The Brighton Murders

A non-comic trilogy exploring Brighton's criminal past and present and introducing disgraced Chief Constable Robert Watts. The first in the trilogy - "City of Dreadful Night" - will be published in the UK and the US in August 2010. Read the prologue and the opening chapter on this website. The second novel, "The Last King of Brighton", will be published in February 2011.

Here's the blurb for "Last King":

"Barbarians at the gates of Brighton. Pitiless men who want…everything. Vengeful men who kill without conscience and threaten the lives of ex-Chief Constable Bob Watts, his comrade-in-arms Jimmy Tingley, DS Sarah Gilchrist and – above all – Brighton’s crime king, John Hathaway.

But should the three friends help a man who, they glimpse underneath all his charm, is a monster?

Hathaway wasn’t always that way. Or was he? In the Sixties he wanted to be a pop star but as the decade progressed he was drawn into his father’s murderous life of crime. Perhaps the dark side had always beckoned.

The story moves from the Great Train Robbery through Sixties gang warfare and the cutthroat rock business to the Balkan genocides of the 90s and a vicious present day struggle for power between European and British mobsters.

But, always, in the shadows, is the lurking mystery of the Brighton Trunk Murder.

Only connect…"

The final book in the trilogy, "God's Lonely Man," will be published in August 2011.

This just in: Peter James has read an early copy of City of Dreadful Night. In his view it's:

""A gripping yarn, brilliantly melding Brighton's murderous past with its murderous present. I loved it!". The man is a genius.

Mark Billingham says:

"Peter Guttridge is a master of comic crime and has now proved himself equally capable on the darker side of the genre. City of Dreadful Night is gritty, compelling and meticulously researched. There are two words running through this darkly delicious piece of Brighton rock: 'must read'."

Let's make that genii.

City of Dreadful Night

July 1934. A woman's torso is found in a trunk at Brighton railway station's left luggage office. Her legs and feet are found in a suitcase at Kings Cross. Her head is never found, her identity never established, her killer never caught.
But someone is keeping a diary.
July 2010. A massacre in Milldean, Brighton's notorious no-go area. An armed police operation gone badly wrong. As the rioting begins, high-flying Chief Constable Robert Watts, government poster-boy for its policy of routinely arming Britain's bobbies on the beat, makes a decision that will cost him his career. And then, one by one, the police involved in the killings start to disappear.
Meanwhile, young ambitious radio journalist Kate Simpson hopes to solve that Brighton Trunk Murder of 1934. Police files long-thought destroyed have turned up in the cellars of Brighton's Royal Pavilion. She enlists the help of disgraced ex-Chief Constable Robert Watts.
It's only a matter of time before past and present collide.