Being a Detective by Stuart Gibbon and Stephen Wade

Val Penny ♦ October 13, 2019 ♦ Leave a comment

Crime writers are, by the nature of their work, blessed with excellent imaginations. However, if you are writing a police procedural novel, you want the procedures to be as accurate as possible. Enter Stephen Wade and Stuart Gibbon with their new book Being a Detective. I am particularly pleased that Stuart Gibbon has taken time to visit my blog today.

Thank you for inviting me to feature on your blog, it’s great to be given the opportunity to talk about our latest book, ‘Being a Detective’ and how it came about.

My background is in policing, having spent 30 years in the service, working in the Metropolitan Police and then Lincolnshire. A large part of my career was spent as a Detective at various ranks. As a Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) I worked on a specialist unit as the lead Detective responsible for the investigation of Murder cases.

I retired from the police service in 2012 and, following a break to recharge batteries, set up my own consultancy service (GIB Consultancy) to help writers with police actions and procedures to ensure that their work is accurate and authentic. This service is now well-established with a varied client base. Authors tend to send me a list of questions to address or a section of their work to fact-check. Although the majority of my work involves helping crime writers, I have advised across a real cross-section of genres including sci-fi and romance. It’s hugely rewarding to be able to help writers and to play a small part in their writing journey.

I met crime historian Stephen Wade at a literature festival a few years ago and we have since become good friends. Our first book The Crime Writer’s Casebook was published in 2017 and has proved to be very popular, particularly with the crime writing community. I would describe it as a reference book which contains lots of useful information about crime, historical and current. It includes Chapters on Murder investigation, DNA, police custody procedure and includes a number of true crime case studies for context.

Our second book ‘Being a Detective’ was published in March this year. It’s a little different to the ‘Casebook’ as it’s written in an A-Z format and is a ‘Readers’ and Writers’ Guide to detective work past and present’. Once again it’s for crime fans and covers both historical and contemporary periods. You can find out how detectives were first used way back in 1842, read about the history of detectives and the challenges facing modern detectives today. The book brings us right up to date with sections on cyber crime, keyless car crime and DNA tagging to name but a few. It’s full of case studies and is intended to tell you everything you need to know about UK detectives. The book contains more than 100 sections identified in alphabetical order from the ABC principle of crime investigation through to Zombie knife. We hope that Being a Detective provides an interesting read for fans of the crime genre and becomes a useful addition to the bookshelf.

Many thanks for inviting me to feature on your blog, Val, it’s been a pleasure as always.