tandem.

How did you finish The Wrong Men and what was your journey to publication? The workshop part of the Creative Writing Programme was very helpful. It imposed a certain discipline because of the regular submissions and feedback. By the second year the book really had its teeth in me and I raced to the end. The feedback from tutors and fellow students was incredibly helpful and lots of changes were made to the original piece. Even after I had started to send it off to agents and publishers, I made significant changes based on reader feedback that eventually convinced me that I’d been wrong about certain choices I’d made in the earlier drafts. I sent if off to lots of different people and had the usual number of rejections, with about half a dozen people who requested the whole manuscript. In the end I had a couple of offers that were for partnership publishing, and I eventually accepted the one from The Book Guild. A couple of weeks after signing the contract I got an email out of the blue from a publisher who I’d sent the whole manuscript to a year before. They had “found” it again, loved it and offered me a three book deal on the strength of it. Sod’s Law! I felt I had to honour the contract I’d already signed. It was a good lesson though,  not to give up. Somebody somewhere will understand what you were trying to do and will want to publish.

You have previously published two YA novels – The Watcher and the Friend and When The Cold Wind Blows, but this is your first adult novel – could you tell us whether your writing process differs when writing YA and adult fiction? In some ways I don’t think the idea of target audience is very helpful. The two YA novels are aimed as much at adults who like fantasy fiction as children. So, no, my writing process was exactly the same, apart from the specifics of editing to hide the story from the reader mentioned above.

What are you working on now? I’m writing sequels for both of them. The final part of the YA trilogy (working title When Stars Collide) and the follow up to The Wrong Men. Unfortunately, all of the work you have to do to promote and market a new book takes up a lot of time – it doesn’t leave much room for new writing. This is a good reminder to get on with it!

What are your top tips for someone starting out on their writing career?

  • Write a story you want to tell.
  • Ignore trends 
  • Generate words
  • Put characters together and watch the magic happen
  • Edit ruthlessly. If you’re not sure, get rid of it
  • Listen to advice and then ignore it if doesn’t strike a chord with you

You can find out more about Rob on his website, BlueSky, Twitter and Instagram accounts. And if you want to write a novel, why not sign up for the Creative Writing Programme starting in September in bookish venues across the south-east of England and online. Our 10-week Introduction to Creative Writing course starts on 29 April if you want to dip your toe in the water.

Sounds of the Seventies

In December 1979, Johnny Jewell was 22 years old. He had three main passions in life: Football, Music and Reading. This is what he and his friends were listening to.

My new book, The Wrong Men, published by The Book Guild on March 28th, is a murder mystery set over Christmas 1979, and features Johnny Jewell, a 22 year old English graduate who is working as a porter in York District Hospital. To give readers a flavour of that time, I’ve included a link to a Spotify Playlist of the key tracks that Johnny and his friends were all listening to then. It’s an eclectic mix: some of the songs are mentioned in the novel, some relate directly to the themes of the book, and some are there just to give texture and atmosphere. They are what he was listening to in that period of his life.

You can pre-order the book from Amazon here: https://shorturl.at/JoiAh

Scan the QR code for the Spotify Playlist

Some younger people might look at the list and jump to an obvious criticism, bolstered by some rudimentary research. “Big mistake – that song wasn’t released in 1979, it was from 1971. Shoddy work!” It’s true, there are many tracks from earlier times, but there are none from after January 1980. I was sorely tempted to include Happy House by Siouxie and The Banshees, notable for their live performance on Top of the Pops, (where Siouxie conclusively demonstrates the superiority of two pockets full of glitter over a panoply of computerised special effects). Eventually, integrity persuaded me to leave it out, comforted by the fact that it will appear in the sequel to the story.

So there is some rigour to the choices, and they reflect the reality for a young music aficionado with little disposable cash to hand. The truth is, back in those pre -internet, pre- Spotify, steam -powered days, finding out about new music and buying new music was a very different thing to its equivalent today. We listened to the radio (mainly John Peel after the pub, but also Alan Freeman on a Saturday afternoon) We read the music press. The Thursday purchase of The New Musical Express was a thrill that its hard to fully explain to today’s kids. It was The Bible for Leftie music fans– funny, authoritative, alternative, well-written and informative. Sounds and Melody Maker would be tolerated, but they were a pale, thin replacement for the real thing.

Once you had triangulated a list of potential new purchases from the radio and the NME and gossip, you could begin to edge towards doing the deed. But back then, an album cost about £4.99. Just to give you a marker, at the same time a pint of beer was about 40 pence – more than ten times the cost. Just do the basic maths, using the average price for a pint today, and you begin to get some idea of the scale of the investment.

This alone explains why the average student’s record collection would only contain a handful of new releases, and their listening experience would inevitably involve recycling their back catalogue. A stack of LPs would be regularly out of their sleeves for a play. The second factor to bear in mind was the iconoclastic effect of having experienced the punk revolution, which turned everything on its head. What were you supposed to do with your lovingly curated collection of Prog rock albums? Could you still retain any street cred and play Yes, for example? Many of us did that kind of listening in a solitary and secretive fashion, saving the latest music for communal experiences. Some old stuff, deemed “classic” managed to straddle the divide and in some ways were an even greater indicator of your superior music taste – hence the inclusion in the list of Van Morrison, John Martyn etc.

The tracks that made it on to Johnny Jewell’s playlist all have a back story. Here are just a few of them.

  1. The List kicks off with “London Calling” by The Clash. It had only just been released when the book starts on December 21st, 1979, but this is an example of another kind of purchase. The Clash were firm favourites for Johnny and his chums and no research was needed. London Calling was confidently bought on the first day of its release.

2. There’s a middle dance section in the playlist, to mirror the Party episode in the middle of the novel. Much time was spent by Johnny and his chums compiling mix tapes for parties. In such tapes, Funk was held in high esteem: James Brown, Funkadelic, Parliament and Stevie Wonder were key players, and The Jacksons, criminally underrated, never failed to make the cut.

3. Solid Air, Hard Nose the Highway and Take Me to The River are moody, late night, after the party listens. Chilling, chatting and winding down. Stuff happened between people when these were playing.

4. A word of clarification about the Dr Feelgood track, Because You’re Mine. The Feelgoods were a big thing in the mid – late Seventies, and acted as a bridge between Pub Rock and Punk. Live, they were thrilling, particularly the manic attack of Wilco Johnson’s extraordinary guitar sound and style. They crackled with tension, live and on record. Sonically , they were supreme. Lyrically, well, that’s a different story. They fully reflected the sexist world of the Seventies. Their gigs were a very male affair – it was rare to spot women there, and Because You’re Mine is a classic representation of the attitudes that prevailed at the time.

It’s included because of that – this was the world that Johnny inhabited and was trying to navigate. We thought for a long time that most of those battles had been fought and won, but nothing can be taken for granted in these dark days of populism, when Neanderthals like Andrew Tate, inexplicably hold sway with young men. The just released statistic that 33% of Gen Z men believe that wives should obey their husbands is a chilling reflection of this sliding back to the Dark Ages. Listen to the Feelgoods, read the book and fight back!

For the rest, many of them have lyrics or ideas that directly relate to the story of The Wrong Men. How many can you find? What would be on your own playlist from when you were twenty two years old?