Jessie's biography

Then things went disastrously wrong. The family business went bankrupt, her father died, the bank took the family home, and Jessie found herself living on a council estate with her widowed mother. Secondary school was a disaster: distraught from all that had happened to her at such a young age, she couldn't focus and failed her exams, leaving school with virtually no qualifications and with her hopes of attending Art College (for which she'd already been accepted) in tatters.

There followed a succession of dead-end jobs and dodgy boyfriends, but she taught herself to type and kept writing stories. Some office and secretarial work followed, then she married and ran a business with her then husband. They later divorced, and through it all Jessie kept bashing out stories and filing away all the rejection slips.

Finally she’d had enough: she’d tried to get published for 20 years, writing sagas, chick lit, comedy crime, and she’d come close ... but never close enough. She was broke – so broke she couldn’t even afford to have central heating fitted to her increasingly dilapidated home. She took a year off to retrain as a counsellor, doing a little tutoring work for the Writers’ News and the Open College of Arts to try to make ends meet. But the writing bug wouldn’t let her go. While watching a sixties gangster film one rainy evening, she was really engrossed and inspired, and she got back to the writing again, determined to write not something the market required but something that she herself would enjoy reading about.

The result was her debut novel DIRTY GAME. Writing suddenly became fun again. Even if it never saw the light of day, Jessie had so enjoyed writing the book that she didn’t care. She completed it on a freezing January day, wearing an overcoat while she typed because she still couldn’t afford to have heating installed. With no expectations, she sent the first three chapters of the manuscript off to six agents, and two – much to her amazement – responded positively and wanted to see the rest.

Then came the call from one of the agents, Judith Murdoch, summoning Jessie to London to discuss the book. With some small alterations, the book was then deemed fit to be presented to publishers, but her agent told her not to expect a quick reply as nothing happened in publishing in August. So Jessie sat back and expected more rejection slips.

On the August Bank Holiday her agent phoned again and delivered the life-changing news: she had secured a three book deal with HarperCollins for a substantial six figure sum. And the first thing Jessie did? Phoned a central heating engineer!