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.
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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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Magical realismDrawn for YouSteve Harding

Magical realism · Noir

Who Framed Roger Rabbit meets Sin City.

Drawn for You

Working title

She was drawn to solve crimes. Now she’s living one.

Current status · Seeking representation

Synopsis

Thirty years. That’s how long Nina Noir has spent as the hardboiled heroine of a rain-soaked comic strip, solving tidy murders in ink under the hand of her creator, Max Carter. Then a dead man in one of Max’s own panels refuses to stay dead, and Nina wakes up. First a strange prickle of sensation. Then full consciousness. Then the terrifying realisation that the line between page and world is dissolving under her.

She’s pulled out of Max’s strip and into the studio of his rival, Damien Wolfe, where she meets Scarlett, a model turned character pulled into an erotically charged existence neither woman chose.

Max himself sits at the centre of the unravelling, a solitary, ageing artist who realises the only woman he’s ever loved is one he spent decades drawing, and who now has to figure out what it means to have created her, and fallen for her. Working against him is Vincent Black, increasingly unstable, whose experiments in blurring art and reality have stopped being mischief and started being dangerous, staged “impossible crimes” bleeding into the real city, echoing panels straight out of Nina’s fictional casebook. Circling the wreckage: Charles Whitmore, the magazine editor leaning on Max to make Nina “sexier” for a shrinking market; Vivienne, whose motives nobody can quite pin down; and Detective Sergeant Langley, a real investigator closing in on a truth nobody wants uncovered.

Speech bubbles start appearing over real Londoners. The city itself starts behaving like a comic page. Max, and Nina, must understand, and stop, a force rewriting the border between fiction and life before it swallows them whole.

Nina has solved thirty years of murders without once asking who wrote the ending. Now speech bubbles are floating over real Londoners, the city is laying itself out in panels, and somewhere a pen is moving that isn’t Max’s. She knows how every case in her strip ends, the detective wins. She’s just realised nobody ever told her who decided that.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit meets Sin City. A cartoon detective steps off the page into a hard-boiled, sexually charged real world where her creator’s pen still hasn’t let her go.

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