New Novel - The Snake: when police procedure meets something far darker
Tomorrow sees the publication of The Snake, a new thriller by writer Phil Gladwin — and I’m delighted to have played a part in helping bring it to the page.
It is not a cosy crime novel. Nor is it a book in which somebody flashes a warrant card, shouts “You’re nicked” and then spends the next hour filling in a notebook no one has used since 1987.
The Snake takes readers into the world of London’s armed policing: a place where decisions are made quickly, consequences last for years, and the difference between the right action and the wrong one may be measured in fractions of a second.
A police thriller with heart, humanity and passion
Phil spent considerable time researching policing long before we met. He rode with officers, observed training, listened to the stories officers tell once the radio has finally gone quiet, and got a real sense of the humour, pressure, frustrations and humanity behind the uniform.
But research notes, however good they are, can only take a writer so far.
When it came to writing armed-policing scenes involving firearms deployments, high-risk incidents and split-second decisions, he wanted the fictional world to stand up to proper scrutiny. That is where I came in.
I spent part of my Metropolitan Police career as a Tactical Firearms Commander with SO19, deploying Armed Response Vehicles and coordinating firearms responses across London. Phil and I met, talked through the story, and had rather more Zoom calls than either of us probably expected when we started.
I read several drafts and went through scenes in detail: not just whether something was technically possible, but whether it made sense for the officers involved.
Because authenticity is rarely about knowing the correct acronym.
It is about the practical reality: who would make a decision, what information they might have, how officers might communicate under pressure, what they could reasonably see or know, and how a situation might feel when it is moving too quickly for anyone to enjoy a helpful pause for exposition.
More than once, Phil had written something that worked perfectly in his imagination but would have been disastrous — or fatal — in real life. Fortunately, that is exactly the point of having an advisor. We corrected the choreography, sharpened the dialogue, explored what officers might realistically be thinking, and removed the bits that simply would not happen.
More than an armed-policing story
At its heart, The Snake is a fast-paced thriller — early readers have described it as approachable and a page-turner — but it is interested in much bigger questions than whether the police catch the bad guy before the final chapter.
The book explores:
What makes a killing lawful, unlawful or seemingly inevitable.
Whether good people can kill, and what that does to them.
How an otherwise decent person can go badly wrong.
The pressures, loyalties, fears and self-sacrifice involved in serving as an armed police officer.
Mental illness, evil and the unsettling possibility of demonic possession.
That is quite a lot to ask of one book. Thankfully, Phil has not forgotten to make it entertaining.
The story begins calmly enough, then gathers pace, tips into a roller-coaster and heads towards what Phil promises is an almost unbearably tense climax. Armed policing gives a novelist a formidable dramatic framework: officers trained to run towards danger, working under strict discipline in fast-changing and potentially chaotic circumstances — while knowing that even a justified use of lethal force may later be examined in the most serious of settings.
Not much pressure, then!
Why realism matters
I advise writers and productions because police stories work best when they feel lived-in. Viewers and readers may not always know precisely why a scene feels wrong, but they know when it does.
The good news is that realism does not flatten drama. Done properly, it makes drama stronger.
The practical limitations, the chain of command, the uncertainty, the consequences and the very human reactions of officers are not obstacles to a story. They are the story.
Phil took that seriously throughout the process. He was prepared to ask difficult questions, revise scenes when the reality did not support the first idea, and keep digging until the action and characters felt credible. The result is a thriller with real operational grounding, but also a broader interest in courage, moral responsibility and what people do when confronted by the worst circumstances imaginable.
The book is out tomorrow, 6th October
The Snake by Phil Gladwin is released tomorrow. If you enjoy tense, character-led thrillers, armed-policing drama or police stories that make an effort to get the important details right, it deserves a place on your reading list.
The Kindle edition is available to pre-order for £1.99, and pre-orders help give a new book some much-needed momentum on release day.
And if you are writing a police-based novel, screenplay, television drama, documentary or other project, I can help you make sure the policing feels credible — without sacrificing pace, character or drama. The trick is not to turn your story into a training manual. Nobody needs that.
