Interview with Paul Crawford, author of The Wonders of Doctor Bent
Today it gives the Indie Crime Scene great pleasure to interview Professor Paul Crawford, whose novel The Wonders of Dr Bent has its debut on 18th March 2025.
What gave you the idea to write a novel about crime in an academic setting?
University life can be dull. I wanted to blend the darkness of say Clare Mackintosh’s I See You with the lighter campus novel of David Lodge’s Small World.
This is your second work of fiction but you have been writing mostly non-fiction. How easy is it to switch between these?
Fiction is much more demanding than non-fiction. Writing non-fiction is a kind of relaxation when I need a break from the imaginative effort of giving characters blood pressure!
Tell us about your protagonist, Jason Hemp. Who is he and what crime is he investigating?
Jason Hemp is an unambitious English lecturer at a new university who sets out to find the killer of his twin brother. His grief leads him to unusual and naïve attempts to track him down. The brother he thought he knew more than anyone is rather more complex and caught up in a sinister world.
The other main character is Dr Bent, the medical director of a high security hospital for treating people with severe mental health conditions deemed a grave and immediate risk to the public. What sort of person is he and how does he encounter Jason Hemp?
Dr Bent is a highly successful goth-psychiatrist and wounded healer who struggles with his own mental health. As medical director, he tries to humanise the prisonlike environment of Foston Hall through what staff call ‘his wonders’. He also works to divert people in mental distress from the court system. He first meets Jason in this capacity as the impulsive amateur detective becomes a public nuisance and comes to the attention of the police.
The issue of mental capacity and criminal responsibility has been brought into sharp relief by recent murder trials. How far have such cases affected your decision to write this story?
The writing of The Wonders of Doctor Bent predates the most recent and shocking killings by Valdo Calocane in Nottingham who had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Determining how far such an individual’s capacity to act freely will always be a matter for the courts and expert witnesses. In the novel, Dr Bent deliberates his own hierarchy of empathy and compassion for those who commit such terrible acts yet he also considers the victimhood of those whose mental disorders so distort reality that they end up in a high-security setting for the rest of their lives.
You mention your own struggles with depression. To what extent has that contributed to the creation of the characters in the story?
My lived experience of extreme trauma, subsequent depression and suicidality joins with my clinical and research knowledge as a professor at the Institute of Mental Health to scaffold believable characters under duress. This combined awareness resonates in descriptions of behaviour and actions of both the main and minor characters in the story.
The issue of responsibility and mental health is a live one. A lot of people seem to ignore mental illness as a defence to murder, despite what the law says. What are your thoughts about this?
I am not sure the majority of people consider those with enduring serious mental illness that profoundly distorts their grip on reality, for example, when subject to delusions and command hallucinations, as deserving the same evaluation or judgement as someone without such difficulties. The law rightly tests the balance here.
You led the creation of the Aardman Animation series What’s Up With Everyone, supporting young people’s mental health. What challenges did that present?
First, leading this remotely during the pandemic! Second, its complexity given the large number of people involved in the project: 42 young persons, Aardman producers and animators, public relations, researchers, and clinicians.
Foston Hall is an institution for “the treatment of the so-called ‘criminally insane’.” How far is it based on reality, and how much is it an imaginary space like the asylums of Gothic fiction?
Foston Hall is seeded from both working in different institutions for the mentally ill, visiting several high- or medium-secure hospitals or units, and even being locked up in one for a while by mistake!
What would you like readers to take away from reading The Wonders of Dr Bent?
An emotional after-image of what makes us human, appreciation of the genius of creative survival, and a falling heart rate.
How do you think it might appeal to a lay and/or an academic audience?
The Wonders of Doctor Bent is a literary thriller, a frame for readers to hallucinate and enter at pace into the lives of the characters. It affords a Chinese burn to expectations and reminds us that our minds are not entirely our own and recovery from mental affliction, not least regaining trust, is hard won. Its themes generously gear to both lay and academic curiosity and wonderment, from crime and campus to diverse mental states. Going deep or shallow, I hope my readers enjoy the story.
How much does it relate to the new genre of dark academia?
I would turn things the other way and say that several genres, including dark academia, relate to the novel. The Wonders of Doctor Bent is not a standard issue thriller. It is a mixed grill. Tuck in everyone!
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About Professor Paul Crawford:
Paul Crawford is an award-winning author and a leading figure in mental health, with Fellowships of the Royal Society of Arts, the Academy of Social Sciences and the Royal Society for Public Health. The world’s first professor of Health Humanities, which seeks to enhance people’s well-being through creative practices, he directs the Centre for Social Futures at the Institute of Mental Health, based at The University of Nottingham, UK.
His recent non-fiction work, Florence Nightingale at Home, won Best Achievement in The People’s Book Prize 2022. He also led the recent animated series with Aardman, What’s Up With Everyone, supporting young people’s mental health, which won Best Design and content in the 2021 Design Week Awards, multiple categories in the 2021 PR Week Pride Awards and reached over 17m people within four months of launch alone. He is Joint Editor-in-Chief for The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Health Humanities and Commissioning Editor for two book series, Arts for Health (Emerald), and Routledge Studies in Literature and Health Humanities.
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