I began writing plays in my year out before university, and the first one I completed (set in a local creative writing group) was performed at my university and then at the Edinburgh Fringe. After that, through much of my writing life, I believed I could only write dialogue and not prose, so stuck with drama. I continued to have plays produced, including many on the London Fringe and a couple on the radio. My only play to date broadcast on Radio 4, Kerton’s Story, starred Bill Nighy and Lesley Sharp. I still write theatre plays and a couple of my most recent ones, Empty in Angel and The Play with Speeches, were nominated for various awards and appeared across many London venues.

As an experiment, I tried writing short stories, and the first one I wrote was published in Scribble in 2015. I found that I loved breaking down traditional ways of storytelling. For example, R v Sieger – additional document disclosed by the Crown Prosecution Service, is structured like a bundle of court documents. It was highly commended in the London Short Story competition and has been published in two story collections. I found a home for four of my stories with Ambit magazine, all of which significantly played with form, including a piece that reads like an academic article on David Hockney and tells a story about the writer in the footnotes, and a comedic tale told in the written notes left by a barrister to his cleaner and in her responses. Ambit is also how I met Writing Room Programme Director Kate Pemberton, who was the fiction editor I worked with. And it is through Kate – and my wife Philippa, who told me Kate was involved in another writing enterprise – that I found Writing Room, more of which later.

I’d had around 25 stories published in magazines, online and in books before I began writing novels. I’ve now had two thrillers Indefensible and The Company She Keeps published by Bloodhound Books, both in 2024. I am currently editing a third in which my earlier protagonists are featured in the same story (one is older and the other younger). My approach to writing my novels is very different from my short stories, with much of my focus on creating a sense of verisimilitude. I have a variety of techniques to achieve this, including producing a detailed chronology, and using real people and history as a backdrop for my fictional stories. I also include real places which are named and appear as they would have at the time. The novel I’m currently editing is a political and legal thriller set in the mid-1980s after the IRA bomb in Brighton. It took almost two years for me to feel I’d got the plot right. For this reason, the novel I’m currently planning will be based on a largely forgotten true crime story from the 1960s.

For most of the time, I’m pretty self-sufficient with my writing, but every so often I crave structures that support and facilitate my creativity. And when I began attending Writing Room courses, I felt like I’d found the perfect organisation to do this. At the times I need it, I can relish being around other writers, and that amazing feeling of all working together on our separate projects. It is for this reason that I’ve particularly loved the Writing Sprints with Alison Chandler. I’ve also felt very supported in Kiare Ladner’s Fiction Workshop Courses, where it’s been great to get feedback on early chapter drafts.

Indefensible, a novel: Extract from Chapter 1

(Trigger warning – a violent crime is reported to the police in this scene.)

Friday 17 December 1993

The three girls were still lolling over the front desk. Would they ever leave?

“We don’t do lifts home,” Barbara said, for what must have been the fourth time.

“But the police are meant to help,” the one with a top knot complained.

“Here, I expect you need this.” The new officer placed a coffee cup next to the mug with the pens.
Barbara turned round. “Thanks. They get plastered, then expect me to sort the taxi. Honestly, it’s been non-stop nonsense tonight.”

He shook his head smiling and headed back to the other room.

And now, a dishevelled woman was making her way purposefully towards the desk. Perhaps in her early fifties, her straggly hair fell like a fox’s tail alongside her neck on one side, but on the other it was scooped into a bunch leaving her face and left ear exposed. The unmistakeable impression was that she hadn’t been looking after herself.

“Ooh, what’s that stink?” The tallest teenager looked outraged.

She had a point. Barbara had every sympathy for anyone living on the street, of course she did. But there were showers in the homeless hostels, weren’t there?

“What can I do for you?” Barbara said to the new arrival.

Last Sunday – I think it was Sunday,” the woman’s tongue pressed into the side of her cheek as she attempted to concentrate, “I was on the bridge.”

“How we gonna get home?” the girl with glasses called out from in front of a missing person poster.

“Go on,” Barbara said to the woman. She wasn’t likely to say anything significant. She’d probably got into an argument, been groped, or kicked by a passer-by. There would be no details. These cases were dead in the water before you so much as breathed on them.

“It don’t matter what day it was,” the woman continued. “Probably Sunday. But I saw something. And I’ve been meaning to tell. Cos it wasn’t…” she stopped, one eye squinting slightly. “It wasn’t right.”

“And what did you see?” Barbara had the book open, ready to make a note.

“I was on the bridge when I saw it.”

“Which bridge would this have been? And what time of day?”

“Tower bridge. It was late. And I saw a man with a carrier bag. I was just kipping down, you know how it is. But he looked suspicious.”

The way she said this last word, it would have rhymed with fishes. And her eyes briefly went from one side to the other, a recognition perhaps that she hadn’t quite nailed the pronunciation.

“What happened next?”

“Well, he takes this head out the bag and throws it off the bridge.”

“What do you mean, he takes this head out of the bag?”

“I mean, a head. It had long hair… this golden colour…” – she said this wistfully, as if it would be nice to have golden hair. “And he threw it.” She mimed throwing the head with two hands, like a footballer taking a throw-in.

“He threw a man’s head off the bridge?” Barbara couldn’t wait to tell her new colleague about this one.
“It’s not funny, young lady,” the woman said.

“Alright, shall we start from the beginning? With your name and date of birth?”

“Jackie Levine. Twenty-fourth November, nineteen forty-eight.”

They went through the whole story with Barbara taking notes as best she could, pressing the woman for clarity. She didn’t get a good look at the man, she said. But on the other hand, she would definitely recognise him again. “Without a shadow of doubt,” she said this twice, sounding pleased with the phrase.

“And is there any reason why you didn’t report this earlier?” Barbara asked.

“I just didn’t get round to it.”

“Well, thank you for getting round to it now.”

The comment was meant to be ironic, but the woman smiled, exposing two missing teeth at the front. “No problem, love. Now I don’t suppose you have one of them nice cells free this evening?”

“You know I can’t help with that.”

The woman nodded, picked up her belongings and made her way out. Barbara reviewed the notes and at the bottom of the page added, “Recommendation: NFA.”

At some point the teenage girls must have gone too. Barbara realised she had Jackie Levine to thank for that. The girls probably left because of the smell.

James Woolf’s books are available at major booksellers including World of Books, Amazon and here at Waterstones:

https://www.waterstones.com/book/indefensible/james-woolf/9781916978140

https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-company-she-keeps/james-woolf/9781917214032