Chris Graham

Chris Graham spent his working life riding motorcycles and driving vans to earn a living. Along the way he met many different types of people and saw a whole load of different places. Today, he still rides and drives, but the riding is for fun when the weather is good and the driving is purely 'social, domestic and pleasure', as the insurance companies like to refer to it. From England's tranquil West Country, where he now lives, to the busy city streets, and of course the open road that was his companion for so long, Graham traversed the country, and beyond, delivering anything and everything from documents to diamonds, and even body parts, to people as varied as artists and ad men, musicians and actors, engineers, lawyers, fashion designers… people of all walks of life from tarts in massage parlours and professors in labs to members of the royal family… not to mention working as a despatch rider for TV camera crews at major events in the days before the digital age, when the tapes needed rushing off to catch the satellite link 'window' so that news hungry audiences in America got their pictures. All of these experiences and more, got shelved away, for future use in the writing that he'd always promised himself he would do one day. None of it would be wasted. With his eclectic interests ranging from food to fossils, from wine to wailing guitars, from surrealists to steam engines and beyond, he is never going to be short of subject matter. Now, at last, from his home in a small Wessex Village, he is weaving some of the more believable situations that he's encountered, along with the tales and experiences related to him by the people with whom he's worked and played, into his series of stories, the 'Lena's Friends' crime novels. CHRIS GRAHAM’S introduction to the ‘LENA’S FRIENDS’ series (Published by ‘Ex-L-Ence Publishing’). Motorcycle riding Lena isn’t the average amateur sleuth, in fact she’s not the sleuth at all in these books… but some of ‘Lena’s Friends’ are… while others somehow get themselves involved in various crimes and misadventures. Meanwhile her friends on the right side of the boundary between right and wrong try to solve them. But Lena herself is no stranger to the shadier side of society - both high and decidedly low - as in her working life as a high class call girl, she has some less than respectable acquaintances. OK… I know that credibility has to be stretched a little in crime fiction, whether it’s the cozy ‘Miss Marple’ style sleuth story, dramatic or violent thrillers, or over the top comic book heroics with impossible feats of derring do leaping off the page. (Then there’s the impossible crime fighting ‘superheroes’ with special ‘powers’ as in so many American comic books and the movies they’ve spawned.) The premise of little villages with major crime rates that would rival New York, or even prohibition era Chicago, can be a little unbelievable. In the UK at least, a murder is still big news. We don’t have a culture of guns and killers as the norm. I’ve tried to avoid these problems of credibility as much as I can with my ‘Lena’s Friends’ stories by making Lena Fox more of a catalyst than the actual protagonist.  The series is called ‘Lena’s Friends’ after all, so along with the glamorous redhead, her friends, both inside and out of the forces of law and order, all contribute. So why not get to know Lena and her varied friends? You can share in the lives of some interesting, and sometimes very naughty, characters as for some of them their lives are changed forever… while for others, their lives are dramatically cut short.