Mari Hannah tells Steve Pratt how she created her North-East-set crime novels as a result of being forced to change her career

HAVING her first novel published was an exciting moment for Mari Hannah, even though it was in Germany. “I was so overwhelmed my book was out somewhere I drove to Cologne, booked into a hotel and then went to bookshop because I wanted to see my novel on the shelf,” she recalls.

“But I couldn’t find it anywhere. I asked someone and they said they were getting it in the next week. I was a week early.”

Today when I phone her, she’s juggling numbers. That novel she searched for in Cologne – The Murder Wall – was published in this country in April. A second book in the series, featuring Tyneside detective Kate Daniels, will be out in November.

“I’m in the middle of the third book edit. I have book five in my head and have given my agent number four. It’s something I’m learning as I go along, trying to remember what number I am in the series,” she says.

Hannah is a former probation officer, whose career was cut short in the 1990s when she was assaulted and injured while on duty. Her badly-damaged wrist needed major reconstruction and typing was one way of trying to get movement back in her hand.

Now a full-time writer, she admits she’s not one of those people who’s always wanted to be a writer since they were eight. Her route into being published was circuitous, to say the least.

London-born, she came to the North- East when her father, a soldier, was posted here. She loved the area so much that she stayed and now lives in Northumberland with her partner, a former detective.

When she began writing while recovering from her wrist surgery, Hannah found writing prose difficult. Then an American screenwriter she met suggested she might find writing scripts for the screen suited her more.

“I really changed tack and went to screenwriting. I taught myself how to do it because it’s a completely different thing – and I really loved it,” she says.

She put the book aside (“although it was still there and I wanted to finish it”) while she worked as a film and TV scriptwriter, also writing plays for radio and theatre.

SHE received support from regional screen agency Northern Film and Media and New Writing North. At one point she pitched to the BBC the idea for a TV series based on characters in her, then unfinished, crime novel The Murder Wall.

Winning a place on the BBC North- East New Voices scheme saw Michael Chaplin, the Tyneside writer who created Monarch Of The Glen for the BBC and writes regularly for Live Theatre, assigned as her mentor.

“Working with him was amazing,” she says. It also gave her the inspiration to go back and finish writing The Murder Wall in the light of everything she’d learnt.

Hannah was drawn to writing crime novels. The Tyneside setting and female protagonist were what she’d always wanted to feature.

“I’ve had so many people lately who’ve said they love the book because it’s great to identify with places and areas.,” she says. She talks enthusiastically of a website, TripFiction, that advocates reading books in the places where they’re set to give an extra something to the read. Edinburgh, I point out, organises walks in the footsteps of crime writer Ian Rankin’s books. “If I can do for Newcastle what Ian Rankin has done for Edinburgh I will be very happy,” says Hannah, who won the Northern Writers’ Time To Write award in 2010.

The starting point for her books is a theme like divided loyalties, a subject that’s always fascinated her. Having an ex-policeman as a partner also influenced her. “Although you don’t think about it constantly there’s always that thought that something might happen to them. In a way I wanted to put Kate Daniels in danger. There’s lots of me in there, but the story came from the theme,” she says.

She’s proud to have been chosen for the new authors section of Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, having attended and been inspired by workshops and talks in previous years.

Now, of course, there’s every chance that The Murder Wall, an idea she once pitched as a TV series, will end up on screen. Various production companies, including one involving North-East director Ridley Scott, are considering the book.

Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival runs from July 19-22 at the Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate. Box Office: 01423-502-116