“It is the long-held ambition of many people to write a book, but it is hard to realise the dream. Finding the time, learning the process, having the commitment – it is a difficult thing to achieve and I didn’t have the chance until I had stepped away from my first career as an economist.”
Richard Jerram joined City St George’s as a mature student following a career working as an economist in the financial markets, having held the role of Chief Economist at the Bank of Singapore and at Macquarie Capital Securities in Japan. It was his time in Tokyo which would provide the inspiration for his first book, The Makoto Murders.
“Tokyo is a great setting for crime fiction as it is a very safe place but there is a lot going on beneath the surface.”
“Thinking about some of the people I had worked with in finance, I was playing with the question of how far will we go to succeed. Somehow the bones of the plot fell into place very quickly and I had a lot of fun writing it.”
The Makoto Murders tells the story of Ken Kato, a half-British, half-Japanese photojournalist working for a low-brow weekly magazine in Tokyo. He achieved fame with a photograph of a boy who drowned in the tsunami that hit Japan in 2011, who he could have saved had he not been more concerned with finding the right light and composition for his shot.
Four years later, unable to repeat the success of that photo and facing redundancy, he decides to turn serial killer to generate his own attention-grabbing pictures – for which he is inevitably always first on the scene. His magazine then publishes the pictures, causing a sensation in a society where murder is almost unheard of, and tripling its sales figures.
The early chapters of the novel won Richard the Debut Dagger (now known as the Emerging Author Dagger) from the Crime Writers’ Association in 2024.The CWA awards are the UK’s most prestigious crime fiction awards and Richard met his agent at the ceremony. From there, the book went out for submission before being acquired by Titan Books.
“When I started out, I hadn’t realised that writing a decent book was only the first step. Finding an agent, then a publisher is incredibly difficult. From starting the novel to walking into a bookshop and seeing it on the shelf took about four years, but less than half of that was the actual writing. I’d had a career where the time delay between writing and sending out a report was measured in minutes, so the different pace is something I have found difficult.”
“I was in a hotel in Tashkent, jumping on the bed in excitement, when I heard the news that The Makoto Murders was going to be published.”
Richard credits the MA Creative Writing with helping to shape his creative process.
“I found the structure of the master’s very helpful. The input of lecturers and classmates in workshops was particularly useful.”
“It is certainly possible to read some books on writing and figure the rest out by yourself. But investing time and money in a master’s makes sense in terms of the education and the support network. You’ll get to where you want to be so much faster.”
Following the success of The Makoto Murders, what is next for Richard and Ken Kato?
“A sequel is in the works. The first quarter of the book is based on the thesis I worked on for my master’s at City with Dr Joe Thomas, who was incredibly helpful. I was a fan before I applied for the master’s and he has written some great stuff.”
“My dream when I started out was to have a book on the shelf. I have achieved that, so I’m content.”