Jul 22

Jul 22 Nick Sweet

Author Nick Sweet

Biography

Nick’s crime novel, The Long Siesta (Grey Cells Press, the crime imprint of Holland House, September, 2015), was praised by a number of top crime authors, including Nicholas Blincoe, Caro Ramsay, Paul Johnston and Howard Linskey. Critic Barry Forshaw also wrote a positive review of the novel in Crime Time and followed up by giving Nick and his book a mention in Brit Noir, a guide to the best contemporary British crime writing and film.

Nick has also had stories included in prestigious anthologies in recent months, including The Mammoth Book of Jack The Ripper Stories (Little Brown, ed. Maxim Jakubowski) and Sunshine Noir. Nick’s first crime novel, Flowers At Midnight, was published by Moonshine Cove, an American publisher, in 2012, and it was praised by the likes of Vincent Lardo and Quentin Bates. He has had around twenty short stories published in North American magazines, including Descant and the Evergreen Review.

So far, Nick’s books can be divided up into crime novels, like Bad In Bardino, and works which are centred more on relationships, such as One Flesh - which focuses on a love tangle set in a Welsh mining village in the 1980s. Another of Nick’s novels, Young Hearts, tells the story of a love triangle set against the backdrop of World War One, while One Flesh concerns itself with gay as well as heterosexual love.

Nick’s crime novels can also be divided into different sub-categories. For instance, Bad In Bardino, is a PI novel set in Spain, and in this book, which is told in the first person, we see everything through the private detective’s eyes; while Switch and Only The Lonely, both set in London, are shorter but pacy stories in which we see the action from different points of view – often through the eyes of the criminals. With The Long Siesta, a third-person narrative set in Seville, Nick again chose to tell the story so that all of the action is seen through the eyes of the main character, in this case Spanish police detective Inspector Jefe Velázquez.

Nick is British, but is currently living with his family in Fuengirola, Spain. Originally from Bristol, he studied at the universities of Cardiff and London, and lived for a long time in the English capital, where he ended up teaching English Literature and English Language in an FE college. He has moved around a fair bit, and has also lived and taught in Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Brighton, Barcelona, Bilbao and the city of Malaga. His experience of life in different places has helped his writing, and his books are set against a range of backdrops.
Nick has always taken a keen interest in sport, particularly in cricket and football, and he was a useful cricketer in his youth, having opened the batting regularly for Downend’s first eleven in the Western League.

Nick speaks Spanish fluently and reads widely in both English and Spanish. If he had to choose his all-time favourite crime novels, then The Long Goodbye and The Postman Always Rings Twice would both be up near the top of the list. Elmore Leonard’s Pronto, Get Shorty or Bandits and Jim Thompson’s The Getaway would also figure, as would Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key. Nick also loves to read contemporary crime writers, to keep up with what his peers are doing, and is as likely to be found reading the latest Ian Rankin, Don Winslow or Lee Child, say, as rereading Tolstoy or Hemingway, or Don Quijote in the original Spanish.

Anyone who reads One Flesh and then goes on to read Bad In Bardino (or vice versa), might be excused for thinking these books must have been written by different authors, so different are they in terms not only of subject matter but also style. If so, then Nick would be happy with this state of affairs, because he feels that authors should try to keep their own personalities out of their books as far as possible.

Nick wants people to enjoy reading his books and keep turning the pages, and he would like to encourage satisfied readers to post reviews on Amazon or Goodreads, or wherever they see fit.