My name is Martin Best, and Jennifer Jackson of Author’s Lounge kindly invited me to write this article. My home town is Torquay in the county of Devon (Sunny Devon, where it rains six days out of seven!), part of the ambitiously named English Riviera, where I live with my wife Kim, eldest son Connor, and our dogs, Shadow and Raven. I’m a full-time independent author and publisher, and, to date, I’ve published three short stories and seven novels. I write contemporary paranormal urban fantasy, which translates as a combination of storylines featuring ghosts and mythical beings in an everyday setting. My abiding interest in the supernatural stems from growing up in an actively haunted house, where various members of my family and I experienced phenomena ranging from hearing phantom sounds to seeing apparitions. These experiences, plus subsequent ones, have almost inevitably inspired my writing. The house where I spent my first eleven years provides the location for the haunting in Of Gods and Ghosts – the second book in the six-part adult themed Ghost Hunter series of stand-alone novels – and in my short story The Novice Ghost Hunter, the paranormal activity is based on a haunting that I witnessed.
My primary objective when writing, is to entertain the reader by immersing them in a compelling, realistic story. To this end, I find that the inclusion of meticulously researched authentic locations and genuine historical events give the fictional elements greater credibility, and if the reader is unable to differentiate between fact and fantasy, so much the better. The supernatural raises far more questions than it answers, and beyond the given premise that ghosts exist – even if they’re empirically unproven – my characters seek cogent explanations for the paranormal phenomena that they encounter. What is a ghost? How did the beings known as the Celtic Gods come into existence? Is religion relevant to the supernatural? Although there are no definitive answers, I hope that the diverse theories and concepts explored provide the reader with food for thought.
My latest novel, the first of a new series, is The Baby Farmer’s Ghost. It features a Ghost Hunter series fan favourite character, sixteen-year-old Carolyn Hunter, in the leading rôle, and is aimed at a readership aged from thirteen years upwards. The eponymous ghost is inspired by an unpleasant piece of social history from Victorian Britain. In the absence of any welfare services, it was relatively commonplace for unwanted or illegitimate babies to be ‘farmed out’ to mostly middle-aged women for either a one-off fee or a regular payment. Many baby farmers were unscrupulous, and would systematically drug or starve their charges to death – sometimes outright murdering them – to maximise their income. One of the most notorious baby farmers, Charlotte Winsor, lived only a few minutes’ drive from my home, and she provided the perfect model for a malicious ghost. I was however, forced to relocate the baby farmer’s house, as where it once stood is now the site of a McDonald’s restaurant!
In The Baby Farmer’s Ghost, seventeen-year-old Francine ‘Frankie’ Allen and her family have moved house twelve times in the last ten years. Frankie’s dad, Matthew, has promised that they’ll be staying in Torquay, which is a relief, until Frankie discovers that their forever home is haunted. Emotionally scarred by merciless bullying at her previous school, Frankie is pushed close to breaking point, and turns to her strange new friend, Carolyn Hunter, for help. Invited to stay overnight at the Hunter’s house, Frankie is introduced to the paranormal world that Carolyn and her parents, Malachi and Teena, inhabit, and learns that reality isn’t as straightforward as she believed it to be. Armed with her new knowledge, Frankie, helped and hindered by younger brother Tristan, joins Carolyn in what becomes a desperate struggle to rid the family home of the spiteful spirit. I’m currently writing the next instalment of Carolyn and Frankie’s story, Hunter and Allen: Paranormal Investigators, which will be published in the first half of twenty twenty-three.
I hope that you’ve enjoyed reading this brief insight into my world, and the fictional world of the ghost hunters, as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it.
