Hello!
So its Saturday morning, which can only mean one thing, its the Triple S post. This week its the turn of Hemmie Martin.
About Hemmie:
Hemmie Martin spent most of her professional life as a Community Nurse for people with learning disabilities, a Family Planning Nurse, and a Forensic Mental Health Nurse working with young offenders. She spent six years living in the south of France. She now writes full time.
Hemmie created the DI Wednesday series, featuring DI Eva Wednesday and DS Jacob Lennox, set in and around Cambridge, with fictional villages. There are four books in the series so far. Hemmie has also written a psychological thriller, Attic of the Mind, and two contemporary women’s fiction, The Divine Pumpkin and Garlic & Gauloises. Mental health often features in her novels due to her background of forensic mental health nursing. Hemmie is a member of The Crime Writer’s Association.
Wednesday’s Woes
When I was a child I adored Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series. Being an only child, the characters became my friends and I loved getting to know them more as the series progressed. I loved the camaraderie, the adventures, and George, as I too was a tomboy – it gave me permission to be as I was in a world later dictated to by ‘Jackie’ and ‘Blue Jeans’. I read some of the books to my own daughters when they were young, and I enjoyed revisiting the stories again and seeing the pleasure in my daughters’ eyes.
At High school I wrote all my English essays about a fighter pilot – Hayden Moss. My teacher said I’d written a book about this character over the years, but I look back now and think that perhaps that was my first foray into writing a series.
Later, I adored Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple series, preferring this character to Poirot, I suppose I have a preference towards a female protagonist. Having said that, Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus is a tremendous character and series, so that blows my theory out of the water.
I’m coming across new authors on a daily basis thanks to blogs such as this one, so my TBR pile is growing taller each day, especially as I currently prefer reading paperbacks rather than using my Kindle.
My own crime series featuring DI Eva Wednesday and DS Jacob Lennox, is currently comprised of four novels – ‘In the Light of Madness’, ‘Rightful Owner’, ‘Shadows of the Mind’, and ‘What Happens After’. Each book is a complete story, but if you want to read Wednesday and Lennox’s backstory in chronological order, then the above order will do just that.
Wednesday is a competent DI, but lacks confidence in herself at work and as a daughter, hence she sometimes exhibits passive-aggressive traits. She fiercely guards her private life from her work colleagues, especially her mother’s mental illness. However, overtime, thanks to a crime that encircles her mother, and her half-sister’s role as a journalist, some of her private life is revealed, causing her anxiety, as she fears it will prevent her from rising up the ranks in the police force.
She is also anxious about mental illness lurking in her own mind, and she wonders whether other people see it there?
Thanks to a shameful event in her past, Wednesday remains single, fearful of trusting men again. Her half-sister, Scarlett Willow, has no such worries, and being bi-sexual, is never short of a partner of either gender, and it’s only when she begins dating Lennox that it causes concern for Wednesday. She is struck by worries of how it could affect her working relationship with Lennox, and twinges of jealousy – something she learnt to live with as she and Scarlett grew up together. Scarlett is striking in appearance, whereas Wednesday is rather plain.
I’m at the planning stage for the fifth novel in the series, which the publisher is keen to publish towards the end of 2017 – so I had better get on with it!
Useful links:
Winter Goose Publishing- Hemmie Martin
Hemmie Martin Amazon Author Page
Huge thanks to Hemmie Martin for taking part in the Saturday Series Spotlight post! 🙂
