Super Sleuth

Lesley Thomson has built a bestselling series of novels around her highly rational detective, Stella Darnell. She tells Simone Hellyer that crime takes a back seat in her books

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Crime fiction is about more than just murder, asserts Lewes-based author Lesley Thomson. For her, the crime is often in the background. The real story revolves around her characters’ complicated relationships.

“I write novels that have deaths in them and people have to solve a murder. But, for me, there are other reasons for writing, like relationships, class and life. And that is what really interests me,” she explains.

Lesley divides her time between East Sussex and Gloucestershire with her partner and a “raggedy poodle” called Alfred. Her second novel, The Detective’s Daughter, was a number one bestseller and has turned into a series that has sold more than 750,000 copies so far. The series focuses on Stella Darnell, a cleaner and the daughter of a former police detective who develops a private detective business after his death.

Cleaning and sleuthing may seem like completely incompatible professions of first inspection, but Lesley believes there are parallels between the two: “What I have shown throughout the novels is that cleaning is like detection because you have to have an eye for detail. Cleaners enter a place that is a chaotic mess and restore order, which is sort of what a detective does too.”

In her latest novel,