There I was, hurtling through the draft of the next Code & Stone novel, when I somehow ended up writing a Halloween short story. Before anyone starts, it all started innocently enough. I’d plotted a scene for Network Rising where Jinx and Stephen were having a chat over a fireside pint in The Feathers, with Jinx telling him a little about her past.

The trouble was, once I started drafting it, the scene kept growing. There was far too much dialogue, I was trying to cram too much in and I quickly began to realise it probably wasn’t a good fit for the book, so I abandoned the idea.

Meanwhile, I’d also discovered that, as an indie author, I was apparently supposed to have something called a “reader magnet”. Basically, a free story to encourage people to sign up for my newsletter. My author friends (by which I mean random people on Facebook) had assured me this was essential.

Fair enough. I could write a short story, give it away, and then get back to Book Two. How long could that possibly take?

So I started looking for an idea. That abandoned scene with Jinx was still rattling around in my head, and someone on Reddit had recently mentioned they’d love to read more about her.

An origin story was beginning to look like a possibility. I just needed somewhere to set it.

Fortunately, around the same time, I’d been researching interesting locations for future books and found myself disappearing down a rather different rabbit hole.

Who knew London had an old underground tramway?

One of the things I enjoy about writing Code & Stone is taking real places around London and imagining what else might be happening there.

The Kingsway subway was particularly good for that. It opened in 1906 and eventually connected tram routes north and south of the Thames. Ordinary London trams disappeared beneath the streets near Holborn, stopped at underground stations, and emerged again near the Embankment.

What really caught my attention was discovering that part of the long-abandoned subway is still there. The southern section became the Strand Underpass, but much of the northern tunnel survived near Southampton Row, complete with its old rails and tiled walls.

There are plenty of photographs and accounts of its history, so I had a reasonable idea of the layout without actually setting foot inside. (London Transport Museum runs guided tours, which I’ve now added to my rather long list of places I want to visit.)

So I had a location. Now I just needed a plot.

With Halloween 2026 approaching, I started thinking about what might happen in an abandoned tram tunnel beneath London. A few ideas came and went, but I kept coming back to that scene I’d abandoned. A Jinx origin story seemed the obvious choice. A chance to explore a little of her life before she met Stephen and took on the apparently full-time job of keeping him alive.

All I needed now was to give her a particularly unpleasant evening.

A different perspective

Phantom Signals is written in the present tense, with Stephen narrating events as they happen to him. But Jinx’s story takes place four years earlier, and for some reason, writing it in past tense just felt more natural. I’m not sure there’s any real literary significance to that. It just seemed to work better in my head.

Of course, writing Jinx as the main character was another departure. Until now, I’d only written her through Stephen’s eyes. Writing from her perspective meant getting to know her a little better and working out what she was like as a young police constable, fresh out of Hendon and still finding her feet.

Not to mention that I have considerably more experience being a grumpy middle-aged man than a woman in her early twenties. But let’s gloss over that…

Before I knew it, I somehow had an 8,000-word short story. 

The result is The Last Passenger, a new Code & Stone short story set on Halloween 2021. Three teenagers have disappeared, and PC Janie Evans and her partner find themselves investigating what happened.

Readers of Phantom Signals will know her better as DC Jinx Evans, but you don’t need to have read the novel to enjoy this one. And if you have, I hope you enjoy getting to know Jinx a little better before Stephen comes along and complicates her life.

It’s around half an hour’s reading, and it’s free when you sign up for my rather irregular newsletter from the field.

Get your free copy of The Last Passenger

So, after all that, I finally have my reader magnet. Whether I’ve made any progress on Book Two in the past few weeks is another matter.

I hope you enjoy it!