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| Image by gazrock from Pixabay |
Today we sit down for a chat with Jason Davey (aka Jason Figgis) from author Winona Kent’s Jason Davey Mysteries.
What was your life like before your author started pulling your strings?
To be honest, it wasn’t ever ordinary. My parents were the founding members of the 60s British folky-pop band Figgis Green. So my sister and I grew up in the spotlight. And when I became a musician myself, I started out busking in interesting places like Covent Garden and the London Underground. Then I joined a few bands, and spent time touring. And then, after my wife died, I ran away to sea to work on cruise ships. Which is, in itself, quite adventurous. And then after Winona discovered me in Cold Play—and then abandoned me!—I went travelling around the world for a few years. After I came back, a few mates and myself auditioned for a gig at a tired old rock and roll club called Diamonds…we failed the audition but then the owner got murdered…and his brother turned it into a jazz club called The Blue Devil…we auditioned again…and the rest is history.
What’s the one trait you like most about yourself?
My habit of completely rearranging pieces of music to create new forms of audio fusion. You can do it with food, so why not with music? Case in point: Aria Sopra la Bergamasca by Marco Uccellini. Composed in 1642. Traditionally performed with two violins and a basso continuo. My band and I do it with a Gretsch solid body G5135 CVT, a harpsichord patch on a Roland XP-80, a tenor sax wailing out the baroque melody line, and a polite little snare drum keeping us all well-behaved. My drummer Rudy sums it up nicely—the perfect synthesis of the unnatural with the bizarre.
On the other hand, I once rearranged Variation X (“Dorabella”) from Elgar’s Enigma Variations into a jazz piece. After two performances at The Blue Devil, I was unceremoniously informed by my band that if I was going to subject them to much more of my “idiosyncratic wankery” (as Dave, my keyboard guy, put it), I might consider continuing my gig at the club as a solo act.
I still firmly believe classical music should never take itself too seriously.
What do you like least about yourself?
If you’d asked me that before I went on the road with my mum’s band, Figgis Green, I’d have said, my addiction to nicotine. But I gave up smoking halfway through the tour and I haven’t looked back since. Now, it’s my lack of any kind of physical fitness—other than a daily walk, which, admittedly, does often cover a couple of miles. I’m in my fifties now and I want—I need—to work on having a healthier lifestyle. Somebody famous—I can’t quite remember who—once said, “Whenever I’m overcome with the feeling I ought to exercise, I lie down ‘til it goes away.” That might have described me in days gone by—but no more!
What is the strangest thing your author has had you do or had happen to you?
In Ticket to Ride, while I was on tour with my mum’s band, she made me deliberately drink some seafood chowder prepped by our catering crew. My mum had been laid low by what we thought was an allergy to mussels—which I also suffer from (as does Winona, so she has first-hand knowledge). Rather than wait for a toxicology report, she had me sample the stuff. She knew the results would make themselves apparent almost immediately. And they did. With predictably unfortunate results.
Do you argue with your author? If so, what do you argue about?
Most definitely.
See below!
What is your greatest fear?
What Winona’s going to do to me next! She seems to take a perverse joy in making me suffer. I’ve nearly died in a fire, been thrown into the sea, almost been welded to death, beaten up and had my feet burned by a thug, struck by lightning, overdosed on insulin and fallen head first out of a two-story window. I’m afraid to think about what she has planned for the next book. I anticipate strong words will be exchanged.
What makes you happy?
Marmite. Branston Pickle. Yorkshire tea. Maltesers. Chocolate digestives. Fireball XL5. Pat Metheny.
If you could rewrite a part of your story, what would it be? Why?
I’d probably rethink Notes on a Missing G-String. It’s got dodgy subject matter (a runaway teenaged daughter, Soho’s sex trade)…as well as some very “descriptive” scenes… at the time Winona wrote that story she was literally still trying to find her audience—as well as an agent and a traditional publisher—and I’m pretty positive both she and I thought sex might sell. And the book did sell quite a lot of copies. But it’s probably dead last in my list of favourite Jason Davey adventures.
Of the other characters in your book, which one bugs you the most? Why?
My old nemesis, Arthur Braskey. I first crossed paths with him in Notes on a Missing G-String. He’s an elderly, old-fashioned Soho crimelord—clever, with a somewhat twisted sense of humour, and an absolute bastard. Especially to me. He forced me to take part in a charity firewalk—and then he burned the bottoms of my feet for real. I thought I was done with him at the end of the novel, but he showed up again in Bad Boy. He's someone I do truly fear—for obvious reasons—but somehow I found the courage to stand up to him. And I’m quite proud of myself for that.
Of the other characters in your book, which one would you love to trade places with? Why?
In another life I’d love to write cozy mysteries. My sister does that, under the name Taylor Feldspar. I would absolutely love to be a bestselling author with about 30 books on the shelves, never out of print, featured in high-profile interviews and hobnobbing with the great mystery novelists. And, of course, there would be series deals for television. My sister shows up in most of my adventures. In the latest, Bad Boy, she helps me get the answer to one of those damnable train-time-distance problems—which I’ve never been able to solve.
Tell us a little something about your author. Where can readers find her website/blog?
Winona’s been writing for quite a long time. Her first book was published in 1989. It was called Skywatcher,and it was a finalist in a well-known (back then!) first-novel competition. Then there was a bit of a gap, and she wrote a second book about the same characters (spies!) called The Cilla Rose Affair. And then she discovered me! Although I wasn’t a sleuth at the time…I was just a jobbing musician working onboard a lovely old cruise ship sailing between Vancouver and Alaska. That was in 2012, in a novel called Cold Play. She and I both had a lot of fun with that one—at the time, I was obsessed with Twitter (my handle was @cold_fingers)…and so was she, to be honest! I remember she asked a whole load of her followers if they’d like to be characters in the book. They could pick their fictitious names and also what they did for a living. They all ended up passengers on the cruise ship.
After that, she abandoned me! She went on to write three “accidental time-travel romances”, although I always suspected she had me at the back of her mind when she created Shaun Deeley, the time-hopping companion of the series heroine, Charlie Duran.
And then, in 2017, Winona discovered that she quite enjoyed writing mysteries. And she remembered what a good time she’d had with me five years earlier in Cold Play, and thought to herself, why don’t I bring Jason back as a private investigator? Still a musician, mind—and now with a permanent residency at The Blue Devil jazz club in London’s Soho. But also a somewhat reluctant amateur sleuth. So that was Disturbing the Peace, and now there are four more novels, for a total of five, with the latest one (Bad Boy) released in September 2024.
The thing that always amazes me is that Winona has twelve books out there (including an anthology of short stories)—and all but the last three were written while she was working full-time at completely unrelated jobs.
She’s now happily retired (and she’s just turned 70, which utterly amazes me—she’s about twenty years older than me) and has turned plant-rescuing into one of the things she does when she’s not writing or researching or being the Chair of Crime Writers of Canada. She searches for potted plants that people have tossed into the compost bin at the apartment building where she lives. And she picks up bits of succulents that have dropped off mother plants at the linear park along the river across the road. She’s got quite a collection of those currently occupying her sunny bedroom window. In the summer, she’ll move them all outside to her balcony.
Learn more about Winona’s and her books at her website and at her blog on Substack.
And lots of sample chapters.
What's next for you?
Well…as I mentioned, I have a residency at The Blue Devil nightclub in London, and nearly all of my adventures, for the most part, have happened in England. So I’m very pleased to reveal that my next story is going to take place in Vancouver, Canada. When I was working as a musician aboard the Star Sapphire (doing the Alaska run), my home port was Vancouver, so I’m quite familiar with the city. In fact, it’s one of my favourite places. I’ll be visiting Vancouver with my sister Angie, the one who writes those cozy mysteries under the pseudonym Taylor Feldspar. Angie’s the guest of honour at a crime-writing festival, and I’ve volunteered to accompany her because her husband hates flying. Plus, I’m a real-life amateur sleuth, so who wouldn’t want me along as a tell-all sidekick? While I’m in Vancouver, I may pop ‘round to visit an old mate from my cruise ship days…and that’s when things are going to get very interesting. I’ll say no more…my overworked author has yet to put this into Plottr and get the outline going…but I know she’s been thinking about this since she attended Left Coast Crime in both Vancouver and Seattle…and a recent fire in the apartment building where she used to live has ignited all kinds of possible complications!
A Jason Davey Mystery, Book 5
Fresh from a 34-day, 18-city tour of England, professional musician and amateur sleuth Jason Davey accepts an invitation from a fan, Marcus Merritt, to meet at Level 72 of The Shard to sign one of his band's programs. Marcus hands him the booklet, then leaps to his death from the open viewing platform. Thus begins a week-long quest, during which Jason is tasked with retrieving a stolen collection of scores by England’s most famous composer, Sir Edward Elgar.
Marcus shared Elgar's love of eccentric puzzles and games, and the challenging clues he's assembled for Jason seem to mirror the 14 themes in Elgar's renowned Enigma Variations. Jason's journey takes him to Derbyshire and then back to London, and a four-hour walking tour of Soho's lost music venues where, in Denmark Street, he faces a life-threatening battle with two adversaries: a treacherous Russian gangster who is also hunting for the stolen collection, and Marcus's sister—who holds the key to a decades-old mystery involving a notorious London crime lord's missing daughter.
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