ELSPETH LATIMER is a former architect turned associate tutor in crime writing at the University of East Anglia. Her debut novel The Lost Detective shortlisted for the Bath Novel Award in 2023 and publishes September 2025 with Story Machine.

Huge congratulations on the publication of The Lost Detective. For those yet to read it, what’s it about?

Thank you so much! The Lost Detective is about loss and love and landscape and redemption and endurance and joy and hope. Set in Norfolk, Dan Hennessy is an ex-police detective whose life has gone off the rails following a recent tragedy. A grieving mother asks him to find what happened to her baby son, who disappeared 21 years ago. Dan is also searching for a missing neighbour. When a body is found at a local solar farm, his investigations lead him into the landscape, and into the past.

Lee Child described The Lost Detective as “A superb crime debut – beautifully imagined, beautifully written, stylish, tense and genuinely moving.”  What on earth was it like to receive that praise?

It is utterly amazing! I still find myself thinking, did Lee Child really say that about my novel or did I make this up in a dream? I am a crime fiction researcher as well as a crime writer, and I have studied and always enjoyed Lee Child’s work, and I have learned a huge amount from the Jack Reacher series. His novels are full of drama, tension and pace, and I really admire how he achieves that while incorporating lyrical, detailed, evocative descriptions of place. For Lee Child to read The Lost Detective and say such wonderful things, this is super special to me.

Story Machine approached you about publishing The Lost Detective. How did they find you and what have been the highlights of working with them so far?

I had been writing and developing the novel for a few years, and friends had kindly read those earlier drafts. They said lovely things about The Lost Detective, and their encouragement, along with the Bath Novel Award longlisting and shortlisting, all helped me to keep going with it. One of the friends who read an early draft, in 2022, was Elizabeth Lewis Williams. She is a wonderful poet and writer of creative non-fiction, and we first met in 2016 at the University of East Anglia, where we were both doing PhDs. In 2024, Elizabeth took up a position as one of the directors at Story Machine. I was very excited for her, and we chatted about this new opportunity. We both have Scottish connections, and in November 2024 our trips north happened to coincide, and we arranged to meet for a cup of tea on the Grassmarket in Edinburgh. When Elizabeth said that Story Machine was interested in publishing The Lost Detective, it came as a total surprise, and an incredibly lovely one!

A real highlight of working with Elizabeth and the Story Machine team, has been that they have given me the creative space to fulfil my vision for the novel. Back when I was still trying to find an agent, I began to doubt my writing, and I decided to make The Lost Detective more focused on the crime elements. But Elizabeth had read the earlier draft, where the crime aspects were woven through with other strands, all of which explored different facets of loss, and she encouraged me to bring back to the novel that breadth. My intention had always been to write a detective novel that could be enjoyed by all sorts of readers, some who tend to read crime, and others who perhaps read literary and book club fiction. With Story Machine, I have been able to achieve all those ambitions. Elizabeth has nurtured the book through all its different stages, and it has been a joy to work with her.

Another highlight has been that the publication process has happened in a relatively short space of time. Last November, I was facing the prospect that I might never be published. I was also considering giving up writing. Less than a year later, The Lost Detective is making its way into the world, and this is all thanks to Elizabeth and Story Machine!

Where, when and how do you like to write?

I write in my kitchen, and my best writing time is in the morning. Some days I might write several thousand words, and other days I struggle to reach five hundred, which is the daily total I try to aim for. I have learned not to worry about this, and to know that there will be moments where my typing can barely keep up with my ideas, and slow spells, where it feels like I am squeezing syllables from an empty tube of toothpaste.

When embarking on the first draft of a novel, I will have a rough sense of the overall arc and how it might end, and I will also know certain key scenes. My main aim is to complete the first draft in a fairly swift fashion, so that I can capture the energy of the story. Lots of ideas are generated during that first draft, and I will incorporate them as I go along, but this does mean I need to do a lot of editing afterward. During this first draft, I do not allow myself to revise earlier sections or edit what I wrote the previous day. I might need to do structural edits at the end, where whole sections are omitted, and so there is no point in detailed edits on the first draft. If something looks ‘wrong’ or the writing is clumsy, I can fix these issues on the second draft as they will still look wrong to me then. I really love editing, but I feel it’s important to capture the spirit of the book first, and reach the ending, before refining the words and adjusting the rhythms of the prose and calibrating the plot.

Is there a piece of writing advice that’s really stuck with you?

I have a toolkit of techniques I have learned from the many amazing authors I have met, mainly through the University of East Anglia, where I did the Prose Fiction MA as well as a PhD. One of the key pieces of advice came from Andrew Cowan. Through his feedback, I learned that I often over-choreographed my characters. This meant that the text became overburdened with adverbs and complicated descriptions, which would disrupt the flow of the reading experience, as the reader would almost have to stop and picture, okay, so the person is rubbing their chin with their left hand and also staring into the distance, while reaching something from a pocket with their right hand… Andrew Cowan taught me to trust the reader. He reminded me that readers have wonderful imaginations, and that if you give them a few key details, then the reader can conjure up the rest.

Another very important piece of advice came from Henry Sutton, who taught me to pay close attention to the emotional arc of my main character. Readers are interested in people. If a crime novel has too much action, to the point where that action becomes relentless, then the reader may withdraw from the story, as it is not offering enough emotional depth and satisfaction. I aim to have pace and drama and intrigue in my novels, but I also describe my characters’ needs. How are they feeling right now? What do they want? As the novel unfolds, my characters are changed by what they are experiencing, and I try to capture their emotional arc and share that journey with the reader.

The Lost Detective hits that sweet spot of being both page-turning and richly layered. How did you decide how many strands and twists to weave in?

I’m so pleased that my plot has fulfilled what readers might look for in a detective novel! I like to create a plot with lots of layers, and several interweaving story strands, where the reader is piecing together various clues, but those clues may point in several directions, and I introduce twists, that then mean certain assumptions have to be revised, leading to a finale that is unforeseen but also satisfying, as the clues were all there, they just needed to be looked at from a different angle.

In earlier drafts of The Lost Detective, the plot was hard to follow… I had to set it aside for a few weeks, to almost ‘forget’ the plot, and then read the novel afresh. And I would be asking myself, am I doing enough to make this an enjoyable and intriguing story for the reader? Or am I making the story too obscure and hard to follow? Part of how I answered those questions was through instinct. I have read a lot of detective fiction, from different eras and from all over the world. This has, I think, honed my instincts. And so I would refine the plot by putting in extra sentences where I felt I was being too veiled, and take out sentences where I felt I was being too obvious. It took several drafts to carry out this process of adjustment, and between each reread I had to set the book aside, so that I could come to it as a ‘new’ reader seeing it for the first time.

You’ve said that “being shortlisted gave me the faith to keep going, and finally reach this stage, with a novel emerging from the printing press”. Can you say a little about your writing journey?

The Lost Detective started as scattered fragments, and the only unifying element was the Norfolk landscape. But then I had a moment where I realised how I could bring these strands together, and the story came vividly to life. I first entered it to the Bath Novel Award in 2022 and was excited to be on the longlist. That version did not reach the shortlist, and I could see why, as I had not refined the draft enough. I continued to work on my novel and I resubmitted in 2023. Amazingly, The Lost Detective was longlisted once more, and when I sent off the full manuscript, I hoped it would be shortlisted this time, but I was also aware that the competition attracts such a wealth of fantastic novels, from all over the world.

I was in a cafe in Suffolk when the shortlist was posted online. I kept rereading the announcement, checking that the title of my book was really on there. In 2023 there were 2370 entries from authors in 74 countries, and I was overjoyed to know that I was in the final six. Following my shortlisting, I approached agents, but could not find representation, which was disheartening. However, my Bath Novel Award shortlisting did indeed give me the faith to keep going. The BNA team have championed and encouraged so many wonderful books over the past decade, and I thought, if they enjoyed The Lost Detective, there will definitely be others out there who will want to read it!

The Lost Detective has such a vividly evocative sense of landscape. Why did you choose the Brecks, and what do you most enjoy about settings in detective fiction—both as a writer and as a reader?

It’s wonderful to hear that the settings are evocative! I have lived in the Brecks for two decades, and I have grown to love the landscape here. East Anglia is famed for its coastline, with long beaches and sand dunes, but I wanted to write about the lesser-known hinterlands. The Brecks have always intrigued me, because the area defies traditional boundaries, in that it spans across parts of Norfolk and Suffolk and is defined by the qualities of the land, its mix of heath and fen and forest and field, by its gently rolling terrain, and the long lines of Scots pines. I describe it in the novel as ‘a land of small mercies and unobvious beauty’. It is still possible to get lost in the Brecks, on winding tracks, and in deep woods.

From my childhood onward I have always read mysteries and detective fiction, and novels where there is a strong sense of place. Vivid descriptions of setting are able to conjure up a world that a reader can enter, allowing them to experience everything that is happening, to see and feel and hear and smell and taste it. When I began writing, my work always went towards crime and buried secrets. Living in the Brecks, without even realising I was doing it, I was gathering elements that would lead toward The Lost Detective, and all those ideas are deeply embedded in the landscape.

Harriet Tyce described your detective, Hennessy, as ‘a shabby Keanu Reeves type’—so, if the universe is listening, who would be your dream casting for the role?

Mr Reeves would be fabulous in the role, if he had availability in his schedule…! Dan Hennessy, the lost detective, is tall, with dark hair, and in his mid-thirties. When visualising the people in my novel, I see them in glimpses, from the corner of my eye. Readers will bring their own unique interpretation to the characters in The Lost Detective, and they will picture them differently to me. It would of course be wonderful if my book could be made into a film or a TV series! The translation from page to screen is a whole art form in itself, and I would love to see how the actors would inhabit the characters.

Alongside your novel, you’ve also been writing an academic book for Cambridge University Press, Writing the Detectives. What is it about detective fiction that continues to fascinate you? 

My fascination began with Raymond Chandler, and there is a photo of me as a teenager, reading an anthology of his Philip Marlowe novels. Over the years, my reading has been very eclectic, but I have regularly returned to the crime genre and in particular to crime series and detective fiction. When I enjoy the characters and the world that a writer has created, then basically what I want is more. And crime series give me more. The (unpublished) novels I have written have always been part of a series, and The Lost Detective is the same, in that I have ideas for future novels featuring Dan Hennessy.

In my academic book, Writing the Detectives: Character and the Series Form, I investigate the theory behind how authors create the protagonist in their crime series, but I also refer to why I am so intrigued by them. For me, these detectives have ‘a gravitational pull, a life-affirming longevity, they endure against the bounds of reason, and against the odds of fictional possibility. They offer us ways of exploring who we are, why we are here on this planet, who we love, what we value, and who we are frightened of losing. And by keeping on striving, page after page, book after book, year after year, these characters show us that it takes a lifetime to answer the questions that really matter’. These words capture why detectives fascinate me. They are about endurance, about never giving up.

Lastly, do you have any advice for writers thinking of entering this year’s competition?

My advice is – do it! Finding an audience can seem a hugely daunting prospect for an emerging writer. Is what I am writing any good? Will anyone ever want to read it? I am so grateful to Caroline Ambrose and everyone involved in the Bath Novel Awards – these are people who really love books! And they also want to reach out and support new writers and help them find their audience. Preparing your entry for the competition will help you improve your writing and your synopsis. It is like you are creating a beautiful gift to give your readers, and this awareness encourages you to make it even better. When working on the two entries I submitted, in 2022 and again in 2023, it focused my creativity, and helped me elevate my submissions to a new level, because I was doing it for other people to read. Writing begins in private, an exchange between the author and a blank page. But a book comes alive when it is shared. By entering the competition, you become part of a huge international family of readers and writers, all keen to nurture and share wonderful stories!

The Lost Detective by Elspeth Latimer

“A superb crime debut – beautifully imagined, beautifully written, stylish, tense and genuinely moving.”  LEE CHILD

Buy your copy at: Story Machine | Waterstones | Amazon | Hive.co.uk | Bookshop.org*

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