Yorkshire Writers' Lunch

Redline is the second  "Harry Vos Investigation". Set in Belgium, the novel begins with the discovery of a body - identity unknown - and takes us, and Vos, into the worlds of tattooing, nuclear waste and fracking. I caught up with author Dave Rigby to chat about the book, Belgium and the business of writing.  What inspired you to write about environmental issues and shady land dealings? I’ve always had an interest in environmental issues and specific concerns about nuclear power and more recently, fracking. There’s been an increasing need for storage sites for nuclear waste, particularly with problems around reprocessing of nuclear fuel, the decommissioning of older power stations and recent proposals for building new ones. Likewise, there’s been a lot of interest from companies wishing to develop sites for fracking, another area of activity which has serious environmental implications. (Although fracking is not currently permitted in Belgium, there’s an a...

This week the Writers’ Lunch grills author Dave Rigby about his latest detective thriller, Shoreline. Harry Vos, your amateur detective is a rounded character with lots of life experience. How did you get to know him? click here for details His name was my starting point. I saw it in a newspaper and thought it was a good mixture of a very English sounding first name and a Flemish / Dutch sounding surname. Because I’ve holidayed in the Flemish area of Belgium quite a bit, I decided to base him there. I thought it would be good to have a man in his sixties as the central character, retired (like me) and not a professional crime investigator. That way I don’t have to learn about police procedural stuff. I can just allow Harry to make it up as he goes along (as I do!). I had a strong idea of his character from the start (unlike the plot which unrolled as things developed). Basically I envisaged a solid man but with a number of strong character traits. He’s dogged, stubborn, gets a...