Totalcrime
A true crime podcast, written and produced by Chris Summers, veteran crime reporter with more than 30 years of experience. He has been writing producing content for Totalcrime on Substack since March 2024 and is now launching into podcasting. The podcast will be a mixture of Chris narrating true crime stories from the UK and around the world, and occasional interviews with people who are knowledgeable about crime.
Totalcrime
How To Write Fiction Based on True Crime
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In this episode I speak to Simon Michael, a former barrister turned novelist, who is sometimes known as "Britain's John Grisham". We had a fascinating discussion about the differences between true crime and crime fiction and Simon - who has written the Charles Holborne series of novels - explained how many of his books were based on real criminal trials. We also talk about plotting novels and about whether AI will replace human authors.
Hello and welcome back to the Total Crime Podcast. This is episode 22. And uh I have with me today Simon Michael, who trained as a barrister, is a barrister, um but now you are an author. Can you uh how how did that happen?
SPEAKER_00Oh well that's a that is a long story, and probably longer than you have, but give us a sort of slightly summarized version. Okay. I wrote a uh couple of books in the late 80s, um, and they did all right. They were published both here and in America. Um, and my publishers were then bought out by uh Richard Branson, Virgin Books. They they were W.H. Allen. And he assured all of us that he was going to honour all our contracts, but that wasn't entirely true in my case, because even at the the uh I think it must have been four or five days after the champagne reception, um I received a letter saying they were no longer going to continue with my sort of uh sort of prime fiction. Oh so I had to fight to get my rights back. It took the issuing of legal proceedings, and um I got so discouraged that I basically stopped writing with a view to the publication for 25 years. Oh but I always wanted to go back to it. I thought I had some stories to tell. And by the time I got to 37 years of mad judges, corrupt metropolitan police officers, and lying clients, I thought I'd probably had enough for an entire series. So um I started again, I retired early, started again using my books, uh using my cases and other historical cases, which fascinated me as the the the sort of the basic foundations of the series.
SPEAKER_01And you tell me about your your main character. Uh are all your books got the same character?
SPEAKER_00Th those in this series have. I've published in another genres as well. I've published in both romance and um speculative fiction. But this series all have a guy whose original name was Charlie Horowitz, and who changes his name to Charles Holman, and he is um he's an East End Jewish lad, uh dabbled in crime, used to very nearly had a career as a professional heavyweight boxer, but got called up to the RAF, had a good war, because I sent my books in the 60s and 70s, um, and as a lot as a lot of um successful uh uh pilots and others did, he was given a scholarship to Cambridge. So that opened new doors for him, and he finds himself a barrister, the only East End Jewish barrister at the bar, and uh that brings certain problems for him. Um and it that mirrors what exactly what happened to me when I first started as a barrister in 1978. There was I come from I come from the same sort of background as my hero.
SPEAKER_01Um I'm gonna stop you for a second because weird, I'm gonna go off a tangent here because I years ago I wrote uh an article. I'm a bit of a boxing fan, you see. So I wrote an article about a the at the time they they had just created a musical, I don't think it lasted very long, but it was about Jewish boxers. And um I wrote an article about some of the famous sort of uh British Jewish uh boxers, especially in the sort of 1920s, 30s, I think. You know, when Kid Berg and people like that. Um Kid Lewis, I think.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, two two of my great uncles have that background, they were both East End boxers.
SPEAKER_01That's right, they didn't that's how we don't think of it as you know from the Jewish community nowadays, but I guess it's just it's kind of a thing that a lot of immigrant communities go through. You know, we have nowadays a lot of sort of boxes of sort of Jamaican and Nigerian origin. Um but yeah, back in the day it was East Ewish guys.
SPEAKER_00I think it's I think it every wave of immigration appreciates that the way to fight get out of the gutter and the way to start making money is through sport. Um, and I think i as each generation comes along, uh that's what they end up with, and some of them make it and get out. Um, you only have to look at the makeup of the the Premier League before we had the influx of the uh all the foreign players. These are very largely kids, and there are exceptions, very largely kids who had very little education, and they saw their way out was by using their footballing skills. And I think the same applied, you know, in the 1920s to that wave of Jewish immigration. They had various various options, but one of them was to be very good at sport.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um but yeah, you found in the 70s, late 70s, that was this sort of unspoken anti-Semitism at the bar?
SPEAKER_00Oh no, it wasn't unspoken anti-Semitism. It was very spoken, and laid on top of that was class prejudice. I mean, all of the boys, you know, it was a rich boys' club when I started. Very few women, very, very few women. Um, and all the blokes involved, my intake, they'd all been, they'd all come from wealthy families, they'd all been to public schools, they'd all been to Oxford or Cambridge, and they all had relatives who were in the law, or cabinet members, or senior civil servants. My lot were East End Jewish tailors. Um, and when I first started, it was um the prejudice was uh astonishing. I mean, completely open as well. Uh probably may not have time to tell that this story, but there was one particular judge who was known for it. Um they used to have a sort of um I don't even I don't know if it still happens, I don't think it does, but there used to be a sort of convention that if you'd finished a long High Court case, you would be taken backstage into the chambers of the uh the judge concerned to have a cup of tea or a glass of sherry with your opponent because you'd been fighting, you know, tooth and nail for several weeks sometimes. And that happened to me. I just finished a case in the high court, I'd done all right. Uh we'd won, was invited back to this bloke judge's chambers, drinking a cup of tea with his clerk standing behind him, and then my opponent for the first time mentioned the fact that I was from a Jewish family. And he said East End Jewish family. And all of a sudden the atmosphere went completely cold. The judge judge put down his cup, stood up, made it clear the interview was over. He said, Yes, thank you, gentlemen. And in case anyone had missed the point, he pointed at a a room sorry, a window above him, and sort of in the ceiling, and said to his clerk, Would you mind opening that window so we can let the Hebrew influence out of the room?
SPEAKER_01Wow. Is that is that is that judge still alive?
SPEAKER_00Because we should know uh no, he isn't, but I won't give you his name. He was well known at the time, but he's presumably got entirely blameless children and grandchildren now.
SPEAKER_01So I'm not gonna that's horrible. Um I would and I wonder what your your opponent made of it. Is he was he like equally baffled or no?
SPEAKER_00He I think he did it deliberately. Um I don't think the judge had recognized the I mean I I don't have a particularly Jewish name. Michael's not a Jewish surname by and large. I don't think he uh the judge had noticed, but my opponent knew where I came from, and I think he was deliberately getting a dig in. He'd lost the case.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, he yeah, exactly. Why did he mention it? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Okay, well, so this that is very much sort of part of your character, then, is it that um you know, that he is told and he he's um living with that sort of prejudice all the time, or yes, you'll see it through the books.
SPEAKER_00Um he has negotiated incredible class and religious prejudice um to get a foothold at the bar, and having changed his name uh to make it more anglicized, and having married out of his parents' faith, because Charles, like me, doesn't really affect my life at all. Um he finds himself an outcast from both communities. He's never going to be approved of by his uh rich uh public school educated peers, and he's burnt his bridges with his family. So he's very much an outsider, which is the foundational characteristic of him, the fact that he he always feels on the side of the the you know the the weaker members of society. That's the the books. I d I trun I'm not trying to make them into a sociological uh um doctorate, but they all they all pick up on the themes of those days which apply now. So enormous racial prejudice, the huge gulf between the people, the haves and the have nots, and the inability of the the little man in society to cite the big corporations or the government and whatever it may be. So I'm I'm picking up the themes that uh applied at that time, which are no less uh prevalent today.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean it's interesting on that point of uh the the you know the does he do mainly defense cat work, your your character?
SPEAKER_00No, and like me, he didn't I did both. Uh you you know you defend and you prosecute uh when you at the criminal bar, depending on what brief comes in and what your relationships with the solicitors are like. So I've got Charlie doing a bit of both. So for example, in the waxwork corpse, which is based on the true case, which I'm I don't know how old you are, but the chances are if you were around in the late 80s, you'd have heard about the lady in the lake, the chap who dropped his wife's body into washwater.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well, well, so that that was uh that was a well-known case at that time. Um and I've I've and I was involved with it. Uh and so I have placed Charlie in the position of the prosecutor for that case.
SPEAKER_01Was that in Cumbria or something?
SPEAKER_00I well, it's yeah, waswater in the lake district. It's the um it's the deepest lake. Yeah, it's the deepest lake in Britain. Um it's was sort of carved by glacial action, so the bottom third of it is all silt. And he this particular chap realized that if he could get his wife's body into it, she would just sink through the silt and never be found. It was very unlucky though, because unknown to him, and in fact unknown to everyone except for the local diving fraternity, from the bottom of the lake there sticks up a finger of rock called Tiffin's Rock. It never breaks the surface, it's just there. And the divers know about it because they used to use it to swim out uh for their night dive training, to swim out to it, had to find it in the dark, get to it, turn around and come back. And so this in this enormous lake that's with this one finger of rock sticking up from the bottom, he landed the body right on top of it.
SPEAKER_01I don't have sympathy with murderers, but and that's you've got to feel for the guy sometimes.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, oh it gets worse. I mean, he was really unlucky. He got caught after a period of almost a decade. But he managed to land her at a position in the water where the water temperature is maintained between zero degree and one degree centigrade throughout the year. Um I don't know if you're proposing to dispose of any human bodies that and if you are, you might want to start taking notes around now.
SPEAKER_01But when you put a body into people listening to this podcast, might be taking notes, yeah.
SPEAKER_00If you put a human body into uh water of that temperature, it becomes adipose, which means wax-like. And so she was absolutely perfectly preserved. I mean, the day she came up, maybe 10 years to the day after she went in, she looked exactly the same. I've still got the photos. Right. Um so he was a very unlucky chap. But so that was a case where he was um where he was acting for the crown. I've got cases where he's acting for the defense as well. So his his career very much mirrors mine.
SPEAKER_01Because we we are here really uh focusing on the difference between fact and fiction. And it in crime fiction, you know, be it novels or plays or you know, films or TV, the the prosecutor can sometimes be the hero of the piece, or he can be the villain, you know, the you know, is a miscarriage of justice, and and the prosecutor doesn't care whether the guy's a lot, you know, guilty or not, he just wants to get a conviction. Um and the other way around, it could be the defense is is really the bad guy. It um I guess there's so many variations, you know, in in especially in courtroom dramas, you know, and there was there was the film, is it called the juror, where um revolved around um you know, one of the jurors getting up. I think actually um spoiler alert uh committed a murder and and it you know he ends up as the jury on his own. Maybe that was John Grisham, I can't remember.
SPEAKER_00Uh yes, it was uh no well the juror, uh was a book written by a chap called Steve Kavanaugh. But there are there are a lot of them around. I I always I find myself puzzled why the um the public is so keen on true crime as if it was in a different category to fictional crime, because there is no such thing, the way it's presented either in podcasts or on the television, there's no such thing as objective truth. At every single cut, every single line, an editorial decision has been taken. And they are moulding the truth just in the same way that a fiction writer is moulding the truth. They do it by making sure there's a cliffhanger at the end of every episode and there's a rehash of the uh facts at the beginning of each episode. They um they've decided in their own minds who is the goody and the baddie of the piece. You know, was this a case of police missing something, or was it a case of brilliant uh detection? So the truth is when you get what is called true crime fiction on uh radio, TV, whatever it is, it's never purely true. There's editorial decisions taken throughout. Whereas what I'm doing is, and I'm taking real cases as well, but I'm, if you like, I feel rather more honest about it. I'm I'm taking the case, the kit the bones of the case, but I'm spending time looking at the psychology of everybody involved. And I can you can do that with fictionalization. You can and and I sometimes think you get to more of the truth, the human truth, than you do by a a carefully ordered recitation of facts and discoveries, so on. So yeah, that's that's that's why I like doing it the way I do it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I was I was looking through your your notes you sent me. One of them I liked I don't know if this is your term or um about being a plotter or a pantser, as in seating pants.
SPEAKER_00Is that is that um something you've come up with or no no, it's it's well known within the writing fraternity. Uh people talk about either being a plotter or a pancer.
SPEAKER_01I don't know. Can you explain the but the basic difference?
SPEAKER_00You know, I I guess people guess, but well, it's uh a plotter is someone who plots out the book carefully, they know where their ending is going to be, they know who did it, and they know what clues they're going to place along the route that the reader will follow. Uh a pancer is someone who flies by the seat of their pants, and I always imagine them setting off with a rucksack on their back, heading into a jungle with a naschete in one hand, and they uh you they hope to make it to the far end of the jungle in one piece and with a plot making sense. My fear always is you get 60,000 words in, you're right in the middle of the jungle, and you realize you can't get out. You've got no way of working out the end of the book. So the result is you've wasted, you know, six months or however long it may be writing 60,000 words and not getting to an end.
SPEAKER_01I was reading a book uh today and uh or yesterday, and there was a a great uh quote in the I've never heard of it. Apparently, I think it was Tolkien um conjured it up. Uh you catastrophe, which is uh basically a a sort of a pleasant catastrophe. So your your your character, you know, in your using your analogy, you know, you're you're stuck in the woods, you can't see a way out for your characters. You've sort of you've riddled, you know, written yourself into a dead end, uh, and then you sort of come up with a kind of a ridiculous plot twist. But to get them out of, you know, I think in in Tolkien's case, you know, he had Gandalf on a and an eagle came and rescued uh Frodo or Bilbo or whoever, but um you know that that sounds a bit desperate. I guess, you know, if you did it well, it would work out well. You know, people they're probably famous examples of it, but if you know it it might look a bit ridiculous, um, you know, rather than a very cleverly made plot.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you you can't let it look off read like uh Deus Ex Machina, you know, the the audience you know, the the the gods descending in a cage onto the stage at the end of a Greek play to actually sort it all out. It's and nowadays audiences are really clever. You know, the the people who read this sort of stuff or watch it on television are so much more sophisticated now than they used to be. And so they won't they won't buy into that. You know, they want to know that the you know that the thing that resolves the plot for them has been seeded earlier on in the book and but just cleverly disguised sometimes, so they don't realize how important that clue is. Um now I I tried very hard never to have to you know to result in some sort of sleight of hand at the end. I did actually once get uh I got myself into a bit of a uh cul-de-sac, uh it's in book eight, nothing but the truth. Um, and it was my partner who came up with the idea and she said, How about this? And I said, No, that'll never work. No one will ever buy that. And she said, Oh, I think they will. Um, and I wrote it, you know, and it was published, and I was sort of cringing, just waiting. And it turned out everyone said it was the most brilliant switchback, they said brilliant reveal that they'd ever seen in a book. But I didn't have any confidence in it. I thought it was I thought it was too far-fetched. Happily, none of the readers did.
SPEAKER_01Um I took you you bought your wife a very nice present off the back of that because I did. Impressive, yeah. I got on the subject of novels, I've got a a novel I've been working on for 10 or more years. Uh literally almost 20 years, actually. Um, it's based on a um trial I covered once. Um and basically, I uh when you say about plotting, I I've tried to plot it out. I know how it ends, and I I've obviously written a start, but I've I I've got stuck somewhere in the in the middle, you know, me making the them get to the end. I think my problem was that I ended up with a you know, I made it a fiendishly complex plot when I should have started, you know, with you know, I'm interested in that and when you did your first novel, were you did you start off with an incredibly clever, fiendish plot, or was it very was it sort of a little bit simpler?
SPEAKER_00No, it wasn't in fiendishly uh clever. It was um it was based on a real case, uh my first murder trial. So it was easy to that extent. Um and it's what they call a cutthroat defense in the trade, where the prosecution know that one of two defendants did it, or more than one, maybe more than two, um, but they can't point the finger at any one of them in particular. In this particular case, it was it was a security guard uh got shot dead, and one of the gang said, Well, I took I took an invitation gun, so it couldn't have been me. And the other one said, No, you didn't, I took the invitation gun, it couldn't have been me. And so the prosecution set essentially could set them to fighting one another, and it's uh from a prosecuting barrister's point of view, they can be quite a lot of fun. But so I had that part of the plot ready-made. The rest of it I had to work out as I went along, um, and I didn't know where I was going, which is perhaps why I feel that if I could wind back time, I'd restructure the book slightly because it's I mean you know, readers seem to like it. There's nearly 5,000 four and five-star reviews on Amazon, so I'm not complaining, but I think it could have done better if I had uh thought about it a little bit more before heading off into the jungle.
SPEAKER_01And so just uh how how long after the real trial was that did that book come out? And and how many people sort of knew which case you were referring to?
SPEAKER_00Um it let me see. Uh it came out only a few years in its original format after the trial. I changed. All the names and I made the um I I resituated the actual offense so it shouldn't have been too noticeable, too too recognizable. I guess if you were one of the two chaps who was actually involved, you might recognise the way in which they they planned the raid on this particular security ban. Um and but the great advantage of writing stuff based in the 60s that is that most of the players are dead. Um and particularly in my case, if you're writing about uh police corruption, which in the 60s in London was absolutely endemic. I mean the the the Metropolitan Police was described by its own commissioner at the CID, who said was the single most routinely corrupt organization in the metropolis. That's the Commissioner of Police.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I was interviewed Sir Sir Ivan Lawrence uh a little while ago for this podcast, and I think you know him, and he he he was uh saying similar things about the police almost routinely lying during trials, you know, in the back in the days before um uh you know police and criminal evidence acts. Um yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, it was they it wasn't just lying in the court, they would make it making up confessions and planting evidence and uh bullying and beating people up until they would admit crimes they hadn't committed, or you know, framing completely innocent people, or in as I say in one of one of my books, The Fall Guy, there was a group of Metropolitan Police officers who were selling licenses to commit crime. They would basically say, Well, you can go and commit these crimes, and we'll give you a list of potential targets, and uh we want 50% of the proceeds, and if you get caught, we'll make sure the evidence gets lost, or we'll put pressure on the officers who are not part of our little gang to make sure they change their stories. And that was actually happening. Uh uh at the back of the all the books I put a historical note to tell you, you know, where the you know the truth lies and the fiction begins. But it's it it it was from the perspective of someone working then, it was absolutely horrific. I mean, I you know, my dad said to me when I went to the bar, um I was living and working in London, he said, if you're in trouble, um you know, find a friendly copper. That was that was advice I soon abandoned after the first few months because there were very many friendly coppers, and uh but too many of them were corrupt. Yeah. Um so yes, I I worked at the same time uh uh only a couple of years after uh Ivan Lawrence, who is uh you know an acquaintance or a friend of mine, and who I have thanked for his input into one of the books. Um but yeah, it was it was very like that. Um that's sorry, I was just asking.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, can I just ask you about the um the legalities of of writing books? So you're not putting at the beginning based on a true story, or you know, you're a fit if it's fictionalized, you know, because obviously every book has a part the publishers have a lawyer who wants to make sure that they're not going to get sued over a book. Um so yours, you know, because they are just they might be based on a true case, but it's it's sort of disguise, and nobody can say, well, you've libeled me, or or or are you just saying, Well, this came out in court anyway, so I'm um there's nothing.
SPEAKER_00Well, exactly, you've put your finger right on it. Insofar as the case has come out in court, you know, the evidence has been heard in court, it's a matter of public record. Yeah. So that's the first thing. You know, you can't be sued for telling the truth. Um, secondly, you can't sue for libel once you're dead. You know, states don't have a reputation, and libel is damage to a person, living person's reputation. So if I'm writing about the 60s and 70s, most of these players are dead now. And thirdly, when I'm writing about people who are still alive, if I have any doubt about proving what I'm writing, I will make some changes just to camouflage. But I never bothered, I didn't bother saying this is based on a true story. I will tell my fictionalized story, and in the end, I will say, right, now this is based on the following case or the following people, and I will set it out, and where I need to, I will also set out the original materials from which I did my research.
SPEAKER_01When you read or you know, other people's novels, or when you watched, you know, TV drama or films, what are the sort of most glaring mistakes that you notice? Obviously, you as an uh all novelists have to cut out certain bits which just would make the whole you know thing lag, you know.
SPEAKER_00Oh, absolutely. You can't set out the uh the entirety of all the evidence and all that stuff because even when you go to a real murder trial at the Old Bailey, for example, there are long, long passages that are just tedious, proving chains of custody or scientific evidence and so on. So it's not it's not all dramatic. So uh, like any sensible editor, I will cut out the dull bits and just sort of skate over them. Um, but I do know that everything in my book actually can happen and or has happened in terms of legal uh procedure and how the police work and how the prison service works and so on. The things that drive me most up uh wall are inappropriate relationships. I mean, I used to watch, well I didn't watch many of them, but I watched enough of the uh Judge John Deeds to know it was it was complete nonsense. I mean, judges do not have affairs with witnesses or or counsel um who are involved in their cases. It's just that just doesn't happen. I've got some examples. My son is an actor, and he was in Silent Witness for a couple of seasons. And there was one memorable occasion where the two forensic scientists who who front the whole series have an interview with a uh a child uh without a parent being asked to be present, without anyone else being there, and uh, having then broken all the rules that you can possibly imagine, they go rushing off to themselves to try and catch the criminal.
SPEAKER_01That's what I yeah, solemn witness is the one that really bothers me. It's like, what? Pathologists don't invent, they're not detectives, they it's just totally preposterous, the whole premise of the program. Yes, I agree.
SPEAKER_00No offense to your sort of drives me crazy. Um I used to I never used to watch him for that reason. Of course, I did watch it because I wanted to see my son's performance, and I I said to him, Well, you were very good, but the plot, as you know, is complete drivel, which it was. So, I mean, there are it's easier, in fact, to name those where they don't get it wrong than to name those where they do, because essentially almost all of them get it wrong in one way or another, and some of them, you know, manifestly across the whole piece, it is just wristable, and I can't watch it any longer. But there are some honorable exceptions. Um, there was a series called Silks, I don't know if you remember that, from might have been the 80s or the 90s, which was extremely good, well acted, and written by a man who had been a barrister, so he got that right. And I've I watch uh the Bosch series on television, who which are the books come from um the pen of Michael Connolly. Now he used to be a crime reporter in Los Angeles and had many years on the crime beat, and he really gets it right.
SPEAKER_01And I'm it I'm full of admiration for him because Yeah, I think the same way that the wire is written by a guy who used to work for the Baltimore Sun, I think, as crime crime desk. So um, thank you, Simon. Uh, this has been really interesting, and I I hope people go out and read your books. Um, I think I might buy one, buy myself one.
SPEAKER_00Um, that'd be great. The Charles Holburn Legal Thrillers, and I have developed the reputation as the British John Grisham. So if you put a search into any search engine for the British John Grisham, you will probably come up with my name. And the the the latest one is called It's called The French Vendetta. It's a good place to start, actually, because it's slightly out, it's it's a slightly a standalone novel. They're all part of the same series and they do follow Charles's development through the years. So, but the good thing about the French vendetta is uh it's set, it's not set on the crime-ridden streets of London. It takes a slightly different approach. So it's a good place to start if anyone was interested.
SPEAKER_01I wanted to ask you, because my I've got this pet theory that in sort of 10 years or 20 years, there'll be there'll be um people like yourself, or you know, proper novelists will be making handmade books. They'll be sold as handmade books, in other words, somebody has written them by hand. Uh, but they'll be sadly the minority and the vast majority of books will be AI written. Do you is that something you fear, or do you think we are sort of already hitting that way?
SPEAKER_00I don't I think we are going that way. There are many, many um uh books now on Amazon which have been written by AI. Most of us think they can be detected. They are very they are oh by definition derivative, because AI can only write them from what's been inputted from previous books. So there's nothing, you know, there's nothing new about any of them. The Society of Authors has now um developed a thing called the human-authored uh logo and scheme, whereby publishers can sign up and agree that on the front of the book or somewhere prominently in it, there is the the sign of sign, it's like a hand sign of the human-authored. So they will know immediately a purchaser that it has not been produced by AI. Do I think it's going to get worse? Yes, I think it is bound to. Um and the difficulty isn't that uh human beings won't write very good books, they will, but the risk is they get swamped. They already do get swamped by what's on Amazon now. There are, you know, there are millions of books there. And unless your publisher or you are prepared to put serious money into marketing, they get lost. They're just simply drowned uh behind all the rubbish. So I think that will get worse. But I I'm still, I don't know, maybe I'm being over-optimistic, um, but I still believe that humans understand the human condition in a way that machines never will. And therefore, we should, the good writers amongst us should be protected.