First Dead Body, and all up-coming books in the Simon Jardine series, are centred around Derby and the Derby Evening Telegraph. I have dug out some of the photos taken during that heady time and added them to this web site. See ‘Photos’.
Many are not flattering, some are embarrassing – but I’m old enough to take your brickbats and cheeky comments.
Music was a key factor in my newspaper days in Derby and I was lucky enough to meet, and in some cases, establish lasting friendships with some world-renowned musicians and vocalists. Slade were top of the list as well as Top of the Pops, and the list of interviewees goes on and on.

I attended the Leicestershire ‘Everybody’s Reading’ event and heard Elly Griffiths, author of six very successful Ruth Galloway mysteries set in North Norfolk; Mark Wright, first time author of Heartman and heading for stardom; and John Martin, author of Crime Scene Great Britain and Ireland.
They were propounding their views on locations of crime fiction. Elly (North Norfolk) says the location dictates the characters; Mark (Bristol), that the locations develop the characters; and John (expert on crime writing)) tied it up nicely and neatly with a message that it could be both, but locations were integrally important factors in crime novels.
My view is that it is usually easier for the reader to grasp the location as a foundation of reality on which the more complex, ethereal, fictional characters and their foibles can be developed and woven.
Derby is the core base for the Simon Jardine series (First Dead Body launched it in summer this year), and the Derby Evening Telegraph in the old danced hall on Albert Street is central for logic and geography. Jardine pivots the story on the fulcrum of his office and radiates to extant pubs like the Dolphin and Exeter Arms, along with now disappeared venues such as: the Crown Club, Spondon (jazz); Cleopatras on Babington Lane (rock), closed, re-opened closed and shut and redeveloped; and Tiffanys, Babington Lane (disco and dance bands), where the building remains, but the sweet sounds have dissipated into the ether.
Derby is important, not just because it is where I began my career in newspapers there in 1970, but also because it was at a time when the town was going through big changes. Rolls-Royce crashed, putting tens of thousands of jobs in jeopardy; Brian Clough and Peter Taylor were about to take on the management of Derby County; the town’s heavy engineering industries (such as large conveyor belts) were thriving, but facing foreign competition; rock music was going through a mini hey-day; and in 1977 the town, which already had a cathedral, was about to become a city.
The 70s was also the decade when the ‘Free Love’ of the 60s actually happened. Girls became emancipated and boys were no longer the sole decision makers in life. ‘Girls just wanna have fun’ is a 21st century phrase, but it flowered 40+ years ago … more of that anon.

Today, September 27, is the 40th birthday party of Scarthin Books, Cromford – my favourite independent bookshop. If you’re going – be sure to wear those 1970s togs! Only four copies of First Dead Body left in store. Buy one and then I’ll have to deliver more … thank you.

Page 55 of artsbeat, September 2014 (www.artsbeatblog.com) – Magazine of the Year in the Midlands Media Awards 2014
Former reporter
publishes debut
crime novel
Reviewed by Guy Cooper, new books manager, Scarthin Books, Cromford
This is the first novel by ex-journalist Richard Cox and is a crime story set in Derby in the early 1970s.
Simon Jardine is a young reporter and is paired with seasoned crime reporter Dave Green.
The dead body in question is that of a young man whose death appears suspicious. Dave knows the victim and his mother well and, as they investigate a story of corruption and further crime emerges involving a prominent local gay businessman and his company’s operations in building the new ring road around Derby.
Dave Green has his own reasons for being interested in the family of the dead boy, whose father, an ex-convict works for the construction company and seems to be hiding something from his wife.
Colonel Hamilton-Pocklington, the local businessman, also has his own secrets to protect and finds himself being blackmailed. The reporters pursue the story in the smoky pubs and local jazz scene in Derby, looking at links between the construction firm and the local council.
Things begin to unravel culminating in an exciting car chase across Derby.
This is a good, gripping read and, as an ex-journalist, Tony Cox provides a very interesting angle on the crime novel by basing it around reporters rather than police and the 1970s setting is well drawn, with pubs, live music and attitudes to gay people convincingly written.
This is certainly a promising start to a planned series featuring Simon Jardine and I look forward to the next one.
First Dead Body (The Choir Press. Pb, £6.99)

Local newspaper sales in the UK fell by an average of 13.5% in the first half of 2014, year-on-year compared to last year. That is a tragedy for an industry and a service that has been the bedrock of how we communicate for well over a 100 years. Local and regional newspapers have been a flagship of our democracy.
And how does the industry react? What are publishers doing to protect our local media outlets? They are:
• Sacking trained reporters, sub-editors and editors
• Switching from print to, frankly, ill-designed and ennui-ridden web sites
• Shutting newspaper offices so the news in, say, Yorkshire, is edited by a sub in South Wales
• Riding roughshod over the legalities of making sure that news reporting is fair and not ‘manna from heaven’ for solicitors
Worst of all is the experiment in Lincolnshire where a well-respected local news sheet is now filled with material provided solely by residents.
Come off it publishers. That’s what social media, the digital revolution, is for: it isn’t a way to provide intelligent, thinking residents with a professional, considered, well-delivered and well-designed service. Newspaper web sites are dreadful – and that’s what it means to me: they fill me full of dread for the future.
So how important is news? It’s vital, it’s the foundation on which we build opinions and considered comment, it is at the core of what we hold dear as citizens of the UK.
If you have your car serviced do you take it to a garage stocked with people who know one end of a spanner from the other, even though they use the software on a computer for much of the work? You don’t? You leave it out on the street with the bonnet open and a bag of spanners next to it so that everyone passing can have a go?
Yes. I know news gathering and communicating is a business, but there is a place for local news, and advertising will be profitable. Maybe the problem is, yet again, greed. Shareholders demand excessive returns to the medium and long term detriment of the product and sales. That this is folly is amply demonstrated by an average drop in sales of13.5% in an industry that I hold close and dear.