Peter Chegwidden

After a fascinating career of widely varied employment it has come to this: writing for fun.

A proud Londoner by birth, I came to love Essex and Kent in equal measures and have settled in the latter over these last many years.

In employment I have found myself at the pleb end of things as well as in middle and senior management, and even ran my own business for a while.

Most of my working life has involved ‘customer interface’ as it is now known, and undoubtedly my experience of people I have met and those I have worked with, over many years, has helped shape some of the characters I have written about.

Mostly able to see the funny side of things I felt the time was right to inflict my sense of humour on a wider audience.

I am a recent convert to crime novels and have now read numerous examples in just the last few years. So my first book, Deadened Pain, parodies the crime novel genre and does so with a mixture of humour, drama and romance after a fashion.

My characters are mostly caricatures, somewhat larger than life, intentionally so. They are totally fictional.

I live on the isle of Sheppey in Swale, Kent and it may be my home area influenced the creation of the fictional Paslow, who knows? Sheppey has a warm place in my heart with the rest of Kent not far behind.

My second work, Sheppey Short Stories, is based in a very real place, but once again all the characters are fictional. All kinds of stories lie therein, some are funny, some sad, some poignant. There is satire and mild mocking humour, and tales that will be touching, and one or two that might touch a nerve!

After spending much time in the travel industry I ended up lorry driving and then bus driving! I worked for Swale Borough Council on refuse and recycling so I understand something of “dustcarts” and wheelie bins! (see ‘Deadened Pain’). I had a brief spell as a Community Rail Partnership Officer on the Sheerness branch in Kent, and the railways feature in the sequel to Deadened Pain: ‘Dead Corrupt’, and to a much lesser degree in the third of the trilogy ‘Dead Departed’.

Sheppey and Kent are very much the inspiration behind Sheppey Short Stories.

Certainly personal experience and knowledge, and some excellent first-hand accounts, have had some effect on the core background to my writing. There are serious ‘messages’ in my crime novels.

The misery of drug addiction, issues with underlying prejudices, social ills and problems, slavery, political arrogance and stupidity, corruption, mental health matters ..... these and other undercurrent themes roll along behind the facades of the stories, occasionally to the fore.

And I tend to leave a few loose ends for good measure!