I am thrilled to have interviewed author Paul Gitsham, who shared with us details of his writing life, his book ‘The Aftermath‘, which was released on 10th October 2024, and answered a few fun questions. This post contains affiliate links.

Paul Gitsham is a former biologist and schoolteacher, living in the Midlands, in a house with more books than shelf space. Since 2014, he has written nine novels and four novellas in his DCI Warren Jones series. The Aftermath is his first standalone domestic thriller.

With me, it’s always impossible to say exactly where the inspiration will have come from. All I know is that the central twist has been sitting in my ideas file for the last few years. It’s almost certain I had the idea when watching a true crime documentary with my wife, but there is no way to track to track down that original inspiration.

Alas, I’m not one of life’s great plotters. I tend to sketch some rough ideas down in a Word document, then begin writing. When I start putting words down, it seems to fire up my creative juices and before you know it, new ideas are flowing thick and fast and I find myself jotting them down in that Word document, as I continue writing. Eventually, the plot starts to take on a rough shape, and I take a bit of time to wrestle those ideas into a loose outline – then I just keep on going, filling in the gaps.

I chose the title The Aftermath long after I had written the book. I had a working title that my wife hated. And to be fair, she’s got pretty good instincts when it comes to these things. We eventually settled on The Aftermath because the essence of the book is the aftermath of this devastating fire that kills Seamus Monaghan’s wife. This then lent itself very nicely to the book’s tag line – The Fire. The Fallout. The Aftermath.

Coming up with character names is one of the jobs I hate most when writing. Very often a character will be known by a place holder name – e.g. Witness one, until quite late in the process, when I’ll finally sit down and do most of the names in one go (note the
underscore – this allows me to find the name and replace it really easily).

For this book, the influence was purely names I recalled as a kid. I was brought up in Coventry as a Catholic. Back then, pretty much everyone at my schools had Irish ancestry – we were the outliers. So I grew up with those names. Seamus and Dominic Monaghan, the brothers at the heart of the novel, are from a family with Irish ancestry. It has little influence on the story, but once I’d made that decision it gave me a suite of names to choose from.

Unlike my DCI Warren Jones police procedurals, this one required much less new research. The limited police procedure in this book came from years of experience writing the Warren Jones novels. Some of the technical knowhow necessary to make sure that my scenario worked I either already knew, or I just went online to check the details.

I’ve always loved reading domestic thrillers, and so it was natural that some of the scenarios in my ideas file would lean towards that subgenre. The central premise that eventually became The Aftermath sat in the file for some time before I finally concluded that there was no realistic way I could shoehorn it into my existing DCI Warren Jones series. So, I decided instead to scratch a long-standing itch and write a standalone in the vein of a domestic thriller, rather than a police procedural. I really enjoyed writing it, so there will definitely be more standalones and domestic thrillers in future.

In many ways, this is one of the quickest books I’ve ever written, although it took about two-and-a-half years to actually hit the shelves. I finished a contracted Warren Jones novel several months ahead of deadline, and so decided to sit down and write an idea that had been bouncing around my head for ages. The first, very rough, draft was completed in six weeks (a record for me), after I decided to set a target of finishing before I got married. When I picked it up again a few weeks after the wedding I did a full edit and turned it into a second draft, which I then gave to my beta readers.

Things went on hold then for a few months, before I sought some professional feedback, which persuaded me to change the tone of the book somewhat. Again, it went on the backburner for a while. Eventually, in April/May this year, I decided it was time to publish it and it then took time to get it properly edited, the cover designed, distribution set up etc etc, before its launch on 10th October.

Twisty. Menacing. Unexpected.

Juggling everything. The time I spend actually putting words down on paper is something of a respite from everything else that comes with being a professional author! I’m essentially running a one-man, freelance business, of which writing the books is only a small part sometimes.

If you like stories where you change your mind repeatedly about what actually happened, who was responsible, and why it all took place, then this is the book for you.

I’m afraid not.

I generally write in silence, distracted occasionally by the hair-raising exploits of the local squirrels out of the window.

I write in a small bedroom that I have converted to an office. I treated myself to a very wide screen recently. I think it makes me more productive. My wife thinks I’m just trying to recreate the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.

I love the idea of playing a forensic technician of some sort. Perhaps somebody analysing CCTV footage?

‘Know any good recipes for field mice? I’m getting a but bored of the same thing for dinner each night.’

A big thank you to Paul Gitsham for sharing his writing life with us and for a wonderful interview.