Phil Hall
speaker
50 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Phil Hall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
07759 441 808.
07759441808.
I had a career with Kimberley Clark in numbers and finance, and then I had a really serious bike crash. Someone hit me from behind, knocked me over the handlebars. This was actually on Mid Street, where I live in Nutfield. Knew nothing about it, but he just sort of woke up almost, standing on my drive, bike beside me, covered in blood, and thought, oh, God.
And tipped her back into the house and my dear lady wife went, rushed me down to East Surrey Hospital. They took one look at me, took me straight through. Long story short, I was there for about 10 days and I smashed in a bit of the skull up here. And if it hadn't been for a bike helmet, I wouldn't be here today. So was that a bit of a life changing moment for you?
Did you kind of reappraise what you were doing and where you wanted to go? It didn't feel so at the time, but it's turned out that way because the recovery was six, eight months or so. And my wonderful company said, thank you very much. We found someone else to do your job. And yeah, in fairness, they gave me a bag of money and pushed me out the door. I was really miffed about that at the time.
But it did give me a chance to think, what am I going to do?
Yeah, absolutely.
Then that kind of brings it to sharp relief, doesn't it? Yeah. And so I thought, well, I've always fancied trying to write a book. How hard can it be? You're talking to someone who's written six books, and I can tell you, it is very difficult. Yeah, it is quite a slog, isn't it? My first one would show. So I started with a writing course over at East Grinstead.
John Pye, the guy who runs a bookshop, who's been very good to me, actually, because he stocks my books. They ran a little course above it, and I did...
six eight ten weeks or so of writing courses and they then said okay well start writing so i started writing a standalone story which was a bit of a psychological thriller set it in lingfield eventually it was like i'm going to publish it get it out there because you can just keep revising and revising and revising and rewriting and editing and subbing yeah Absolutely, it goes on forever.
If you want it to go on forever, then it does. You need to write crime or romance if you want to sell stuff these days, because they're the things that people buy. So I thought, I'll create the new Morse and Lewis. I've got these two really good friends. One is a glasses-half-full guy and, you know, take on the world and... He's always happy, relentlessly happy.
And the other guy is really cautious. The glass is half empty. I'm not going to watch the match tonight because I know we'll lose. But the two together are really good opposites. And so I thought, I can take that basic character, obviously extend it and change it and develop it a little bit, and create two characters. They're my two leading detectives.
And then because I live in and around Reigate, I thought, well, that's the place to write about. Do your friends know that they were used? Oh, they do. They do.
Oh, absolutely, yeah. I mean, the current one starts off with like a chase like you get at the start of a James Bond movie.
I was walking it so you could pick up the sights and the sounds so you can describe it to people. Because you can't just say he ran down here and he ran down here and he ran down there. You've got to change it a little bit. But making it local means you can walk the area and feel it and sense it and then try and capture that idea when you put the story together.
absolutely yeah and one or two people have said to me the thing they like about the books is the fact that they can relate to the area and they can walk this piece and they can walk that bit is that a bit tricky though in case somebody says well actually you got that wrong because if it's based on fact it's based on fact
I'm sure I have. Things change. So one of the stories has a murder, takes place outside the Barclays Bank, which, of course, most listeners will know, used to be in the Hind of the High Street, but it's no longer there. So it dates the book a little bit.
Yeah, that can be a problem. But there is quite a lot of variety, so I state the books have been in the Surrey Hills, and I did that deliberately so that... It was Ryegate and Red Hill and all of the podcast area, but also some of the hills outside. So I've got quite a lot of variety to play with. Whilst I like to try and create and describe an area, I don't want anybody's house to have a problem.
So one of the stories features a fire and a house burns down. So you don't actually have a specific address for that? No, absolutely not. So that's based on an estate near Redhill, on the east side of Redhill. And I walked the estate so I could describe it and I got to know it very well. But when it came down to it, I picked a number that doesn't exist.
Tell me why that is. The body that features in the start of the story is discovered in the Baron's Cave, which is actually just underneath the Castle Grounds where we are now. And I chose that because... It's an interesting location to use and all the people I spoke to, nobody really knew very much about the Baron's Cave. Hardly anybody had been to visit it.
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