Black magic has long been a dangerous and dark power that has woven a mysterious net throughout history.  Its name is given to inexplicable or supernatural powers of evil characters.  Black magic stands in contrast to white magic, which is seen as its good counterpart.  Generally, white magic serves to bring the practitioner closer to spirituality and nature.  Black magic, however, is said to be a selfish means for the practitioner to make gains from it.   

Historically, all magic was seen as evil and suspect, as the witch burnings from the Renaissance or earlier history show.  Some reports of witchcraft and witch burnings or executions go back to ancient Egypt and Babylonia, where sometimes women were executed with their children, if they were believed to have used magic in the form of drugs or curses.  

In the Renaissance, any form of magic, be it white or black, was considered an affront to religion and punished with a sure death sentence.  The upper and educated classes may have studied “natural magic” without consequences, but any form of ritualistic magic or magic practised by the common folk was seen as a crime.  

Black magic can still be found today, be it as an occult, satanism or sorcery.  A search on the Internet shows that not only do people believe in it, they also search for answers on how to protect themselves against it.  Supernatural forces, be they good or evil, clearly have a huge pull in today’s world.  

The human race has always sought to deal with uncontrollable events by turning to a higher power.  Being able to control outcomes for one's own selfish gain may be a reason why some turn to a darker practice of dark magic.  Black magic, voodoo and murder often go together and some cults believe that potions or human sacrifices bring them wealth and good fortune.  

Black Magic - The fuel for Andrew Segal’s latest crime thriller “The Black Candle Killings”

Andrew, thank you so much for taking the time to read and answer these questions.

Congratulations on your fabulous new book

The Black Candle Killings.
Please tell your readers: How did the idea of a female Private Investigator come to life? 

I wanted to make a change from the usual macho loner. I couldn't find many female PIs on Google, (plenty of female police), so thought I'd work on that. I planned a woman who would be both physically and mentally strong, but a woman unafraid to acknowledge her essential femininity nonetheless. She stands out, being just over six feet tall, and makes no apology for being a committed fashion icon. She's an exponent of Krav Maga, the Israeli system of self defence. She's experienced all sorts of prejudice being both mixed race and Jewish. She has both specifically female and also personal weaknesses. With high levels of testosterone, whilst unlikely to conceive she still hankers after motherhood. She's sexually profligate with an Israeli occasional lover in tow, whilst living with her female partner. She does lines of cocaine, smokes panatellas and drinks vodka. She is a woman of absolute integrity, and a damn good PI.

She sounds absolutely fabulous Andrew.  

Is Tammy Pierre based on someone you know in real life? 

My first wife, Helen, was mixed race, born in Trinidad to an Afro father and mother of Portuguese background. At 5'9", she was tall, but not as tall as Tammy, my main character. That was my starting off point and I built on it and her from there. 

The topic of Black Magic features heavily in your latest book.  Tell us more about your interest in Black Magic. 

On the occasions I visited Trinidad the subject of Black Magic came up from time to time. Helen's family and background was business and professional, her father was an architect. I wondered what that section of the community would make of Black Magic, or Obiah as they called it. The consensus was, it's all superstitious nonsense. But, whatever you do, DON'T get involved with it in any way. I took the advice and never went to any demonstrations.

Sounds quite dubious! 

Do you ever try and see things from the bad guy’s perspective when writing? 

In my short story, soon to be the title of my next book of short stories, 'I'm a Contract Killer,' I put myself in the killer's place, writing in the first person. It was an interesting exercise. My killer is actually a man with a conscience. He'll only kill to order if the mark is a menace to society.

What draws you to Crime Thriller writing? 

I like reading it, so I thought I'd try writing it. My short stories, for example in the book, 'I'm a Gigolo,' are very black humour. I like the idea of twists and turns in events, their unpredictability and what makes characters tick. Crime thrillers open up innumerable possibilities on that front.

Does your writing scare you at times? 

In the book, I'm a Gigolo, is the story, In his own Image, based loosely on the life and death of the 1870s US, so-called 'freedom fighter/bushwacker’, Archie Clement. A five foot tall, twenty-one year old, whisky swilling tobacco chewing, thug who rode with Bloody Bill Anderson and his gang, robbing banks and murdering at will. Archie's USP was his love of scalping his victims, frequently while they were still alive. The somewhat metaphysical ending left me a tad uneasy. Badly edited by the first publishers, it nonetheless carries a punch.  

Where is your biggest inspiration for your crime thrillers coming from? 

Inspiration comes from actual events which spark an idea, including news items, comments and conversations with friends, my own imagination, nightmares during restless nights. The secret, for me, is to be aware that I've found something worth exploring. I frequently make notes on ideas in the early hours. If I don't, by morning they're gone.  

That’s so frustrating when that happens!

What’s your favourite horror or scary film? 

Probably none of the usual. An old TV ghost film in the lead up to Halloween one year, watched in company, had everyone in the room distinctly uneasy. Then a TV production of Frankenstein, more than twenty years ago, with the monster ageing, slowly but visibly, had me turning off. Too weird by half.

With a daytime job, when and how do you find the time to write stories? 

I write evenings, weekends and spare moments if the adrenalin demands appeasement.

When did you start writing? Was it something you always wanted to do? 

When I first met my present wife, Roberta, thirty or so years ago, I told her I had an idea for a short story, which with her encouragement, I wrote. She liked “Cat and Mouse”, and so did my daughter. So I joined a  writers' evening class and they seemed to like my off the wall short stories. A novel, Toa, based on the life of a Jamaican woman whom I sponsored for UK citizenship, followed. I then turned to writing a thriller, vaguely based on an insolvency incident, and The Hamilton Conspiracy was the result. And now, The Lyme Regis Murders, followed by Black Candles.

How do you balance writing crime fiction with brutal and dark details with being a children’s book author? 

In my first marriage I was the parental one. My daughter elected to stay with me when I divorced. I like kids, and like, as far as an adult can, to empathise with them. I switch off one genre in my head and open another when going from crime to children's stories.

Thank you Andrew. That’s business and the serious side done!  Now some fun facts:

If you had to describe yourself in three words, what would they be? 

Driven    Compassionate    Curious

What is your preferred writer’s tipple when writing?

Coffee, or bison grass vodka, neat, from the freezer and in a chilled tumbler. A bit like Tammy.

If you had to organise a Ouija Board Session and could invite four celebrities, who would you pick? 

1. Eleanor Marx, multi-lingual favourite daughter and translator of Karl Marx. Around nine corpses a day were found on the streets of London in the Victorian era, having died of cholera, or more likely starvation. The country became wealthy on slave labour, some stately homes boasted as many as 200 gardeners, and a further 100 indoor staff below stairs. Eleanor, Tussy, to her friends, (pronounced to rhyme with pussy, as in pussy cat), worked an unbelievable schedule establishing unions for workers in the gas industry, the docks, retail and more. A chain smoking highly sexed woman who believed all children should be given the unvarnished facts of life, women should be treated equally to men and effectively that enterprise should be done away with, I'd love to meet her and ask what she'd do about the human desire for challenge, for profit and reward for risk. 
   
   

2. Thomas Cromwell. He was a buccaneer, mercenary, finance wizz, philanthropist, organiser, etc etc. I wonder what he really thought of Henry VIII, who in the end succumbed to his own paranoia and had Cromwell executed, an act he later bitterly regretted.
   
   

3. Jennie Churchill, Winston's American mother, daughter of the wealthy Leonard Jerome, married to Lord Randolph, who died early of syphilis? Or perhaps simply exhaustion and general ill health, and who neglected him, Winston, in his early years, later doing all in her power to help him further his own military ambitions. A beautiful, highly sexed woman, reckoned to have had over two hundred lovers, one cannot help but wonder, with her lack of funds after Randolph's death, whether some of her amours might not have helped her defray the exorbitant costs of Winston's horses, guns, uniform etc etc. I'd like to know what it was that most impressed her about her son?
   
   

4. Frank James, brother of the notorious outlaw, train and bank robber, Jesse James. The two rode with a number of gangs, among them, Bloody Bill Anderson, killing and looting as they went, stealing an estimated $200,000. After brother Jesse was killed, aged just 34, by bounty hunter Bob Ford, seeking to earn the $10,000 dollar reward, who'd fooled Jesse into thinking they'd plan one final robbery, what did Frank think of his brother? Why did he think that the journalist who financed his, Frank's, three trials, for murder and robbery, where he was eventually acquitted, had done so. Frank ended up a lover of Shakespeare. Where did that come from? And in his latter years worked at Barnum and Bailey's circus regaling open jawed listeners with stories of his questionable past.

If you could travel in time, which era would you go to? Why? 

Probably to the golden quarter century following the second World War. It was a time of peace, rebuilding, optimism, hope. There were anti-biotics, indoor plumbing and the E-type Jaguar. A gentler time when people still treated each other with respect, queued in line and even the most modest foreign holiday resorts were exotic, exciting and weren't overrun with tourists.   

Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” or “Psycho”? 

Both chilling. In Daphne du Maurier's book, Birds, the ending is far less optimistic than Kitchcock’s film, where there is a happy outcome. Du Maurier's short story leaves the reader with a doom-laden ending. There is no solution and the protagonists are unlikely to survive the ever more fevered attacks by the birds. 
In Psycho we have one of the apparent principal characters, played by the good looking John Gavin, killed entirely unexpectedly quite early on in the film. Typical Hitchcockian surprise. On balance I'd go for the Hitchcock. I like Ruth Rendell's psychological thrillers, also written under the pseudonym, Barbara Vine. Norman Bates is an intriguing character. Is he schizophrenic? Does he comply with the definition? Or is he something else, believing himself to in effect be his mother? Endlessly interesting. 

Andrew, thank you so much, you have been incredibly interesting and fascinating to talk to.  

“The Black Candle Killings”by Andrew Segal can be purchased via the following:

Happy London Press:  Special Offer Books | Happy Story Store

Amazon: The Black Candle Killings: Amazon.co.uk: Segal, Andrew: 9781912951260: Books

Waterstones:   The Black Candle Killings by Andrew Segal | Waterstones