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WORK TITLE: Dead Silent
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
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NATIONALITY: British
http://headofzeus.com/books/dead-silent * https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/146285.Mark_Roberts * https://nudge-book.com/blog/2016/06/dead-silent-by-mark-roberts/ * https://promotingcrime.blogspot.com/2016/12/dead-silent-by-mark-roberts.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
Unable to find entry in LOC; “Mark Roberts” name too common, even adding “Dead Silent” … is not the same author as Mark D. Roberts
PERSONAL
Born in Liverpool, England.
EDUCATION:St. Francis Xavier’s College, graduated.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Special needs teacher and writer.
RELIGION: Roman CatholicWRITINGS
Author of plays.
SIDELIGHTS
Mark Roberts, a native of Liverpool, works as a teacher for adolescents who have severe learning disabilities. He wrote two books for children, Night Riders and The 12-Day Jinx before turning to crime fiction. His first series centers on DCI Rosen of the London police, who solves serial murders in The Sixth Soul and What She Saw.
Roberts’s second crime series follows the exploits of DCI Eve Clay in Blood Mist, Dead Silent, and Day of the Dead. In Blood Mist, Clay tries to find the killer of two ritually murdered families. Sarah Ward, writing on the Crime Pieces website, observed that Roberts “takes the relatively well worn theme of religious mania and gives a realistic context.”
The second of the series, Dead Silent, finds Clay investigating the gruesome murder of a professor of medieval art, whose body has been “twisted into a hellish parody of the artworks he loved,” according to Dorothy Flaxman, writing online on the Nudge website. Flaxman found the novel “graphic,” “creepy,” and “not for the faint-hearted.” Overall, she termed this a “good crime story but not a great one.” A critic in Publishers Weekly thought that the “medieval art theme is engaging” but would have appreciated “deeper character development.” Lizzie Hayes, blogger on Promoting Crime Fiction, commented: “Roberts is rapidly showing himself to be a master of the kind of crime fiction that delves into the nature of evil as well as inviting the reader to solve a complex puzzle.”
In Robert’s third offering in the series, Day of the Dead, Clay must find a serial killer calling himself Vindici who goes after pedophiles. On the Shots website, reviewer Adam Colclough termed this a “superbly constructed thriller” and “elegant novel.” Colclough singled out for praise the author’s take on social media and its effect on society, in particular, the clouding of “moral boundaries” and the “online world’s capacity to make heroes out of monsters.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, September 12, 2016, review of Dead Silent. p. 36.
ONLINE
Crime Pieces, https://crimepieces.com (September 23, 2015), Sarah Ward, review of Blood Mist.
Nudge, https://nudge-book.com (June 16, 2016), Dorothy Flaxman, review of Dead Silent.
Promoting Crime Fiction, https://promotingcrime.blogspot.com (December 5, 2016), Lizzie Hayes, review of Dead Silent.
Shots, http://www.shotsmag.co.uk (2017), Adam Colclough, review of Day of the Dead.*
Mark Roberts was born and raised in Liverpool. He was a teacher for twenty years and now works with children with severe learning difficulties. He is the author of What She Saw, which was longlisted for a CWA Gold Dagger.
Mark Roberts
Born Liverpool, The United Kingdom
Websitehttp://www.markrobertscrimewriter.com/
GenreCrime, Mystery
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Mark Roberts was born and raised in Liverpool and was educated at St. Francis Xavier's College. He was a teacher for twenty years and for the last thirteen years has worked with children with severe learning difficulties. He received a Manchester Evening News Theatre Award for best new play of the year. He is the author of What She Saw which was longlisted for a CWA Gold Dagger. Blood Mist, the first in his DCI Eve Clay series, went to number one in the Australian kindle chart.
Thriller set in Liverpool – and interview with author, Mark Roberts
26th May 2016
Dead Silent by Mark Roberts – thriller set in Liverpool.
Dead Silent is a violent, macabre, and disturbing thriller – firmly set in the Liverpool of the near future.
thriller set in LiverpoolRetired elderly academic, Leonard Lawson lives with his more than grown up daughter, Louise, near Sefton Park in Liverpool. One night Leonard is murdered with great brutality and his dismembered and ritually transfixed body is discovered by Louise. She runs from the house and collapses on the street to be found by passers by and assisted by the police. She cries out loud and clear ‘he’s been slaughtered’. DCI Eve Clay follows up and leads the investigation, but is frustrated by Louise’s inability / unwillingness to help as much as she feels she could… What is she hiding and / or what is she afraid of?
Clues lead Eve to the belief that two very evil killers are involved in the murder – the ‘First Born’ and the ‘Angel of Destruction’ – but who are the perpetrators behind the masks? And what do their acts have to do with three medieval religious paintings – The Tower of Babel and The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel, and The Last Judgment by Hieronymus Bosch? What dark secrets are there in Leonard’s past? Will Eve’s religious upbringing by nuns help her solve the mystery?
The action moves from pathology lab, to the university, to both the Catholic and Anglican cathedrals as Eve and her team get closer to the killers. The reader thinks the story culminates in a thrilling hunt through the bell tower and roof of the Anglican cathedral – but there is still one more revelation to come. The final twist is clever and unexpected as all is revealed and explained…
Dead Silent is a brilliant book for TripFiction. There is a map at the beginning of the locations that feature and it is easy to follow where the action is happening… Liverpool comes through loud and clear. I do, though, have to express a personal interest at this stage – Liverpool is the city in which I was born and grew up, and reading Dead Silent was a bit like heading down memory lane (though I don’t recall such a brutal murder in my youth!).
No doubt that Mark Roberts is a really good thriller writer, and that in Eve Clay he has created a complex and determined detective. Dead Silent is the second book in the Eve series – I am sure there will be more.
Tony for the TripFiction Team
Now over to our conversation with Mark…
TF: In Dead Silent you have written a particularly macabre and disturbing thriller. How do you feel as you write about such subject matter, and how do you switch off when you have finished a day’s writing?
MR: When I write disturbing scenes, or even less disturbing scenes, I am so engrossed in what I am doing that I don’t feel unbalanced by the process. After the event, when I go back and read over what I’ve written, then I think, that’s disturbing. But by this time, I’m working on the next chapter or sequence and so don’t have time to worry about it.
I don’t always write in the day because I have a full time teaching job working with teenagers with severe and profound and multiple learning difficulties. For me, the daily writing window is between 4pm and 8pm or later if necessary. I work days during weekends, holidays and half-terms. I wind down with watching football on TV, swimming, reading and arts documentaries.
TF: Do you have an interest in art history – or did you research the two works by Pieter Bruegel, and the one by Hieronymus Bosch, specifically for the book?
MR: I’ve always been interested in art and art history. I grew up close to Sudley House and, when I was a kid, I used to go running up there all the time to look at the Turners, the Gainsborough and, of course, the Pre-Raphaelites. I loved William Dyce’s Gethsemane and learned the lesson early on that you don’t have to be a massively well-known artist to be a brilliant one who can pin-down profound loneliness in a canvas around the same size as an Everton programme. Bruegel and Bosch are long-standing massive favourites of mine and I knew The Tower of Babel, The Last Judgement and The Triumph of Death pretty well but did make sure that I understood them in some greater detail because they are so essential to the story and image system of Dead Silent.
TF: In Eve you have created a feisty and determined detective. Is she based on anyone you know, or does she come entirely from your imagination?
MR: I set up a fairly detailed back story about Eve’s childhood which is crucial to the unfolding stories and a lot of what she is comes from the logic of The girl is the mother of the woman. I’d like to think she was entirely the product of my imagination and, while I’m not aware I’ve taken bits and pieces of people I know, the process of creating and developing characters involves the subconscious.
TF: Religion, if at times somewhat warped, plays a big part in the book. Why is this?
MR: I’m interested in all religions. The religion you belong to is dictated by the time and place into which you are born, an accident of birth. Me. Liverpool. 1961. So I grew up in a Roman Catholic family and, going to mass all the time, which was still in Latin when I was still in infant school, I was surrounded by theatrical rituals, statues of Jesus dying on the cross and Mary crushing the serpent under her bare feet, and the concepts of heaven and hell sold as pure facts. When I got older and started crunching it all down for what it really meant to me I came to a massive conclusion about human beings, what they do and what they don’t do. The first major piece of writing I did was a stage play Manson, about Charlie. The dramatic premise was that it doesn’t matter what the stone cold truth is, what people believe is the thing that really drives the bus. This is what I like to explore in my novels. People, in crisis, good versus evil, levels of distorted and different consciousness, the power of belief to crank up the horrific way that people treat each other.
TF: You clearly know South Liverpool (from Ullet Road, through Sefton Park, and on to Aigburth and Otterspool) extremely well. Is this an area of particular significance for you?
MR: It surely is. I’ve only ever lived outside of Liverpool for fifteen months when I got my first teaching job back in 1983-1984. I just love living in Liverpool. (The pool of life as Jung famously said). I know the streets pretty well. But I grew up in Aigburth and spent my formative years living in the house Eve lives in, with her husband Thomas and son Philip, in Mersey Road. Otterspool Promenade was my playground.
TF: Do you plan the plot in detail before you start a book? Or do you sketch the outline, and then let the plot and characters develop as you write?
MR: I usually write a paragraph, this turns into a three-four page treatment which I promptly stick at the bottom of a drawer and never look at again. I take a starting point and just go from there allowing the plot and characters to develop.
TF: What are you currently working on?
MR: Provisionally entitled, The Day of the Dead it is the next of the Eve Clay novels, the follow-up to Dead Silent, it is set in Liverpool and it is not a romantic comedy.
A big thank you to Mark for answering our questions so fully…
You can follow Mark on Twitter, Facebook and via his website
And do come and connect with Team TripFiction via Twitter (@tripfiction), Facebook (TripFiction), Instagram (TripFiction) and Pinterest (TripFiction)… and now YouTube
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Dead Silent
Publishers Weekly.
263.37 (Sept. 12, 2016): p36.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Dead Silent
Mark Roberts. Head of Zeus (IPG, dist.), $29.99 (400p) ISBN 9781784082925
In Roberts's uneven second mystery featuring Liverpool Det. Chief Insp. Eve Clay (after Blood Mist), Clay
and her team investigate the murder of elderly art historian Leonard Lawson, whose naked body was found
in his bedroom, suspended by ropes from a pole under a strobe light. Such a setup would have required
more than one killer. Lawson's grown daughter, Louise, who was in her father's house at the time, suffers an
epileptic seizure and sustains a head injury shortly after the murder. When she's questioned in the hospital,
Louise is incapable of communicating what she observed. Initial clues are The Tower of Babel, a painting
removed from the scene by the killers; a book open on Lawson's desk about Hieronymous Bosch's The Last
Judgment; and an unpublished manuscript in a locked drawer. Clay's pursuit of the killers, who call
themselves the First Born and the Angel of Destruction, maintains interest and the medieval art theme is
engaging, but the book would have benefited from deeper character development of the detectives. Agent:
Peter Buckman, Ampersand Agency (U.K.). (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Dead Silent." Publishers Weekly, 12 Sept. 2016, p. 36+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464046243&it=r&asid=670f2318056784a6f38e0f6a3e9aba95.
Accessed 31 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A464046243
Dead Silent by Mark Roberts
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Review published on June 16, 2016.
Leonard Lawson was a respected professor of medieval art. He lived a quiet life in a suburb of Liverpool, with his grown up daughter. As far as anyone knew, he had no enemies. Louise Lawson watched her father die. Before she blacked out, she saw his body mutilated and deformed, twisted into a hellish parody of the artworks he loved. Investigating a killer bringing medieval horror to Merseyside, DCI Eve Clay must overcome her own demons to unpick the dark symbolism of the crime scene.
This is a ‘grown-up’ book in that some of the content is grisly to say the least. It is very graphic in its descriptions and not for the faint-hearted. The story involved intense cruelty from the murderer and it is very. very creepy in places.
DCI Clay and her team are typical of this type of book. Eve’s story is that she grew up in a Catholic Children’s home and she is an example of how someone can survive this and come out the other side as a person able to achieve dreams and ambitions.
Unfortunately, I read a lot of this type of book and the police teams melt into similar characters. In other words, this book had nothing different to offer in this respect. The police are all dedicated and single-minded in getting the job done and the crime solved.
This is a good crime story but not a great one. The graphic scenes are needed to give the story substance. The characters are not what they seem and the story is complicated in places.
A very dark, twisted plot with some depraved characters.
Personally, I like clever, subtle crime stories which twist and turn and make the reader work for their satisfaction. This one, sadly, misses the mark. After saying that, not a bad read, but definitely not a book to be read at bedtime.
Dorothy Flaxman 4/3
Dead Silent by Mark Roberts
Monday, 5 December 2016
‘Dead Silent’ by Mark Roberts
Published by Head of Zeus,
5 May 2016.
ISBN: 978-1-78408292-5 (HB)
The first in Mark Roberts’s Liverpool-set Red River City series promised a lot in terms of creepy quasi-religious background, ample gory violence and characters with plenty going on in their lives.
Dead Silent, the second in the series, follows similar themes and doesn’t disappoint.
Liverpool’s two cathedrals have key roles to play, as does protagonist DCI Eve Clay’s difficult childhood in a Catholic children’s home. But the main action takes place in and around two chilling houses, and an upmarket adult care home with a venomous owner.
It opens, as did the first, with a bizarre and sickening murder late on a freezing midwinter night. An elderly man has been skewered with a wooden stake, and his body arranged in a parody of a famous religious painting. His sixty-something daughter saw what happened and is in hospital after an apparent epileptic fit, and seems to have been stunned into silence by the experience.
Eve Clay has another convoluted crime to unravel, and she and her diverse team set about picking apart the victim’s life in order to discover who hated him enough to visit such horror on him. And of course there are more murders, with the same theme. Art history, child psychology and plain old-fashioned man’s inhumanity to man all provide clues, but the final solution surprises everyone, not least Eve herself.
Mark Roberts clearly knows Liverpool intimately; the city itself plays almost as important a part as the novel’s characters. And in this second foray into both the place and its people, those characters begin to emerge more clearly as individuals: DS Bill Hendricks the psychologist; DS Gina Riley the ace interviewer; action man DS Karl Stone; Harper the pathologist’s quiet assistant are just a few.
The bad guys and supporting players are even more crisply drawn: vicious Adam Miller, the care home owner; Danielle, his glamorous but fragile wife; Abey, the five-year-old in a man’s body; Gabriel Huddersfield the abused religious maniac; and above all Louise, the first victim’s daughter, compassionate, damaged and clearly harbouring secrets.
Mark Roberts is rapidly showing himself to be a master of the kind of crime fiction that delves into the nature of evil as well as inviting the reader to solve the a complex puzzle. He doesn’t write comfortable books, but he certainly produces page-turners; however many times I had to turn away, appalled by the depths to which some of the characters could sink, I always had to return and read on.
Reviewer: Lynne Patrick
Mark Roberts was born and raised in Liverpool and was educated at St. Francis Xavier's College. He was a teacher for twenty years and for the last ten years has worked as a special school teacher. He received a Manchester Evening News Theatre Award for best new play of the year. The Sixth Soul was his first novel for adults.
Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years, and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives on the edge of rural Derbyshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.
Review: Mark Roberts – Blood Mist
SEPTEMBER 23, 2015 / SARAH
25715275It’s always fascinating to read a crime story set in a city you know well. I lived in Liverpool in the 1990s and, although I’m sure the city has changed considerably, many of the places mentioned in Blood Mist were instantly recognisable. Mark Roberts is a writer I haven’t come across before but I was sent his book to review by publisher Head of Zeus. It’s a high quality crime novel, well written with some very good twists in the plot.
A family is massacred in a Liverpool suburb and DCI Eve Clay leads the investigation into the killings. There is a ritualistic feel to the slaughter and, when another family is killed, police hunt for a link between the victims. In a nearby high security mental facility, a patient demands to see Eve and claims that what he has previously prophesied is now occurring.
Blood Mist takes the relatively well worn theme of religious mania and gives a realistic context. A suburban setting with its quotidian normality is contrasted with the extreme nature of first the killings and then the dogma behind them. Children are presented as possibly complicit in the crimes which adds an air of unreality but also of primeval fear. How bad can children possibly be?
Eve Clay is given an interesting back story which I’m sure will be explored in future books. I’m looking forward to reading more from this author and to further installments in what promises to be an excellent series.
Day Of The Dead
Written by Mark Roberts
Review written by Adam Colclough
Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review.
Day Of The Dead
Head of Zeus
RRP: £20
Released: May 5 2017
HBK
Buy Now
A year after he escaped from prison, Vindici - a serial killer who dispensed his own form of justice to paedophiles on the streets of Liverpool, is back in business. The videos of his crimes placed online have made him into a folk hero to many.
DCI Eve Clay and her team think they’ve started to make progress in their investigation, when matters take an unexpected turn. They receive a photograph of Vindici taken at a Mexican Day of the Dead parade. If their prime suspect is 5,000 miles away, then who is behind the latest killings?
Day of the Dead would be worth reading as a superbly constructed thriller, even if it didn’t have much more to it than that – an elegant novel. As it happens it has some even more intriguing aspects [even if somewhat disturbing]; thought-provoking social commentary about the direction our society appears to be headed.
Roberts makes the city of Liverpool a character in its own right; one with a multi-layered and often troubled past. Roberts is also a master at creating tension pulling a couple of neat tricks on his readers and crafting a genuinely gripping finale.
In Eve Clay he has a strong lead character, forever balancing the demands of her job, the ghosts of her past and the responsibilities of being a mother in a way that is convincing and sometimes touching. She is backed by an equally well drawn supporting cast with detailed back-stories of their own.
What lifts this book above most similar fare is the clear-eyed way Roberts looks at how the internet and social media are changing our society; in particular the way moral boundaries are becoming ever more blurred and the online world’s capacity to make heroes out of monsters.
This is a thoughtful, well-constructed thriller that tackles the darkness that lurks upon the damp floor of the Internet’s shiny appeal.