Q&A: Hazell Ward, Author of ‘The Game Is Murder’

We chat with author Hazell Ward about The Game Is Murder, which is a fresh and immersive murder mystery that riffs on crime classics, where the reader is put in the role of the Great Detective, reinvestigating an infamous never-before-solved case from 1970s England.

Hi, Hazell! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?

Well, I have been writing for a very long time, and this is my debut novel.

So – slow learner.

I live in Wrexham – a small town in North Wales that no one had heard about, until a certain Mr. Deadpool and his friend bought our football club. Now we have tourists coming from all over the world, which is fabulous.

But still feels a little odd.

I was an adult education teacher for a long time, but, while the people I worked with were lovely and I enjoyed teaching, I always knew that it wasn’t what I really wanted to do. I wanted to be a writer. When my children were grown, I thought, perhaps, my time had come.

I decided to give up work and give it a good go. I did an MA and then a PhD in Creative Writing, and really committed to writing a book that was good enough to be published.

And here we are.

I may be slow, but I am not a quitter.

And I got here in the end.

When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?

I have always loved reading. I used to read while walking to school (I only walked into a lamppost a couple of times).  And after school. And during school, too, sometimes. I do remember being told off because I had been reading a novel before the lesson started and failed to notice that the teacher had begun the lesson ten minutes earlier, and that, all around me, the other kids were writing things down.

I was about seven or eight when I realized that books were written by real people, and that writing books was something you could do as a job.

I have wanted to be a writer ever since.

Quick lightning round! Tell us:

• The first book you ever remember reading: It would have been a ‘Ladybird book’, though I don’t remember which one. Ladybird books were a series of books for very young children, very popular in Britain. I don’t know if they were published in the US, too. My mum tried to encourage my sister and I to keep our shared bedroom tidy by promising to take whoever helped out the most to our local bookshop to choose a new Ladybird book each Saturday.

  I won that competition every week. It took me years to realize that my sister, who never lifted a finger all week, just waited for me to finish reading my new book, before borrowing it and reading it herself in our lovely clean room. Older sisters are so mean!

• The one that made you want to become an author: I’m not sure I know the answer to this question, because I don’t remember ever not wanting to be an author. But I do remember especially liking books with writers in them. Jo March in Little Women, I remember, particularly impressed me. Like me, she was always hiding away somewhere reading a book. Or she stayed up writing by candlelight.
  I would have done that, too, but I was a clumsy child, and my mother would not trust me with matches. I used a torch instead.

• The one that you can’t stop thinking about: Perfume, by Patrick Suskind. It is a remarkable book. A book that really shouldn’t work. But it does. The protagonist, a perfumier  named Grenouille, is utterly unsympathetic. Vile, even. It is a novel with almost no dialogue, because Grenouille cares for no one, and no one cares for him. The narrator of the novel pushes the reader further away, rather than trying to draw them in.

In fact, Perfume breaks all the rules of Creative Writing. And yet, I could not stop reading it. Perfume is not a novel that shows you how to write. It is a novel that shows you that when you know how to write, you can do anything.

I’m still working at that.

Your latest novel, The Game Is Murder, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?

Traditional whodunit. Untraditional true-crime. Funny.

That is five words, if you put a hyphen between true and crime.

Which I do.

Definitely, or, at the very least, probably, not cheating.

What can readers expect?

Lots of games. Lots of surprises. A cracking mystery. A little bit of tongue-in-cheek humor. And some mild taunting, too.

Where did the inspiration for The Game Is Murder come from?

From Agatha Christie. And Dorothy L Sayers. Margery Allingham. And Anthony Berkley.  It came from all those whodunits I read while I was growing up, and all those I continue to read as an adult.

I took the game element that has always been a part of the genre and just added more of everything. I love the essential campiness of whodunits. It brings the reader in on the joke. It says, ‘Look, we know murder, and the investigation of murder, isn’t really like this. We know that. But if it was – wouldn’t that be fun?’

And it is. It really is.

Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?

I really love David Verreman. He is funny and charming, but he also displays eccentricity bordering on insanity, too, I think. He tries very hard to keep up the illusion that the investigation is just a game to him, but there are one or two moments where the illusion cracks and you can see a little glimpse of the child he was, and the person he might have been, had his nanny not been murdered when he was a child.

Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?

I had never written fiction based on fact before and was shockingly unprepared for how much research it would take. After spending far too much time flipping through the research to find what I needed, I set up some proper recording systems, which made the task much easier.

Other than that, it was plain sailing, really. I believe there was a pandemic at some point while I was writing The Game is Murder. But, if so, I barely noticed it. It’s like having a love affair. While I’m writing, I don’t really think about anything else.

What’s next for you?

I’m currently writing my second novel. After a lifetime of chasing the dream of being published, I had not given a moment’s thought to what happens next. I didn’t have the foresight to make my debut novel the first in a series of novels, unfortunately, so now I am busy writing a whole new novel, that I hope people who enjoyed the first book might like, while also trying to tempt in new readers, too.

Lastly, what books have you enjoyed reading this year? Are there any you’re looking forward to picking up?

So many to choose from! I am terrible at choosing ‘favorites’ because there are so many favorites out there. So, I thought I would just name the last three books that I read, instead.

• The Names, by Florence Knapp, about the ripple effect of the choices we make, and the power of a name, is both beautiful and sobering, too, at times.
• The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place, by Kate Summerscale, is a meticulously researched non-fiction account of both a miscarriage of justice and the capture of a serial killer. I bet Kate Summerscale has good filing systems!
• All the Colors of the Dark, by Chris Whittaker. Made me cry. Several times.

I’m currently waiting, impatiently, for the next Hawthorn and Horowitz novel, by Anthony Horowitz. Anthony Horowitz is the Watson. His detective, Daniel Hawthorn, is Sherlock Holmes.

One of them is a genius.

The other one solves the case.

Will you be picking up The Game Is Murder? Tell us in the comments below!