Bad Boy: A Jason Davey Mystery by Winona Kent
About Bad Boy
Bad Boy: A Jason Davey Mystery
Musical Mystery 5th in Series
Setting - UK: London and Derbyshire
Publisher : Winona Kent / Blue Devil Books
(September 26, 2024)
Print length : 278 pages
ASIN : B0D9PFYXB4
Fresh from a 34-day, 18-city tour of England, professional musician and amateur sleuth Jason Davey accepts an invitation from a fan, Marcus Merritt, to meet at Level 72 of The Shard to sign one of his band's programs. Marcus hands him the booklet, then leaps to his death from the open viewing platform. Thus begins a week-long quest, during which Jason is tasked with retrieving a stolen collection of scores by England’s most famous composer, Sir Edward Elgar.
Marcus shared Elgar's love of eccentric puzzles and games, and the challenging clues he's assembled for Jason seem to mirror the 14 themes in Elgar's renowned Enigma Variations. Jason's journey takes him to Derbyshire and then back to London, and a four-hour walking tour of Soho's lost music venues where, in Denmark Street, he faces a life-threatening battle with two adversaries: a treacherous Russian gangster who is also hunting for the stolen collection, and Marcus's sister—who holds the key to a decades-old mystery involving a notorious London crime lord's missing daughter.
Bad Boy is the fifth book in Winona Kent's mystery series featuring jazz musician-turned-amateur sleuth Jason Davey.
About Winona Kent
Winona Kent is an award-winning author who was born in London, England and grew up in Regina, Saskatchewan, where she completed her BA in English at the University of Regina. After moving to Vancouver, she graduated from UBC with an MFA in Creative Writing and a diploma in Writing for Screen and TV from Vancouver Film School.
Winona's writing breakthrough came many years ago when she won First Prize in the Flare Magazine Fiction Contest with her short story about an all-night radio newsman, “Tower of Power”. Her debut novel Skywatcher was a finalist in the Seal Books First Novel Award and was published by Bantam Books in 1989. This was followed by a sequel, The Cilla Rose Affair, and her first mystery, Cold Play, set aboard a cruise ship in Alaska. After three time-travel romances (Persistence of Memory, In Loving Memory and Marianne's Memory), Winona returned to mysteries with Disturbing the Peace, a novella, in 2017 and the novel Notes on a Missing G-String in 2019, both featuring the character she first introduced in Cold Play, professional jazz musician / amateur sleuth Jason Davey. The third and fourth books in Winona's Jason Davey Mystery series, Lost Time and Ticket to Ride, were published in 2020 and 2022. Her fifth Jason Davey Mystery, Bad Boy, was published in 2024. Winona also writes short fiction. Her story “Salty Dog Blues” appeared in Sisters in Crime-Canada West's anthology Crime Wave in October 2020 and was nominated as a finalist in Crime Writers of Canada's Awards of Excellence for Best Crime Novella in April 2021. “Blue Devil Blues” was one of the four entries in the anthology Last Shot, published in June 2021, and “Terminal Lucidity” appeared in the Sisters in Crime-Canada West anthology, Women of a Certain Age (October 2022). “On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog”, will appear in the upcoming Sisters in Crime-Canada West anthology, Dangerous Games (October 2024). A collection of Winona’s short stories, Ten Stories That Worried My Mother, was published in 2023. Winona has been a temporary secretary, a travel agent , a screenwriter and the Managing Editor of a literary magazine. She's currently the national Chair and the BC/YT rep for the Crime Writers of Canada and is also an active member of Sisters in Crime – Canada WestInterview:
Where are you from?
I was born in
London, England, but I immigrated to Canada with my parents when I was three. I
grew up in Regina, Saskatchewan. I moved to the west coast of Canada in 1982
and I’ve lived here ever since—first in Vancouver, then in Burnaby, which is a
city just to the east of Vancouver, and then finally, for the past six years,
I’ve lived in New Westminster, which is a city a little bit further to the
east, on the Fraser River.
Tell us your latest news?
I’ve just been
elected the Chair of Crime Writers of Canada, which is a national non-profit
organization for Canadian mystery and crime writers. I’m quite excited about
this as our mission is to promote Canadian crime writing and to raise the
profile of Canadian crime writers with readers, reviewers, librarians,
booksellers, and media—and I’m really pleased to be able to be a part of that.
When and why did you
begin writing?
I’ve always been a
storyteller. My mum used to read to me when I was very small—I remember right
back to when I was about two, and my favourite little book was about a girl who
lived in the “South Seas” in a place near a waterfall. I have very clear memory
of that. I wish I could find that book again! As I grew up—and before I knew
how to actually read and write—I drew pictures to tell stories to myself. And
then when I learned how to read, I added words to my pictures. I got really
serious about it when I was about twelve. I decided to write a novel, so I
taught myself to type on my dad’s old Royal typewriter, and I handed out the
chapters to my classmates at school. When I got to high school I had some
really fantastic teachers who encouraged me—this was back in the 1960s when
there were no creative writing classes in the curriculum at all. I remember Sam
Robinson, who was my staff advisor when I was the editor of the school
newspaper. In a fit of despair, one day I told him I was seriously thinking of
giving up writing. He replied “Are you going to give up sinning as well?”—a
quote that made it into my latest novel, Bad Boy. And I had a very
forward-thinking Lit teacher in Grade 12—Mr. Williamson—who allowed me to write
a novella for my major project—and gave me an A+ on it. That, I think, really
cemented the idea in my mind that I could seriously pursue a writing career.
When did you first
consider yourself a writer?
I didn’t really
define myself as “a writer” until I started handing out those chapters of my
first novel in Grade Eight. Before that, I’d just been writing stories to
entertain myself. After my classmates started asking for the next chapters
before I’d even written them, I realized I was onto something. And it felt
really good. I think that was probably the defining moment.
What inspired you to
write your first book?
My first book was
actually that little novel I wrote when I was twelve. It was about a young guy
named Lawrence Jenkins-Hennessey who was kidnapped and put into the hold of a
freighter sailing to England. It obviously wasn’t ever published—I had too much
still to learn about the craft. I think I wrote four or five other books after
that—I considered them “practice” novels. The last “practice” novel I wrote was
called The Sloughwater Chronicles, which was actually my thesis for my
MFA in Creative Writing at UBC in 1985. It was about a couple of English women
who meet on a train in Saskatchewan in 1882—one is the wife of a farmer living
in a sod hut on the open prairie, and the other is joining her husband, a
shopkeeper, in a little tent town called Pile of Bones (later renamed Regina). After
I graduated with my degree, and while I was working full-time for a
telecommunications company, I wrote a tongue-in-cheek novel called The
Christopher Robin Caper. That was mostly inspired by the old tv spy series,
The Man from UNCLE, of which I was a huge, huge fan. In The
Christopher Robin Caper, a young man discovers his dad—who acted in a 1960s
tv series called Spy Squad (not unlike The Man from UNCLE)—really
is a spy in real life—and the plot progressed from there to include a plot to
take over the world with satellite tv dishes. The book ended up as a finalist
in a first-novel award and I landed an agent and a contract with a traditional
publisher. We renamed the book Skywatcher. And that was my first
published novel, in 1989.
Do you have a
specific writing style?
Not that you’d
really notice, I don’t think. Although all of my previous novels except one
were written in the third person, all five of my Jason Davey mysteries (and the
prequel, Cold Play) have been written in the first person, from Jason’s
POV. I suppose that, in itself, is unusual, as Jason’s an English guy, and I’m
a Canadian woman. But I find his voice—complete with its London accent—comes
very easily to me, and his mind is an easy thing to slip into. I like to throw
in subtle bits of humour when I can, letting Jason comment on situations or
people. I like including a lot of dialogue. Sometimes I forget to provide
descriptions, and I have to be reminded to tell my readers what someone looks
like, or what they’re wearing, or what kinds of plants they have in their
sitting rooms.
How did you come up
with the title?
It was actually inspired
by two songs called “Bad Boy”. One is a really rocking, not-very-well-known
version written and recorded by Larry Williams in 1958 and re-recorded by The
Beatles in 1965. It’s about a very bad boy! The second song was recorded by
English singer Marty Wilde in 1959, and it’s more of a soft little ballad about
a misunderstood young man who’s madly in love with his girlfriend. My main
character, Jason Davey, sits down at a public piano at a train station in
London and picks out the tune on the keyboard near the beginning of the book.
Is there a message in
your novel that you want readers to grasp?
No, not at all. Many
years ago, when I was doing my undergrad degree in Lit at university, my
writing mentor Ken Mitchell gave me some excellent advice. Much to my detriment,
in my Creative Writing workshops, I was trying overly hard to emulate the great
authors whose works I was dissecting in my Lit classes. And I wasn’t very good
at it. Ken advised me to just get on with the job of writing a good story. Be
entertaining, he said. Grab your readers’ attention and their imaginations.
Tell a good tale. That advice has stayed with me all through the years. And I
hope I’ve at least been successful at that.
What would you like
my readers to know?
I’ve just turned 70,
and I literally feel like my writing career has just begun. I spent my entire
life working full-time in completely unrelated jobs, banging out novels at
night, on weekends, and days off and holidays. I managed to get eight books
published. After I retired in 2019, I got another three written, and a book of
short stories. Don’t let anyone tell you us oldies have to take life easy! I
have no intention of slowing down. I’m having too much fun with Jason.
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