Authors get triple book deal

A pair of Frome authors have secured three publishing contracts on the same day.

Mick Davis and David Lassman have signed the contracts with Pen & Sword, a publishing company specialising in local history, military and true crime.

The first of the books the pair have co-written will be published in hardback later this year and recounts the brutal murder of a 14 year-old girl that occurred in Frome in the mid-nineteenth century.

The Awful Killing of Sarah Watts: A Story of Confessions, Acquittals and Jailbreaks is the first full-length book about the case, which happened in September 1851 and shocked the nation.

It is already being tipped as a successor to The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, Kate Summerscale’s best-selling book and television series recounting the 1860 murder of four-year old Saville Kent in Rode.

Mick said, “This case was originally going to be just one article in an anthology we are also compiling, but while conducting the research it quickly became apparent that it warranted a whole book to itself.

“It has more twists and turns than a mystery thriller and a cast of characters, including a prize fighter called Frome Bob and a London detective, fiction writers would find hard to equal. And it’s all true.”

Mick is co-author of The Historic Inns of Frome and a volunteer at Frome Museum, while David is the author of Frome in the Great War and was a founding trustee of the Frome Writers Collective.

The pair met on a local history course run by Frome Community Education and this is the first book they have collaborated on.

The remaining two contracts are for books titled ‘Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Frome and the Surrounding Areas’ and ‘A Visitor’s Historical Guide to Somerset’, both of which are due out in 2018.

David, meanwhile, has been commissioned to write a follow-up to Frome in the Great War, to be called Frome at War 1939-45. He is happy to hear from anyone with memories or archive material and can be contacted at david@davidlassman.com