'There were more psychopaths in business than prison' - author Lesley McEvoy on how behaviour profiling career has shaped her novels, analysing the Oasis brothers and her Yorkshire crime series

“I’d just got to that age where I realised that the stories that were being read to me or the stories I was reading were written by somebody,” McEvoy recalls. “That was kind of a revelation to me and I thought, what a wonderful thing to do.”

Her teacher, in Bradford, was less than convinced. “She said to me ‘people like us read books, we don’t write them’…If she was still alive now, I’d be sending her copies of (my own).”

McEvoy’s first novel was published on the cusp of her 60th birthday in 2019, a crime thriller following the work of forensic psychologist and profiler Jo McCready. Now, the fifth book in the West Yorkshire-set series is set to be released, crafted from McEvoy’s beloved ‘she-shed’ at the bottom of her garden in Cheshire.

Her work has grown from the maxim write what you know. Though McEvoy has never shared the exact job title as her lead protagonist, she is comfortably familiar with the world in which McCready operates, having spent more than 25 years specialising in behavioural profiling and training, both in the corporate world and inside of jails.

“Now I’m not a forensic profiler because I haven’t got a degree in criminology,” she stresses. “But I wrote about what I knew in that world. By making Jo McCready a forensic psychologist, she is better placed to be drawn into working on criminal cases with the police.”

Inside some of the UK’s toughest prisons, Lesley met people whose lives had been characterised by drugs and violence and whose experiences inform the themes she now writes about.

The corporate world also provided unexpected sources of inspiration. “There were more psychopaths in business than there were in prison,” she says.

It is not just within her own books that Lesley has drawn from her career as a behavioural psychologist and a psychotherapist.

She has also used her expertise to help novelist Dorothy Koomson craft her character of profiler Kez Lanyon and has supported author PJ Harrison with his recent book Gallagher: The Fall and Rise of Oasis.

Harrison, who spent time on the road and in the studio with the band, looks at how the brothers rose from a council estate in Manchester and why they have such enduring legacies both together and apart.

McEvoy says: “When he was writing the book he said he thought that the Gallagher brothers had got short shrift in the media really and that all the media saw were these warring brothers…There’s a lot more behind all of that and he wanted to understand their psychology, what made them tick and why were they like that.”

McEvoy pulled together material including interviews, documentaries and information from the Gallaghers’ childhood years and used that to analyse the behaviour of the brothers.

“Liam is more extroverted and he acts out,” she muses. “If he’s got emotions and issues that he’s dealing with, he vents it outwards. Noel is more internalised, he’s more introverted.”

As a result, “when they clashed, it was like oil and water,” she says. “The oxygen of drama that fed Liam starved Noel and suffocated Noel and he couldn’t be around it.”

She believes their behaviours stem from their childhood experiences. “It is a cliche but it’s true nonetheless that childhood experiences are very imprinting and they do form a lot of our views of the world and our characteristics.”

McEvoy, who called Bradford her home for much of her life, says her own childhood wasn’t easy and she lost herself in books. “Those were my friends. That was my escape,” she says. “That was my sanctuary and still is.”

She recalls, as a child, writing stories for her parents and friends and making her own books, by binding together sheets of paper with sticky tape.

Having a book published was always the dream; she started seriously submitting in her twenties but writing would often take a back seat around family life and a demanding day-job.

Her work as a behavioural analyst and profiler took her around the world “and I’m not one of these writers who can write on planes and in hotel rooms”, she says. “So when I was travelling a lot and working a lot, there were a lot of years I didn’t really get a chance (to write).”

McEvoy first became interested in psychology whilst working for Post Office Telecommunications, in its training division. “I started to think about how we get into the heads of the people that we’re working with, whether we’re managing them, selling to them or delivering services to them,” she explains.

Over the next few years, she undertook various courses on the different aspects of psychology and psychometrics in business. She became a certified behavioural analyst whilst working at a company focused on corporate profiling, with clients in the travel and financial sectors. Her career since has been through her consultancy business and therapy practice, predominantly working with big corporations.

Her roles have varied, from helping managers to understand the behaviour of their reports, to supporting frontline staff with recognising and dealing with challenging behaviour from customers. One project saw her team up with British Transport Police to work with staff on identifying risky behaviours among passengers, exploring what to do about it, who to alert and what to say.

“That was really interesting and it happened at a time when terrorism was becoming a subject that staff had to become more aware of,” she says.

In recent years, McEvoy worked on the Once Upon a True Crime series, which saw several authors explore real crimes that had in some way influenced their writing. She analysed the behaviour of Russell Bishop for the episode which explored the 1986 Babes in the Wood murders.

Over her career, she has also worked with charities and third sector organisations on the likes of drug addiction and behaviour-based crime prevention and from there, was asked to give a talk to prison officers about the behaviour of prisoners. That led into working with prisoners and prison groups directly.

“I draw on that experience when I’m writing about people in prison or who’ve been in prison,” McEvoy says. “The way they think, the way they view their behaviours and so on. I’ve had some interesting conversations that feed into my books.”

Her debut, The Murder Mile, was seven years in the making. In 2017, she made the decision to devote more time to writing, and finally finish the book before she turned 60 a couple of years later. So McEvoy wound up a lot of the travel and slowed down her business.

A year later, she took her tale to Harrogate’s Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, which she’d been attending as a crime fiction fan for years. She hoped she’d be selected to pitch to publishing professionals as part of the festival’s Dragon’s Pen event - but her name wasn’t chosen.

“I was gutted,” she remembers. “But I got chatting to somebody that I’d been sitting next to who was published by Bloodhound, and she asked me for my pitch, and I gave it to her. About a week later Bloodhound contacted me.”

In 2019, McEvoy went to the festival as a published author for the first time, proudly carrying her book. There, a friend introduced her to Scottish crime writer Sir Ian Rankin.

“He was there promoting his new book and he generously said, let’s swap books. About two or three weeks later, I got a message from him saying, ‘I’ve read The Murder Mile. I love it.’...He said, ‘I’ll pass it to my agent…there’s no guarantee once I’ve given it to him. It’s up to him whether he takes you or not, but I’ve done my bit.’ I was blown away.”

That was the start of things. A three-book deal with Zaffre for the Jo McCready series followed. Now, book five is set to be released and work on book six is underway. They’re all set in a fictional town, which is based on Bradford.

The Corpse Light, out next week, sees McReady examine two seemingly unconnected crimes - a young woman assaulted and left for dead while walking the Yorkshire moors and a local man murdered on the edge of a landfill site.

“All my books are rooted very squarely in Yorkshire,” says McEvoy. “I’ve got a Yorkshire protagonist. She lives on the Yorkshire Moors in this converted farmhouse…I seem to be getting a band of readers, the majority of whom are in Yorkshire and they’re very loyal…I hope that grows. And I also want to grow the fan base out of Yorkshire…

“In the same way that Ian Rankin’s books grew out of Edinburgh and put Edinburgh on the map in a literary sense…and he’s made local pubs and local landmarks famous that people probably would never have seen, I hope the same thing happens with the Jo McCready series…

“It would be lovely if places here became part of a Yorkshire crime series tour and fans of the books would go seek these places out. That would be great for the county and great for the book. And of course, the main dream, the big dream is to get a TV company to take it up.”

The Corpse Light, by Lesley McEvoy, is published by Zaffre on July 31. McEvoy is at Merchant Adventurers’ Hall on July 31 for a book launch with York’s Criminally Good Books.