In December 2011, I began a writing exercise. The plan was to write a new murder story every week and post them online for one year. I made this very clear when I named the project “52 Murders”.

I got just over halfway (to murder 27, to be exact), when I felt a bit burned out from the whole thing and took a break. I figured it would just be a week or two and then I would pick up where I left off.

It didn’t exactly go that way. It was nearly five years later when I posted a new story, only to drop the habit a couple of weeks later.

Then, finally, I got sick of this being an unfinished project and I told myself that I was going to finish them all off, even if they were the worst stories ever written.

They might be. I don’t know. I really can’t judge it objectively. But they’re done.

They are posted at https://52murders.wordpress.com if you want to read them. Below are some notes on the writing of the stories and the course of the project. I don’t recommend reading them without having read the acual stories first.

1. The First Time

Ugh. I don’t like this at all. It took me a surprisingly long time to realise that I shouldn’t try and write like I went to public school.

2. ’Til Death Do Us Part

Have no real feelings about this one. Meh.

3. Bitter Tang

Seem to remember this was the first one I quite liked, and not just for the mention of Tang in the title. I like ornery characters who don’t give a fig what anyone thinks of them and Captain Powell is definitely that. Suffers a bit from last-lineitis, where it’s clear the author is really pleased with the writing at the very end that they don’t want to go back and actually fix the story. (There’s quite a few of these in this collection.) Anyway. It was OK.

4. Last Christmas

My sister liked this one, perhaps because she was a nurse and appreciates what it’s like working on-call. As for me, I think it hinges on a pretty weak pun.

5. One In, One Out

Yeah, I can see what I was trying to do here. It’s the sort of experiment in form that I wanted to try, but I’m not sure it comes off. Again, it feels like someone who has never spent New Year’s in a club imagining what it’s like. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been to clubs. I just don’t go out on New Year’s Eve. In my mind, the club is the Paradise Factory in Manchester, where my university flatmate Jamie used to be a manager. Why I didn’t just set it there, I don’t know.

6. Dr. Kenner’s Journal

John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ is one of my favourite films. The underlying tension and paranoia that builds throughout was probably what I was hoping for by setting this story in the antarctic research base. That and killing the huskies. In the original tumblr version I had a very subtle typographic difference in the two sections of the story, indicating that something had shifted somewhere. I don’t think the Wordpress version has that and it doesn’t matter, either.

7. All Of You Are Going To Get It

Violent flight of fantasy. Surprisingly well received.

8. Salt in the Wound

In the early stages of the project, I thought I would have recurrent characters coming back throughout the stories. I pretty much abandoned that when the project broke down. This means there’s a couple of threads that don’t go anywhere, which is either annoying, or just life. There’s something about the way DS John Durban actively seeks the mantle of unconventional copper who gets results that I sort of like, though. Rooibos tea. Honestly.

9. Safety

I don’t know. I guess it’s OK. The suburban swingers thing seems a bit overdone, but whatever floats your boat.

10. Full Disclosure

Feel OK about this one. A little uneasy about the parallels between it and other, real-life, ‘murder houses’, but that’s just how things are. The area mentioned is where my Dad used to live. I like the interplay between Perskine and Freddy Jenkins.

11. Hinged

This one’s bollocks. Trying to be too clever.

12. Post-its From The Fridge

Simple idea, which means I’m more inclined to like it. Maybe a few too many notes, but still. That’s my psychopathic handwriting on the notes. I seem to remember it was done digitally with a Wacom tablet for some reason. ‘I know what you did to my Onken’ is the line that sticks with me more than maybe any other in the whole project.

13. Programming Your Killbot

Two in a row that I quite liked. I know the language syntax doesn’t quite add up, but I am not a programmer, as has been demonstrated time and time again by my inability to grasp the necessary skills. The fact that MurderScript requires an explicit declaration not to slay the programmer seems like an oversight. Maybe it’s a feature, not a bug?

14. Parts and Labour

Some weeks I just had to write a story. This is one of those weeks. It’s probably quite clear from this that I know little to nothing about cars.

15. I Killed Moonbeam

Not great, but murder among the hippies is a good setting, I think. Probably didn’t do it justice, but that’s what happens when you only have a week to do it.

16. XP

Different kind of murder and perhaps it’s questionable whether deleting a digital avatar counts. I think I did just enough here to make the protagonist’s loss feel real.

17. Chicken

Nope. Didn’t like this when I wrote it. Don’t like it now. Annoyed with myself that I used the same accidental asphyxiation method in two stories without realising. I think the later one is better, but I might be wrong.

18. Blood Donor

This is fine, I think, right up until the end. The last line is hoary bollocks and I’ve a good mind to cut it. I’m hoping that the use of the word ‘asylum’ might give it a slightly heightened reality that makes this a little less offensive. But I’m kidding myself. This is bollocks. I’ll probably alter it if it ever gets put in print.

19. Breakdown

Here’s a confession - I never actually liked Choose Your Own Adventure books that much. My dad was really into Ian Livingstone’s Fighting Fantasy series, but I never took to them. Too fiddly and whatever. Anyway, they came back in fashion a while ago and a software tool called Twine makes it very easy to create your own. I mean, technically easy. Actually creating a branching narrative that makes sense and is satisfying is no small thing. I did not accomplish that here. For some reason, I made the code more complicated that I needed it to be, with lots of conditions that altered the overall flow of the story. This makes it more difficult to transcribe it to a printed form, or even a simpler set of anchored links so I can host it here. I’ve been meaning to do that for ages, but I’m honestly not sure I ever will.

20. A Moment or Two

The central premise of this - that a few moments of conscious inaction is enough to make you guilty of murder - is quite an interesting one. The tone’s kind of weird here. I think I was thinking of the opening monologue from Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, which (apart from Aimee Mann’s soundtrack) was the only part I liked from that long-arsed film. I also had a weird, half-remembered image of a comedy series set in a sweetie factory made by some of the Pythons in my head as well.

21. Composite

Ugh. Hate this. Several reasons. Invoking Rashomon feels like such a hack move and I’m not clever enough to do anything interesting with it. The characters themselves seem pretty cliched to me. To cap it all off, there’s a recurring character who comes back at the end of the story, lengthening a thread I probably already know at this point that I’m never picking up again.

22. Local Man Gets Life

It’s short. You have to give it that. I was a big fan of The Onion’s ‘Local Man’ trope, so this is my version of that. Suicide into homicide gets used again, because I don’t have enough original ideas to see through a project like this.

23. Pathology

A counterpart to Dr Kenner’s Journal. Pretty much the same deal, if I’m being honest. If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing twice, right?

24. A Brave Face

And this feels pretty similar to ’Til Death Do Us Part. I think you can see that the toll’s starting to show and I am really running out of fresh ideas. The recycling process isn’t so much trying to get things right the second time, but instead that I’m floundering and going back to things I’ve already done. Actually, this also feels like Safety as well. Oh dear.

25. In Conversation With Albert Bassom

This feels like the last good story of this first batch, after a bit of a dry spell that’s about to peter out. I like the conversational format and the idea of a professional Journal of Murder is quite nice. Probably goes on a bit too long, but these sorts of articles do, don’t they?

(I like the names in this one. De La Croix, Petit Ganache, Henri Larochelle. Gregory Hastings, Tibor Sienkiewicz. I thought there was a nice mix of realistic and ridiculous. What kind of horrors has Petit Ganache been up to?)

26. Digging A Hole (Again)

I don’t miss hangovers. At all. Particularly when you have to work. I never had a job digging graves and I know that filing isn’t anywhere near the same level of stress, but that feeling of trying to get through the morning without puking in your own lap was very familiar. The other thing that I don’t miss is not being able to remember chunks of the night before. I spent a long time thinking they were the fugue states of a psychopathic mind. Then I realised they were alcoholic blackouts. I empathise with Chas in this story. Honestly can’t remember if I thought he’d done it or not. Looking at it now, I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt.

27. Make Mine a 99

Named after a Fluke song, this story was the one that made me want to down tools and rethink the whole idea of writing these stories. I didn’t like the idea, didn’t like my story and hated every moment of writing and redrafting it. That should have inspired me to do something better next week, but instead I just stopped.

28. Written Out

I can’t remember what I decided to do instead of writing 52 Murders. I probably thought that writing a novel was a more sensible idea and perhaps I was right, but four and a half years later I didn’t have a novel and decided to go back to the project. This was supposed to be an acknowledgement of the delay and a way of kickstarting things on. I think it might also have been when I moved the project over to Wordpress, for reasons that now escape me, but probably had something to do with unified control panels. It marks another return appearance of John Durban, although he’s not named as such here, probably because I knew it wasn’t going anywhere. But it was him.

29. Inevitably, Crows

I like this one. As the title says, I felt a bit murgh about using ‘a murder of crows’, but I think it turned out OK. I like little Thaddeus and his kin.

30. Get Rich Slow

The podcast Serial was big at the time and I was playing off that. Written as a dialogue probably because I thought it was more like an audio drama. If I’d really wanted an authentic NPR, Vox Media feel to it, I would have cut them off and run narration over the top.

31. Three Windows

Mixed feelings here. In some ways it’s quite an earnest story and I like that aspect of it. What undercuts it is perhaps a lack of authenticity. The detail of American prisons and executions was gleaned from movies and I think it shows. This has some elements that work, but more that don’t. That’s kind of the hallmark of these stories.

This one was posted after another break, put on Tumblr over three years after the last one. I can’t remember why now. Perhaps I thought it was good. Anyway, the date on the Wordpress post is almost a year later.

32. Medici

This one is problematic. It’s really only when I look over the project as a whole that I can see some things clearly. The first thing that really struck me is that this collection as a whole is really white and pretty male. At the start of the process, I probably would have justified it with the fact that I’m a white male and that’s the perspective I’m writing from. That didn’t really cut it in 2011 and it really doesn’t cut it in 2022. The only stories in the collection that feature black characters in a central role are about hip-hop, prison and chicken. That’s just really, really, shitty and I’m embarrassed by it. None of the 52 Murders are deep - they’re designed to sketch a scene and then get it done - but the shallowness in this regard is a real problem. If I was starting now, I hope I’d come from a different place.

Medici was supposed to be a tribute to the magazines Hip-Hop Connection and The Source, which were a big part of how I came to learn about rap music as a teenager. As I got older, I felt hip-hop passing me by. The outright capitalism went to new extremes and, latterly, I found myself utterly disconnected from artists like XXXTentacion and Takeshi69, both sonically and in attitude. I found myself shaking my head and saying proper old person phrases like “that’s not music”. The story is again an attempt to tell a story through headlines and snippets, hoping that some subtext and narrative emerges through collation. But the world didn’t need another story about violent, money-hungry rappers. It conforms to the worse stereotypes about the culture as a whole. But, I wrote it and even though it’s not good, it remains in the collection — hopefully as an example to myself of how easy it is to fall into bullshit racial stereotypes.

It’s really disappointing that I didn’t see how bad this was, particularly as this was the start of the final push to finish the project. The fact that the murder count had stalled in the low thirties really bothered me. Although writing twenty-odd more stories seemed like a tall order (I used to have a lot more energy), I forgot the central principle of taking things one story at a time. Besides, it wasn’t really twenty stories from scratch, as I had a load of notes and drafts. I decided to finish twenty drafts, whatever they were, and just get it done. Medici was one of those, started earlier and decided to go forward with just in the name of momentum. Like I say, disappointing.

33. Apparitions

This didn’t quite come out right. I think we were watching that Nick Frost Ghosthunters series on Amazon and it reminded me of this old idea. I wanted something about a ghost being the image of violent death, but using it as a premonition rather than a past incident. Fudged it, but whatever.

34. Solo

In my defence, the lyrics are supposed to be terrible.

35. Picnic in the Park

Cold beers on a hot day with friend and music - it’s the stuff that Corona commercials are made of. I remember days in the park with plastic bags and a little speaker. The image of someone coming over and asking the group to please move on somewhere else came to me and then there was the twist at the end.

Of course, it’s not really a twist by this point. The thing about it being murder after murder is that they start being meaningless. This was part of what made me stop in the first place. People dying stopped being an abstract thing and the difficulty I had with bereavement made me imagine how much more difficult it would be to have violent crime wrapped around it. This was part of what made me stop the project for a while. I just felt guilty, like I was profiting off someone else’s misery. The thing is, I didn’t really know who and I wasn’t the only one in the crime genre. I don’t know. Maybe I sacrificed morals to gratify my own ego. In any case, the project rolled on.

36. He Killed Last Night

Some of these stories were cut down from longer drafts. This is one. I think maybe the longer version was better, as it mirrored Jim’s standup debut with that of Andrew (Specs). But it took a long time to go anywhere, so I hacked at it.

A surprising amount of my work is based on crap puns and wordplay. Perhaps it’s surprising to me and nobody else.

37. Classifieds

I probably had the famous London Review of Books personal ads in mind with this. Again, playing with the idea of a commercial infrastructure around what is usually a spur of the moment crime. It occurs to me that these could be in the back of the Journal of Murder referenced in 25 - In Conversation with Albert Bassom.

38. The Goon Sweepstakes

I had the rough idea for this based off Suicide Squad. When I was younger I thought the name sounded cool and dangerous and the idea of a group who knew they might well die on a mission lent itself to gallows humour. I didn’t flesh this out well at all and it’s basically a framework for two lists and an ending that comes out of nowhere.

39. Proposal for the Elimination of Rick Burgess

This had the working title Micromort, which is a measurement of the probability of death. I don’t think I managed to work it in anywhere, which was a bit of a shame. I quite like the format and the banal corporate notion of death, but think that I took the wrong tack. Instead of one lone nut, it would have been better to focus on the actual corporate decisionmaking that leads to a person being killed. I’m not sure I have the political acumen or the writing ability to do that, however, and I’d already done all the charts.

40. Serial Killer

Oh, the banality of evil. They live among us. It could be your next door neighbour. All that stuff.

41. Coach Trip

This quite-long story about a mother and daughter on a European coach trip has a few personal elements in it. My mum kept getting free holidays from companies, with the hope that if she was given travel and board free, she would pay for excursions along the way. She never did, as far as I could tell, and went to a lot of places for very little in her retirement. I went on one or two of them and my sisters did, too. There’s a weird dynamic that builds up on coach trips. Who’s noisy and who’s always late, that sort of thing. I tried to get some of that across in the story. The murder part is pretty tacked on to be honest, and it’s a regrettable case of ‘fridging’ a female character. Sorry Inga.

42. pith

I don’t write poetry, but appreciate the economy.

43. Trainer

Just a story to fill up a space. Again, had bigger expectations but in the end just had to write what came to mind.

44. Killer’s Tarot

I had a lot of big ideas about how all these disparate stories might tie together, none of which really came into being. One of them was that, just as there were 52 weeks in a year, so too were there 52 cards in a deck. The murders could be in suits and then you could make hands from them and… something. I don’t know. But the correlation of cards and crimes seemed a good one, so I bashed out this system of murderous divination, based on what I learned as a telephone tarot-card reader during my university years. There’s probably one too many example readings, but I quite like it and think the system makes as much sense as any of this stuff does.

45. Festa

This piece of catalogue copy originally had some artwork to go with it, but I didn’t have enough confidence to post it along with the text. Sort of Futurist, vaguely fascistic feeling artwork that I knocked up in Illustrator. Too many gradients for my liking, so I pulled it from the post at the last minute.

46. The Missing Piece

Second appearance of accidental asphyxiation as a means of death. Not a murder, per se, but certainly provoking feelings of guilt. I’d had the idea of murder-by-jigsaw right from the beginning, but couldn’t find the way to get it right. I wrote this when I was attempting a YA novella and was very much in a teenage frame of mind. It made me think of an old friend from school and what might have been on another timeline.

I don’t have a hole in my heart, although my first girlfriend did. Never date a writer. Or be friends with one. Or really associate with one at all.

I’m still thinking of maybe getting this printed onto a jigsaw puzzle. There’s places that do that. I’m just not sure it’s worth the effort.

47. Interview

Honestly, I think this is shit.

48. Union of Serial Killers Membership Form

This was an offcut from my book Forms, culled from the original set because it was a bit too murder-y for the funtime vibes of that collection of paperwork. But when I was grabbing anything I could to fill out the weeks, in it went.

49. Murder Myself

I think this was one of the stories that made me stop this project altogether. The idea of suicide as murder had been done before in Local Man Gets Life. This was just a more drawn out version of that. I think I lost my taste for it as a theme when someone close to me lost a sibling by suicide and I saw the absolute wreckage they went through. Not posting this story was probably the correct thing to do. But then time passed and I decided to use everything I had in the tank, whether I liked it or not, just to get the project finished.

50. Almost There

Another regrettable instance of a man killing a woman. Unfortunately, that’s the way it happens in the world most of the time. I’m not endorsing it, obviously, but I thought there was something deeply male about not wanting to live with the shame of attempted murder.

51. Last Dance

Believe it or not, this silly idea about a modern day necromancer with an iPhone was the basis of a novel and a screenplay that I worked on for a couple of years. I had an almost complete draft of each, but ran into plot problems after the introduction, so I just posted that as an extract that hopefully stands on its own. There was more in the beginning, but when I read the rough draft I realised that it was, essentially, the same as Watson at the crime scene in the Moffat/Gatiss version of Sherlock, so I binned it.

52. Just One More Thing

This was not meant to be the last story. There was an altogether more philosophical scene about how callous it is to write crime fiction when real people die all the time. But I chucked it when I found this stupid Columbo homage that I had completely forgotten about. I think I’m realising that I’ll go for silly over profound almost every single time.

So, that’s all of them. I’m glad it finally got finished, although I am somewhat embarrassed by quite a lot of the stories. I don’t think I’ll attempt a similar project again, although I probably would be better equipped to do it. I do wish I had been able to accomplish my original goal of one story a week for a year. I don’t think it’s impossible, but perhaps stories shouldn’t be rushed like this.

Anyway, better late than never, right?

Right?