STEVE HARDING

A London crime novel

BADBLOOD

Graves don’t stay shut.
Neither does the past.

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Complete manuscript · Seeking representation

01 — EXPLORE THE LIBRARY ↓THE NOVELS OF STEVE HARDING

The manuscripts

The library.

A story behind every spine.
Select a book to open it.

Bad Blood

Behind the books

Steve Harding

A little about me. I’ve been writing for twenty-five years, longer if you count the notebooks I never finished. It happened around a job, a family, a fair amount of travelling. A page or two in a hotel room. A chapter in whatever flat or house I was living in that year.

Some of these manuscripts go back to the early 2000s. A few are newer. I’ve spent the last couple of years bringing the lot of them up to scratch, and no, I don’t claim to know it all. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and I’m reminded of that most mornings. But I turn up for it, every day, the way you’d turn up for a job you actually wanted.

More about Steve

None of this happened alone.

A retired Metropolitan Police murder detective went through my crime novels and told me, without much ceremony, where I’d got the procedure wrong. Between him, a handful of beta readers I trust, and a few others, every book left the process stronger than I could have made it on my own.

Thank you for stopping by. I hope you find something here worth staying for.

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Synopses, manuscript extracts & development notes.

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Historical fictionAnother Life LivedSteve Harding

Historical fiction · Espionage

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy meets Fifty Shades of Grey, starring Flashman.

Another Life Lived

Harry’s Memoir

Working title

Every good liar remembers the truth. Harry just chooses not to tell it.

Current status · Seeking representation

Synopsis

Harry tells his own story, decades of it, wry and unreliable and honest about exactly none of the things that matter. He starts as an eighteen-year-old kitchen worker in 1970s London. He ends up somewhere else entirely.

It begins in a hospital, for reasons Harry keeps deliberately vague, where he meets a sharp, watchful woman he privately nicknames “Mousey.” Her interest in him feels less like flirting and more like she’s taking notes. At home, Carol simmers in the background, an ordinary life Harry can’t commit to and can’t quite walk away from either. Someone’s following him. The “accident” he claims to be looking into isn’t what he’s telling people it is.

Then Bruce recruits him. A handler, enigmatic in the way handlers always are, who sets Harry on a slow road from ordinary young man to someone who can move through a much colder, more dangerous world, Cold War intrigue, Russian tangles, the whole shebang. Harry is never sure who he is working for the British or the Russians.

Decades pass. Harry rises further than his working-class roots ever suggested he would, nicknamed “Sir Harry,” for a reason you can guess. He moves through high society on the arm of the magnetic Victoria, whose glittering world runs on trust, control, and vulnerability in roughly equal, roughly volatile measure. Then there is Miriam the Merciless.

Told with dark humour and a refusal to flatter himself. Nah not really. Harry’s memoir traces one man’s slide from small deceptions into a life built almost entirely out of them. Love, loyalty, class, espionage, reinvention, and never once does the reader, or Harry, quite land on who he is.

Harry lies to everyone: the British, the Russians, Carol, Victoria, and you. Somewhere in these decades is one thing he told the truth about. Finding it is the game. Working out why he chose that one is the punchline.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy meets Fifty Shades of Grey starring Flashman. Cold War tradecraft and class-climbing ambition fused to private, power-charged intimacy, narrated by a roguish cad who’ll happily admit he’s often in the right place at the wrong time, or is it the wrong place at the right time? Just a man who kept talking, sleeping, and bluffing his way through history, and taking full credit for none of the courage.

A brief synopsis, intended to give the flavour of the book. Not a full or final summary, and subject to revision.