The Thing About Turpenton

It was never meant to be so omnipresent. This place called Turpenton.

It was just a name for a place that I thought up because I needed to think up a name for a place in an early draft of Last Night at The Stairways.

And I got so attached to it, I never thought of a better place name. So the name stuck, and I'm stuck with the name.

I mean, Stairways is loosely based on a couple of old night clubs in my hometown of Croydon, south London. But I didn't want to namecheck Croydon in my fiction, mainly to protect the innocent and prevent an unmanageable influx of tourists to the area. 

And Turpenton was the first made up name I could think of that sounded like a place without actually being a place.

But it wasn't meant to stick, and Turpenton East station certainly wasn't meant to crop up in The Wronged. 

And Turpenton General certainly wasn't meant to be the setting for A Dead Chick and Some Dirty Tricks.

But before you get to thinking he's gone Turpenton crazy, fear not. My subsequent novels A Big Bluff and Some Green Stuff, and A Killing Spree and Some Bloody Zombies barely mentioned the place.

But fair's fair: Zombie Cop returned right to the heart of the town and stayed a whie amid the blood and guts of an undead uprising.

Since then, my books have remained a Turpenton-free zone.