An author living in Lewisham has published her first debut novel, which is set in the south east London areas of Lewisham, Greenwich and Blackheath.

Katherine Black’s first novel - A Most Unusual Demise - is “first in a new series” that she is writing.

The novel, which is a “humorous, cosy crime story”, follows the story of a retired librarian May and her old friend Fletcher, who live in Blackheath and get mixed up in a murder investigation with a journalist from a local paper.

Originally from Dallas, Texas, Katherine moved to England in 1993 after her marriage, and has lived in the south east London area since 2003 which she has grown to love.

The 52-year-old said: “It’s a fictional version of Blackheath, there's a church on the heath, but it's called St. Julian's, instead of All Saints.

“I chose St. Julian's because St. Julian is the patron saint of murderers and I thought that was fitting.

“There are other places mentioned like Greenwich Park, the Cutty Sark. Lewisham Market, Hither Green, and Lewisham Police Station.”

Katherine first began the book during her time studying an MA at the University of East Anglia in 2019.

The book first began as crime fiction and later evolved to include a more comedic element, which she found helped her during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Katherine said: “I knew I wanted to write crime when I started out and the comedy just sort of happened.

“It wasn't initially planned, but then it just started going that way.

“I wrote a lot of it in lockdown and it was nice to have that, something lighthearted to think about and focus on.”

The newly published author also spoke about her love for Lewisham and her admiration for the diversity of the area she now calls home.

Being formerly from the suburbs of Dallas, Katherine said that she wasn’t previously exposed to such a diverse community like where she is now living in London.

Katherine said: “I just love the diversity of the area.

“You can meet someone, you meet the first superficial level of them, and then you scratch the surface and everyone has some fascinating story.

“I see people from all over the world and all walks of life, and it's just really lovely.

“I grew up in a very homogenous suburban area of Dallas, so I just didn't have a lot of that growing up.

“But I love that my children have had that - that that's their norm.

“One of the characters, who in the book is Danny Fox, he's the journalist, and he was born and raised in Lewisham.

“There’s a point in the book where he talks about how Lewisham gets a bad reputation, but how much he loves it and how it's home.”

Katherine is currently working on her second novel, which she said will also be set in Blackheath, although she confessed that the second instalment was still “very much a work in progress.”

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Katherine said: “I'm not exactly sure what is going to happen.

“The plan is for it to play on this idea of the poison pen letter, a modernisation of that using text messages instead.

“But it will return to Blackheath for more crime and some more murders.”

Katherine’s new book, A Most Unusual Demise, is available to purchase now.