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The lawyer who was brought to book
Neil White
By day, Neil White cracks criminal cases; by night, he creates them. Jenny Simpson speaks to the Penwortham author about juggling his job as a top prosecution lawyer with being a crime novelist
“You can never be too far-fetched – there will always be something worse on a court file somewhere.”
The hero of Neil White’s crime novel series, reporter Jack Garrett, is used to coming across some grisly crime scenes.
In the latest instalment, Dead Silent, Jack investigates a case where a woman buried alive tries to claw her way out of her makeshift coffin.
But however gruesome the fictional scenes he creates, lawyer and author Neil knows there are worse crimes which occur in real life.
Dad-of-three Neil works as a senior prosecutor in east Lancashire three days a week.
The rest of the time, he channels some of his experiences from the courtrooms into writing his gritty crime thrillers.
“I have always been interested in crime,” says Neil, who lives in Penwortham.
“Even when I was a kid, it was crime novels I used to read and things like the Famous Five and Secret Seven.
“When I was training to a be a lawyer, I always thought I would be a criminal lawyer, not another type.
“So it was always going to be crime fiction that I wrote.
“Working in the courts helps me as I write because I feel comfortable in that zone.
“I’m not starting from scratch.”
The tale of Neil’s own life so far almost reads like a novel itself.
Neil grew up in a single-parent family on a tough council estate in West Yorkshire.
He dropped out of school with one O-level and spent the next seven years living in bed-sits and on benefits.
But he turned his life around by returning to education in his 20s, completing a law degree at the then Lancashire Polytechnic in Preston and qualifying as a solicitor when he was 30.
He began writing fiction in the evenings after work, producing his first three novels while still working full-time for the Crown Prosecution Service.
“It got to the point where something had to give,” Neil says.
“I dropped down to three days (a week) so I could carry on writing.
“But it’s good to get out in the real world eight hours a day as well.”
Dead Silent follows the story of Claude Gilbert, a man who disappeared 20 years ago after the corpse of his wife was found, apparently buried alive, in their garden.
Gilbert was suspected to have murdered his spouse before killing himself, but his body was never found. When crime reporter Jack Garrett is contacted by someone claiming to be Gilbert’s girlfriend, he eagerly leaps on the chance to solve a decades-old mystery, but becomes caught up in a dangerous game.
Neil says the real-life tale of Lord Lucan’s mysterious disappearance inspired the plot line to some extent.
He says: “The idea was what if Lord Lucan contacted a reporter and said, ‘I will come out of hiding if you prove I’m innocent first.’”
Neil says he is still taken aback to see his novels lining the shelves of bookshops but he has a huge fanbase across the globe.
“You see the books in the shops and it’s still a bit like, ‘What’s that doing there?!’
“I get e-mails from people in Australia.
“Every time I get e-mails, I’m normally sitting looking out at a drizzly cul-de-sac in Penwortham.
“You never think that someone has read what I have written while they are lying on a far-flung beach.”
Dead Silent is out now, priced £6.99 and published by Avon.
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