Jessie's biography

Picture this. It’s early January 2008, it’s mid-afternoon and it’s dark and cold outside. Actually, it’s cold inside too, there’s no central heating in here so I sit under a quilt, toying with the idea of playing a DVD and contemplating my future. Frankly, it doesn’t look too rosy. I’ve just got another rejection slip to add to the pile.

These rejection slips - varying from coldly polite to a brusquely scribbled not interested – have finally convinced me that I am never going to be a writer.

So I make a decision, then and there. I am going to give up writing and retrain as something else.

Having made the decision, I feel better. Not good (hey, writers are born, not made, and the urge to write is so strong it’s damned near overwhelming) but better. I can relax and watch my DVD. I turn it on. It’s The Krays, starring the Kemp brothers. The Krays are rampaging across London’s East End in the swinging sixties like twin Caligulas on bad acid. My jaw drops as the film progresses. And … something else happens. I start wondering what it would be like if a woman were to be there, mixing it with the big boys. I leave the comfort of my quilt (Wow! Cold!) and I grab a pen and paper. And just like that, Annie Bailey is born.

She’s in love with Max Carter, who is due to marry her sister Ruthie. All her life Annie has had Ruthie’s cast-offs, and finally she snaps – and makes a decision that is going to set her on a very different path in life from the one she had supposed she would walk.

Annie Bailey is tough, intelligent, beautiful – everything any woman would want to be. As I started to write her (she sort of poured out of me, like water out of a bomb-struck dam) I knew that Annie was going to fill more than a single book. In between the mad spurts of writing, I delved into research on the sixties and the big organised gangs who ran the various ‘manors’ around London. These were deeply scary people, but was Annie scared? Well, sometimes. But never for long, because Annie had a destiny to perform. She was Annie Bailey, then she would become Annie Carter, and from there, well, that would be telling. All you need to know right now is that she takes up a whole trilogy (Dirty game, Black Widow and Scarlet Women) and one day – who knows? – she may reappear to fill up another book with her escapades. In the meantime there are other heroines queuing up to tell their stories – Lily King for one – and these girls have a style and a passion that’s all their own.

Now what about me? I’ve done a lot of writing since that January day under the quilt, that’s for sure, but way back before I even dreamed I could be a professional writer I was just the youngest in a big family. My Dad was a surveyor with an edge of brilliance. My Mum was from gipsy roots and used to drive around in a goat-cart (yes, really!) when she was little. Once we were rich (although I didn’t know it then, and it was all thanks to my Dad’s ingenuity) and then suddenly – pretty shockingly, really – we were poor (thanks to greedy people who exploited his kindness). I have to tell you, rich is better. But the great thing about life is, even painful events pass, and if you make bad choices, hopefully you learn from them.

For a while back there when the stuff really started hitting the fan, it’s true to say that I lost my way. Bunked off school (I’m qualified for precisely nothing: kids take note – you have to study), worried my Mum, dated bad boys (my first proper boyfriend was a car thief, and not even a good one – he got caught) and even badder men.

But things settled. The fog cleared. And all the hard, horrible stuff – bankruptcies, betrayals, burials of loved ones, crap jobs and living on the edge of desperation – well, they linger, who can deny that? But eventually that stuff starts to hurt a little less. It’s trite but true – that which does not kill you really does make you strong. Everything passes, and that’s a comfort.

Now, since that day under the quilt I write a lot. A lot. But that’s no hardship, because I love it and I feel that’s what I was always meant to do. In the immortal words of Ranulph Fiennes as he scaled the mountain, all I’ve got to do is ‘plod on’. Which is actually what I’m best at.

Jessie Keane