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Bath and North East Somerset Libraries

Jeff Dowson: Crime in the West Country


The Jack Shepherd private eye stories are set in Bristol. They are contemporary, tough, and issue driven. Jack takes on clients in distress, in danger, sad, angry, hurt… They come to him when all other avenues have closed. He is the keeper of The Last Chance Saloon.

Changing the odds book cover

Crime is such a flexible genre. It’s about right and wrong, life and death, good and evil, exploitation, violence, the good guys and the bad guys. And those themes can be explored in anything you want to write about.

In the series (4 thrillers so far) Jack has tackled stuff like dog fighting, people trafficking, transgender, exploitation of the homeless, organised crime, black market body parts surgery, racism, Brexit, the Dark Net and Islamophobia, rogue data brokers, pornography and the cultures of corruption and self-interest.

This is big stuff – always told through an investigation which begins when a client knocks on his office door.

Jack is tough and smart and he can hand it out as well as take it. But the important thing about him is, he’s an honourable man. The difference between right and wrong is etched deep. He’s actually based on bits of all the American PIs I’ve read and watched down the years… Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer, Spenser and my all-time favourite, Jim Rockford – a brilliantly rounded, knowing character with a wry sense of humour, created by the great James Garner and written by one of my heroes, Stephen J Cannell.

As for my other character, Ed Grover…

I decided a change of style was needed for a different kind of investigator. I wanted to write in the third person (Jack Shepherd belongs to a first-person tradition where the reader learns no more than the lead character discovers). And I wanted to sprawl a bit. Use a different writing style altogether. I looked around for a setting that would give me lots of scope.

I grew up in the 1950s. As a kid, I didn’t realise just how bad times were. I was protected from that by my parents who struggled physically and psychologically to get through the years following World War II. It’s only recently that I’ve begun to look back at that time.

New Friends Old Enemies Book Cover
One Fight at a time book cover

Ed is an American GI who battles his way across Europe from Omaha Beach to help win the war, spends another 4 years in West Berlin trying to win the peace, before being sent home. Just before his repatriation, he ends up in Bristol visiting a family he knows, and from there the first story begins.

The early 1950s is a rich vein to mine – the recovery from a world war, rationing, the black market, extortion, corruption, capital punishment, the terrors of being homosexual, racism faced by the actual ‘Windrush Generation’, soldiers coming home from leave with Lugers taken from dead Germans, the infamous underworld of 1950s club land, the growth of organised crime… the material just keeps on giving.

Bristol and the Westcountry influence my writing to a huge extent. I was born in Blaydon on Tyne, lived in the Northeast until I went university, then moved to Bristol at the close of the 1970s. Like Jack Shepherd I know this region. I want it be another character in the stories – like Northumberland is to Vera Stanhope, Edinburgh is to Rebus, Los Angeles is to Philip Marlowe and Jim Rockford. I hope I’m doing that successfully.

JEFF DOWSON, JUNE 2021

About The Author

Jeff Dowson began his career working in the theatre as an actor and a director, specialising in productions of contemporary British and European playwrights.

From there he moved into television as an independent writer/producer/director.  Screen credits include arts series, entertainment features, drama documentaries, drama series and TV films.

Turning crime novelist in 2014, he introduced Bristol private eye Jack Shepherd in Closing the Distance.  The series developed with Changing the Odds, Cloning the Hate and Bending the Rules.

The Ed Grover series, featuring an American GI in Bristol during the years following World War 2, began with One Fight At A Time.  The second book New Friends Old Enemies  was published in May 2021.

Born in northeast England Jeff now lives in Bristol.  He is a member of BAFTA and the Crime Writers Association.

This article was first published in 2021.