Paul Crawford is a British novelist and multi-genre author, who is also founder and the world's first professor of the field of health humanities, advancing creative wellbeing. He directs the Centre for Social Futures at the Institute of Mental Health at The University of Nottingham. His first novel, Nothing Purple, Nothing Black achieved critical acclaim and optioned for film with award-winning filmmaker Jack Emery at The Drama House. Crawford led the creation of a new series of animations, What’s Up With Everyone, with Academy-award winning Aardman (Wallace & Gromit, etc.) and was the researcher behind award-winning filmmaker Chi Thai's (e.g. Raging Grace) new production, Astronaut. His second novel is The Wonders of Doctor Bent
In The Wonders of Doctor Bent, when everything is falling apart, who do you trust? The worlds of Jason Hemp, an English lecturer, and Dr Bent, the unlikely Medical Director of high-security psychiatric hospital Foston Hall, come together in this dark tale of murder, revenge and abandonment. Attempting to track down his twin brother's killer, Jason finds his life unraveling in unexpected and frightening ways, whilst visionary Dr Bent attempts to reform Foston Hall into a place of comfort, all while facing his own mental health challenges. Will both men survive the death of trust?
Paul stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about writing and researching his novels:
My latest novel, The Wonders of Doctor Bent, is a loose sequel to my first novel, Nothing Purple, Nothing Black. Both are dark literary thrillers with a core focus on mental health. My fictional writing is essentially hybrid rather than wholly geared to any particular genre. The next novel will be in a similar vein. What made The Wonders of Doctor Bent particularly different for me, however, was a more direct turn to a sub plot of crime and how this carried into the whole business of forensic mental health services, namely a high-security mental facility, Foston Hall.
How did I go about research and writing this element?
Well, in terms of mental health and the law, I came pre-packed because I was writing about something I knew intimately at a professional level: the human mind, mental capacity, various disorders framed by psychiatry and psychology, and a range of criminal behaviour. Indeed, the field of mental health frequently leans into criminality, especially in cases of drug use, arson, sexual and domestic abuse, and, in this novel particularly, the business of claims of diminished responsibility following extreme violence that attract indefinite hospital orders. My line of work has brought multiple opportunities to visit relevant environments such as courts, prisons, police stations, etc.
This pre-packing of nearly forty years of practice or research in mental health has proven invaluable. I currently direct the Centre for Social Futures at the Institute of Mental Health, The University of Nottingham. Over the years, I have developed expertise in diverse mental health challenges from anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder, to schizophrenia, personality disorders and so forth. I have also experienced and researched grief reactions.
In the novel, there are a variety of mental health and social care settings providing dementia care, psychotherapy/psychoanalysis, and care in acute/urgent, community and forensic contexts. My in-patient and community-based mental health work, research and multiple site visits across the country and overseas, has afforded great familiarity with how people are situated in such facilities and endure or respond to their mental health challenges. This provided the precision required in a realist novel such as The Wonders of Doctor Bent.
Yet on the crime side, I had to research additional, more granular aspects for action and procedural steps to achieve credible plotting of the core crime elements in The Wonders of Doctor Bent. For a start, avoiding spoilers, I read specialised information not ordinarily or widely known widely online and through library access. I double-checked key details with third parties who had relevant expertise. I also read multiple congruent reports and accounts of the core criminal activity in the press. When I used online sources, I did begin to wonder if data analysts somewhere had marked me up as a potential terrorist!
Importantly, lived experience also informed both the mental health aspects and criminality of the novel. This experience includes insights into emotional responses and therapeutics. This is a kind of naturally occurring research. It is the inside track complemented by the outside, standard research. It is, if you will, the governor for the creative engine and character build in the novel. Characters need a kind of blood pressure and reality to walk through the hallucinatory world that you scaffold for the reader to experience. It also provides an emotional resonance difficult to achieve from outside such experiences. For example, if you have not had depression or suicidal ideation, it is hard to enter fully or profoundly the embodied and potentially disembodying experience.
The locations for the novel cohere around the Midlands, notably Nottinghamshire, yet bring elements from other places across the UK. Some of this social and environmental detail is from random recall and some is from researching (re-looking) at particular locations in mind. For example, Foston Hall emerges from several mental health facilities visited over the years, combined with places that are familiar to me, such as Rampton high-security hospital. I also make use of an entirely contrived area of Nottingham, Ardinweald, which left great freedom for invention and setting out feasible, local character mobility.
Overall, my strategy as a writer has been around achieving sufficient detail and cogency to allow the reader to do their job, hallucinating their own unique world of action. It is about finding and delivering the sparks for firing their imaginations but also ensuring switchback revelations and routes to deeper emotional and intellectual sharing. In The Wonders of Doctor Bent, I think I struck the perfect balance between the drama of words and that of silence.
You can learn more about Paul Crawford via his website or follow him on LinkedIn and BlueSky. The Wonders of Dr. Bent is now available via Cranthorpe Millner Publishers and all major booksellers.
