John Dean – Crime Writer

Picture: Kirkcudbright by John Smith

Crime fiction author John Dean has written before about the importance of a strong sense of place for crime fiction writers and reflecting that theme is the success of the website www.tripfiction.com, which allows readers to track down books by searching for favourite places rather than favourite authors.

The result is that more and more people are using the site to arrange holidays and short breaks around the location of novels.

If you visit www.tripfiction.com and key in John Dean, for example, you will find details of John’s DCI Jack Harris novels, whose primary location is the English North Pennines (the towns of Levton Bridge and Roxham are fictional, although Levton Bridge is modelled on Alston) plus quite a few scenes in southern Scotland in more recent books in the series, which is published by The Book Folks, a Joffe Books company.

Now John, who has lived in Dumfries and Galloway for eight years, has written a feature examining the way the area has inspired a number of crime fiction authors. The piece can be found in the Features section of the website here at www.johndeancrimewriter.co.uk