Simon Hall (writer)
Simon Hall (born 3 February 1969 in Bedford) is the BBC's Crime Correspondent in the South West of England. He is also the author of the Dan Groves and Adam Breen detective novels, in which a TV reporter and a detective work together to solve crimes.
Hall works for BBC South West Television's regional news programme, Spotlight, but also broadcasts on BBC Radio Devon and BBC Radio Cornwall.
Hall has covered many high-profile stories, including the attempt to detonate a bomb in the Giraffe restaurant in Exeter, the grounding of the container ship The Napoli in east Devon, and the flooding of the Cornish village of Boscastle.
Biography
Hall was born in the village of Oakley, in Bedfordshire. (His parents later moved to Lincoln, and then Littlehampton in West Sussex.)
He went to Littlehampton Community School and then the University of Kent at Canterbury, where he joined the college radio station, UKC Radio. Hall later did a diploma in broadcast journalism at University College, Cardiff.
Hall joined the BBC as a trainee. He later worked for ITV. He worked around England before settling in the South West.
Simon is married to Jess, who is an assistant director at the University of Exeter. They live in Exeter.
Writing career
Hall has written several novels about a Plymouth-based television crime reporter, Dan Groves, nicknamed "The TV Detective", who often helps police to solve cases that he is reporting on. The books are all set in Devon.
The first novel, A Popular Murder, was published by a print-on-demand company in 2006.
A mainstream publisher, Accent Press, published Hall's next book, The Death Pictures, in February 2008. The plot concerns the murder of a dying artist. It was published in the United States in October 2008.
Evil Valley came out in September 2008. The story is about preventing a psychopath from committing a crime. Much of the action is set on Dartmoor.
The Judgement Book was published in September 2009. The story is about blackmail.
The TV Detective was published in February 2010. It tells how Groves and Adam Breen, the chief inspector in the series first met and is partly based on A Popular Murder.
The Balance of Guilt was published in September 2010. The story surrounds a terrorist atrocity in a sacred building in Exeter.
Hall has been longlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Dagger in the Library award, for writers most popular with library users.
A play, based on the TV Detective books, has been written by Hall. Called An Unnecessary Murder, it is due to premiere at the Barnfield Theatre in Exeter, for a run of four nights. It's a charitable production, in aid of Hospiscare, a Devon-based organisation that Hall has undertaken many events to support. He cites "very personal" reasons as his motivation.
Audio versions of the TV Detective novels, narrated by Hall, and ebooks are in production.