Featured Interview With Roy A Higgins
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I’m retired now and living in the Ribble Valley in rural Lancashire England. I was born a few miles away in the market town of Chorley but left when I was four years of age to live in Hyndburn. I’ve lived in the Ribble Valley since I married 44 years ago and I have no desire to live anywhere else in the world.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I became obsessed with books a an early age but more with owning them than reading. I still have books that I bought with pocket money 60 years ago and I still haven’t got around to reading some of them. I started writing about 25 years ago when I was asked to write books about electronics. I didn’t begin writing novel until about 5 years ago to fill my retirement days.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
My favourite modern day novelist is John Grisham but as I’ve read everything he has ever written I’ve had to move on to pastures new. Recently I’ve been reading Peter Robinson and David Baldacci, but I’m currently reading Val McDermid.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
My latest book is Satan’s Whiskers, I’ve been writing it, and re-writing it, for about three years on and off. When I was young I played in a rock and pop band. While travelling in the group’s van we rear-ended a lady driver, pushing her onto a pedestrian crossing where she collided with a male pedestrian. The man was angry with the poor woman until he realised that she wasn’t the cause of his discomfort but that we were. On recognising the driver of our van, his mood changed. He told us the story of how he’d discovered a dead baby hidden inside a cardboard box. There’d been rumours that the child was dead, and that the drug addicted parents had hidden the body in a squat. He decided to discover if the rumours were true, and crashed through the upstairs window of the derelict house using a mechanical digger left unattended on a nearby construction site. I decided to use this story as the baseline for a series of vigilante killings.
In the story the pedestrian is taken home in the van and is told by his wife of the missing child. The drug addicted parents run from the squat during the commotion as Seamus, crashes the digger through an upstairs window of the house, and they hide in a disused factory building where they are discovered, a few days later, by children playing along the canal towpath. The police investigation reveals that the parents have been tortured and died in much the same way as their infant. This leads Detective Inspector Trimble to the conclusion that Seamus, or a member of the band Satan’s Whiskers, must be the killer, as they alone witnessed the dead child.
When a young girl is raped while walking her dog in nearby woodland the vigilante reacts once again, and Trimble realises that he may have a serial killer on his patch.
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