V Books - The Beginning

Vikki at the launch for The Outer Circle

By Ian Ridley

MY FIRST blog for V Books, so let me start at the beginning. Or rather, the beginning of my fiction-writing career and how this publishing company came about… 

After a lifetime in sports writing for national newspapers, and writing a bunch of sports books, I decided about eight years ago that it was time I wrote the novel that I had been promising/threatening for many years. Initially I would pen a few chapters on holidays until my wife Vikki Orvice - also a sports writer but, as a woman in the man’s world of tabloid journalism, a braver and more trailblazing one than this mainly broadsheet scribbler - suggested I took some time out from writing non-fiction for a living so that I could write fiction for fulfilment. She would, she said, help subsidise me.

The novel, THE OUTER CIRCLE, a thriller set in London and following five people thrown together in the aftermath of an atrocity, was published through Unbound, the crowd-funding platform, in January of 2018. Vikki helped me organise a launch party at Primrose Hill library in North London, a lovely little venue and in the heart of where much of the action took place. It is a night, a memory, that I will forever treasure as so many friends and backers of the book helped me celebrate my fiction debut. 

Vikki died of cancer, aged 56, a year and about 10 days after that launch party. I was bereft, lost. Unable to write, unable to do much of anything. Couldn’t even concentrate to read. Weekends were especially tough, especially empty.

One day on Twitter a couple of months after Vikki’s death, I noticed that the Cambridge Writing Retreat was hosting a day with the celebrated crime writer Sophie Hannah. Vikki had interviewed her once for our local book festival in Hertfordshire, for which V booked the talent with her keen eye for authors who put backsides on seats and had interesting books coming out. I decided to book a place on Sophie’s one-day course.

I could barely concentrate for much of the day, edgy and preoccupied, but at least I’d got out of the house and was in company. At the end of it, I spoke to Sophie privately. She remembered Vikki, asked me what I was going to do. I didn’t know, I said, beyond watching some county cricket that summer as I’d always promised myself I would when I had some time. Now I had all the unwanted time I needed. 

Sophie told me she had just become course director for a Cambridge University Masters course in Crime and Thriller Writing. Why didn’t I apply? I went home and thought about it, sent in an application form a month later and the following January found myself starting an 18-month part-time course that would stretch into 30 months due to a one-year suspension for the Covid pandemic. 

(Thankfully, my writing mojo had returned in the summer and autumn of 2019 one baby step at a time as I had started penning a book about grief, love and cricket, based on that summer of watching the county game. The Breath of Sadness – the title taken from a song by the band James whom Vikki and I loved – was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year and called in by the PEN Ackerley Prize judges and I was very proud of it, not least as it told Vikki’s remarkable life story.)

During the four separate residential weeks at Madingley Hall, home of Cambridge Uni’s Institute of Continuing Education, I learned much on the Master of Studies course about plotting, pacing and structure and an idea that I had for a new book developed into an 85,000-word crime novel. And it was turning into a sequel to THE OUTER CIRCLE.

Now, as that book had taken shape a few years earlier, I found that the character I most enjoyed writing was Jan Mason, a national newspaper reporter with an old-fashioned belief in traditional and noble methods of legwork and using contacts built up down the years to uncover crime stories. So much so that I actually wanted to write about her again. The idea took hold within me that she could even be the protagonist in a series of novels.

Unbound granted me the rights back for THE OUTER CIRCLE and I decided to set up a publishing company to reprint, with the new title of OUTER CIRCLE. I wanted it to become the first in the Jan Mason series of cases and stories and to rebrand, partly also to bring it under the umbrella of the new publishing company. No prizes for guessing why it’s called V Books. The logo - open pages in Vikki’s favourite colour orange - was designed by my daughter, her step daughter, Alex, who is a professional photographer as well as graphic designer. 

OUTER CIRCLE has a new cover (which can be seen at the top of our home page), by the brilliant Steve Leard, and that too is homage to Vikki, who was athletics correspondent of The Sun, the London Olympics of 2012 being the highlight of her career. With the book starting the day after the Games end, the colours on the front cover are those of the Olympic rings. The figure on the back is Vikki, on her phone on Primrose Hill. The shot was taken by Alex, now my partner in V Books, when we were mulling over cover ideas back in 2018. I love the whole package and hope you will too. 

So there you have the genesis of V Books. More about the background to OUTER CIRCLE, which we are looking to publish at the beginning of June, and the next book in the Jan Mason series, coming very soon. 

With Tony Adams at the Primrose Hill launch.