ROLL UP, ROLL UP... FOR THE SHOWMAN DETECTIVE

William Hussey has drawn on his childhood living in a fairground family to create the most unique fictional cop for years in Scott Jericho. He reveals the Sliding Doors moment that led him to writing, his near-death experience and why he makes librarians wince

- By Matt Nixson

ILLIAM Hussey was training in the commercial department of a North Yorkshire law firm when he was ordered to draw up the papers to evict two women from their nursery, in a city centre property earmarked for redevelopment by its landlords.

The request left the young solicitor - who until the age of 12 had lived a seasonally peripatetic life with his fairground family - questioning his previous career choices.

“I went back that afternoon and told my principal I felt terrible,” he explains. “He looked baffled: ‘If you hadn’t done it, someone else would,’ he told me. But that’s not a good reason to do anything, let alone this.”

Hussey quit the firm that very day and, having heard about an MA in creative writing at Sheffield University, took a leap of faith that would take his life in an entirely different direction. That was almost 20 years ago and the rest, as they say, is history.

Now a successful young adult author, and making waves in crime fiction with his “fairground detective” Scott Jericho, of whom more shortly, Hussey chuckles: “In schools you always get asked how much you earn as a writer. There’s no doubt I'd be making more from the law but, as I always say, very few people look back from their deathbed and think, ‘I wish I'd earned more money’. It’s always, ‘I wish I'd done more of what I wanted to do.”

It’s an apt figure of speech for the 47-year-old, rapidly becoming one of the most unique voices in crime writing, who in September 2019 was told he’d be “dead by Christmas” unless he had emergency surgery to fix a bicuspid aorta - where a missing part of the heart valve or “leaflet” means blood is flowing back into the organ as it pumps.

Sometimes fatal, the issue is often to blame when otherwise super-fit sportspeople who haven’t been diagnosed suddenly drop dead after their valve ruptures.