About S. A. Reeves
S. A. Reeves is a pen name for Stephen Haunts and his wife, Amanda Haunts. They have lived in Belper for over twenty years. The ‘S’ stands for Stephen, the ‘A’ for Amanda, and Reeves is the middle name of Amanda’s late father.
Stephen is full-time professional writer and best known for the middle-grade science fiction series ‘Diary of a Martian’. Before becoming a writer, Stephen had a successful career in IT and online training since leaving university in the late 1990s.
Amanda is a full-time IT professional, and they have been married for over twenty years, and have two children together. At the time of writing (late 2024), Daniel is twelve and Amy is fifteen.
Both Amanda and Stephen are avid readers and fans of TV and film. One of their shared interests—both in books and TV—is murder mysteries.
One evening, they were sitting in their lounge and watching one of their favourite TV shows, a BBC comedy drama called Death in Paradise. At this time, Stephen was already an established novelist with the Diary of a Martian series, but Amanda turned to Stephen and said, ‘You should look at writing a murder mystery’.
As it happened, Stephen already had a few ideas. He enjoys reading cosy mysteries, and he had ideas for a rough plot—well, the murder side of it, anyway. He didn’t have any characters or a setting besides a rough idea of how the murder was to be committed.
When Amanda suggested writing a murder mystery, Stephen said, ‘Well, I do have this idea’, and he told her about it. Then, quite quickly, they discussed the idea of the main protagonist being a bookshop owner who had a partner who was an older lady. This is how the characters of Gemma and Mavis were born.
Then came the question about the setting. As a science fiction writer, Stephen spent a lot of time thinking about the setting and world-building. As you can imagine for science fiction, this is an enormous job, as everything has to be made up and invented.
Stephen didn’t want to go to that level for a murder mystery, so they went with what they knew—the town they live in, Belper, which is in Derbyshire, England. Belper is a very typical British market town set in the countryside, and it’s beautiful. They have lived there since 2001 and know the area well, so that became the primary setting.
Next, they needed a venue for the bookshop featured in the novels. Actually, it was a simple decision. In the Belper Marketplace is a business called No 28, which is a community cafe, and they thought this would make a good setting. While the novels are not set in No 28, and they have no affiliation with that business; they liked the location in the marketplace, so that is where they placed their fictional bookshop and cafe—The Bookworm.
As it happens, Belper has a small bookshop to the side of the Marketplace, called Dormouse Books, but for the Bookworm, they created a fictional business encompassing a bookshop and a cafe combined, and this is the central location that serves as the home for their novels.