Ron Morgans, author of Kill Chase (August 10-21)

Please welcome Ron Morgans, author of Kill Chase. Ron will be chatting on LibraryThing until August 21st.

Thank you, Abby. It’s a pleasure to be here. Hello everybody. Ron Morgans here. Thanks for having me.

I have three paperback thrillers. The Deadline Murders, Kill Chase and The Emerald Killers. All are part of a series named The Fox & Farraday Mysteries. The Deadline Murders is the first in the series and introduces my two main characters, Henrietta Fox and Cass Farraday. They are here in LibraryThing and all over the internet.

Henrietta Fox is a paparazzo. A wild, flame-haired girl in biker’s boots and leathers, with an Irish temper. She rides a Yamaha on the streets of London stalking celebrities for the tabloid gossip pages.

Her partner is Cass Farraday, a six foot three, ex-Repton public schoolboy turned tabloid reporter with a devious line in interviews.

She’s a kind of female sleuth who gets into all kinds of international trouble.

HENRIETTA FOX: How did she come about?
I’ve been a newspaperman all my life, working with press photographers. I’ve worked on eight UK national newspapers including the Sun and the Daily Mail, the TODAY newspaper and the Daily Mirror. I was the editor responsible for the picture coverage of the Daily Express, Today and the Daily Mirror at various times in my career.

I guess in the States the word tabloid is kind of looked down upon? Visions of the National Enquirer, etc issue forth?
In Britain a tabloid is simply the shape of the paper, not necessarily it's policy. They are almost all tabloids now, including The Times.

In my early days in newspapers, Fleet Street was a very male oriented place. You never saw women journalists or photographers, with a few, rare exceptions. Women were given jobs as secretaries or reference librarians.

I was picture editing the broadsheet Daily Express in the late sixties when a young Irish American cameragirl came to join us from Boston, Massachusetts. She was 28 and had wild, flame-red hair and she took no nonsense from the blokes in the office. She gave them back as good as she got.

I had 51 male cameramen at the time in London and if they got out of line with her, this girl soon sorted them out. She was well respected for it, and became a top press photographer, travelling the world for the Express.

Later, as I moved on around other newsrooms, the daughters of that girl from Boston's generation forced their way onto British national newspapers - and they were better newspapers for it. They completely changed the attitude of the men in editorial, and it was reflected in the papers themselves, changing them from being very chauvinistic to a much better balanced outlook.

Now camerawomen go to Iraq and Afghanistan on an equal basis.

In the nineties and two thousands a new phenomenon arrived. The cult of celebrity. Readers couldn’t get enough of showbiz stars and TV soap stars. Young Royals at play were popular - then came sports stars spending their new found money. Paparazzi agencies sprung up like mushrooms all over the world and completely changed the content of the papers. The pictures were raw and exciting.

Celebrities and minor celebrities realised they could get into the papers by going where the paparazzis gathered. Tramp and Browns nightclub. Chinawhite and the after Premiere parties were the first. Others soon followed. It became a part of newspapers.

Now the Public Relations Officers work hand-in-hand with the paparazzi agencies, feeding the papers demand for celebrity pictures. Of course, some of the celebrities , mostly the wannabees, can’t handle it and destroy their own careers. The camera is a non-forgiving beast if you’ve had too much to drink.

I dealt with many paparazzi in my time and I thought Henrietta Fox would be more interesting and real if she were one. So Henri is an amalgam of all those camerawomen with whom I enjoyed working and admired over the years.

CASS FARRADAY is a typical reporter. Erudite but a bit irreverent and disbelieving, which is necessary in a reporter. He’s used in the books as a foil, really. Gives Henri someone to bite. I desperately wanted her to be self sufficient. I've never believed this guff about the dizzy girl who's always saved by the hero. In my experience it’s usually the other way around.

These are my web addresses:

http://ronmorgans.com/

http://ronmorgans.blogspot.com/

http://twitter.com/RonMorgans

I meant to add the ISBN numbers:
The Deadline Murders 9788461291632
Kill Chase 9788461291656
The Emerald Killers 9788461291649