Always more to learn! -- Joy Kluver

 Having written three police procedural books, and watched copious amounts of 24 Hours in Police Custody and 999 What's Your Emergency?, I've learned a fair amount about policing and what happens in the first few days of an investigation. But there's always more to learn.

I'm currently in the middle of a four-week writing course run by Graham Bartlett, a former Chief Superintendent with Sussex Police. In his time on the force, he's been a beat PC, a detective, and then in charge of policing in Brighton. To say he has a lot of experience is an understatement. He's an advisor to authors such as Peter James and Elly Griffiths and has recently had two fiction books of his own published. Graham understands the balance between authenticity and adrenalin-pumping drama. Still, as we all know, if the errors are glaringly obvious, we're likely to shut the book or turn off the TV.

For the course, Graham gives us the scene and it's up to us to interpret it. We decide what evidence is relevant and what might be red herrings. Eventually (or next week in my case), we'll write a long piece but before that, we've been encouraged to write small sections about the evidence, the team investigating, the victim and the suspect. We've had the scene video and photos to examine, input from a real-life CSI/SOCO and also thoughts on the crime scene from a behavioural analyst. 

We upload our work onto an online forum and critique each other. Despite being given the same information, we all have different ideas. It's been exciting to see this develop - not just the case itself but the back stories we've given to our protagonists. Keeping up with the work with two bank holidays has been a little tricky but it's meant I've had to be more focused and procrastinate less. It's also been lovely to develop some new characters and for the ideas to start running through my head again. Who knows - maybe this will be a new police team for me.

If you'd like to do this course or any of the one day course that Graham runs, then click on this link.  There's a forensic course on Saturday 20th May and Covert & Intelligence on Saturday 24th June.