Interview with the Author

Hi Fishy People

Today the Shark Fisherman of Wales or SFOW for the purpose of this interview will be speaking with David Williams or DW about the second in his Ken Frane books,
"The Miners' Strike Mystery" which is to be published shortly by Lulu.Com 

SFOW: Hi, hello David, how are you today?
DW: All Right mun! Feeling every inch of my 53 years today.
SFOW: So that would have put you at the age of 18 when the Miners' Strike started in 1984. Do you have any links to the Mining Community?
DW: None at all. Billy Bragg was a miner and a docker between the wars, well I was a Gog.
I was living in North Wales, well I tell a lie, my home was in North Wales but I was a student at Watford College in Hertfordshire when the Miners' Strike was on.
SFOW: And what are you memories of that time?
DW: Well as a callow youth, I had no understanding really of what was going on. I had no empathy being from more rural stock and actually felt that the whole thing was a nuisance. It was on the news every night and you just got bored of it. Jan Leeming was gleaming but in the living rooms up and down the land, you started to realise after the Falklands Conflict, the Toxteth and Brixton riots and with the Miners' Strike that you were living under a great oppression under Thatcher.
It was only after returning to South Wales a few years after the strike and out of college did you start to realise what impact the strike had had on people.
SFOW: This therefore was the background to your new crime thriller'The Miners'Strike Mystery'? 
DW:Yes mostly, I felt that I needed to exorcise a few ghosts politically about that time and how it has impacted on today. I am interested in the collective unconscious and I feel that anybody who lived under Thatcher has some form of trauma to process through.
SFOW: Tell us about your protagonist 'Ken Frane' 
DW: Well Ken Frane is essentially me, my character, a few years older at 58 but world weary, cynical, hard done by and basically trying to make amends for former wrongs. He is a failure and I as a writer ascribe to failure as a philosophy of life. I do not believe that there is any such thing as success because I have never experienced it or tasted it. Life as lived by Ken Frane is lived through the prism of failure and defeat.
SFOW: You have introduced a Watson to his Holmes in this novella?
DW: Yes, he had a bit of a lonely existence in 'The Leiden Triangle Mystery' and I felt organically while writing the novella that he needed somebody to bounce ideas off. Terry Heston and Ken Frane are the 'newish' old crime fighting duo. They both harbour a grudge against South Wales C.I.D for the way that they were treated after the Lynne Black case in the late 1980's. They are both of an era. They were both ordinary bobbies who policed the strike in 1984/85 and Ken Frane thinks rightly or wrongly that it's time to re-open the cold case of 'Andy Halligan'. One ancient murder turns into a new one and Ken Frane and Terry Heston have a job on their hands trying to break through the 'closed shop' of present day Valleys community life.
SFOW: You've set it in the Rhondda Fach? 
DW: Yes, the Rhondda Fawr always gets all the 'sylw' (attention) so I thought that I would base this in and around Maerdy and Ferndale.
SFOW: Did you have any qualms about writing about something that is still so emotive for many people?
DW:I feel that it's about time that people wrote about this period of time.We had a hard faced conservative government then and we have more of the same now. Thatcher was Satan and these are Satan's children now.
SFOW: Strong Words?
DW: What are the point of weak words to describe a time like this. I became politicised as an older person, youth is wasted on the young type of thing.
SFOW: What research did you do for your new novella?
DW: I read Val McDermid's 'A Darker Domain' which also uses the Miners' Strike as  background to her story. I watched the old news footage on You Tube and I put myself back at the time, seeing striking miners near Lime Street station, Liverpool with their yellow collecting buckets and hearing Arthur Scargill wiping the floor with a young reporter on a mid day news programme on the radio. There were some Bristolians down in the same college in Watford and they wore all the badges and had the socialist labour stickers. I also remember them wearing 'Solidarnosc' badges. I bought Billy Bragg tapes but I did not understand and that saddens me looking back. I should have been wearing the badges and going on marches but I was just a casual observer. I was too comfortable and too scared.  I do not pretend that this is an authentic voice of one who was there or part of it. Mine is the dispassionate eye of an observer. I am writing this novella to bear witness to the time and give testimony,all be it through a fictionalised story and characters.
SFOW: David Williams Diolch
DW: Diolch i chi