My Crime Reading And Writing.
With nearly 500 poems written (85 in Print, two Haiku books out (about 550 self-published – three in general print),135 stories penned (31 in print) Four short film scripts, (two of them filmed), 21 short play scripts, (9 of them staged, one three times, two twice), plus a plethora of non-fiction, talks, etc, my personal writing output is quite prolific. My non-fiction Pub Sign books are my most successful work to date commercially and financially. I cross genres quite a lot, with horror, science fiction, fantasy, humour and even erotica (I wrote two stories and a feature for Scarlet, a now discontinued women’s erotica journal. One story -’The Too Beautiful Boy’ originally aimed there way was picked up instead by Mammoth for their 13th Best Erotica Of The Year collection, possibly my most prestigious success to date).
Crime writing is a relatively minor area for me to have covered to date. Just 18 of the works I have listed have a crime theme.
As a reader I grew up reading a lot of true crime. My Mum’s mother, my Nan, was an avid fan of True Detective magazine, with lots of reproduced news clippings, often of Prohibition and Mafia killings, sometimes with grainy but garish press photos of gun shot riddled bodies slumped in cars or on pavements. My Nan also had many collections of short horror stories and Dennis Wheatley horror novels which I read through when young.
At school, assigned to write a short story as homework, I initially thought of nothing before the night ahead of having to hand it in, and decided to plagiarise a late night short horror show I saw on TV, thinking my teacher wouldn’t have seen it. As I wrote it, something weird happened, as my story took on a life of its own and I not only enjoyed what I was writing, it was now genuinely original, and I got a good grade for it.
I continue to include true/fiction crime writing in my insatiable reading. I need to live to be 350 to get through all the as yet unread titles I own.
In the strict cult (Divine Light Mission, aka The Prem Rawat Foundation) that I was tangled up in from 1981 to 1985,writing was against the rules as the cult feared members keeping records of what we got up to. Soon after I escaped I went to college and university. I was asked to write for a college magazine and this became my first work in print. At Uni the following year, I was editor and among the authors of a poetry book. I never stopped writing since, in all mediums. I won my first award (The Silver Stake Creatures Of The Night Poetry award in 2003).
My first theatre piece was staged twice around 1998. Some of my photos first got used in print c.2012. My first podcasted play went out in about 2013. My first commissioned book came out in 2019.
My Crime related film (I wrote the script for this though I was not present at the filming) Watching Paint Dry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mPtHTVwq6A
You can catch me at readings and performances at various venues. I most frequently perform at Preston's Vinyl Tap pub, which hosts regular open mic events. I am often referred to as their 'poet in residence'.
Photos taken by myself, except the shot of me with my guru, taken by a reporter, and the shot from Deity Of The Day, captured on my behalf from the audience.
Arthur Chappell
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