Ray Celestin

Ray Celestin is a British crime mystery writer that hails from London. He is best known for “The Axeman Jazz” and “Dead Man’s Blues” novels. Celestin’s debut novel was “The Axeman’s Jazz” that was published in 2014, and went on to attain massive popularity. Celestin is a thirty-year-old Londoner that studied languages and Asian art at university. He is also known as a scriptwriter for TV and film. Before writing his debut novel, he published a series of short stories that were moderately successful. As for his inspiration for his literary works, he is a voracious reader of historical crime fiction. He cites the likes of CJ Sansom and James Elroy, which are either historical or written so long ago that their work becomes set in a past world. In fact, “An Instance of the Fingerpost” by Iain Peters, which is set in the Restoration era, is one of his favorite novels of all time. He tends to like historical novels that have a sense of escapism. His writing experience in film, TV, and short stories greatly influenced the writing of his debut novel as he used the major elements of script writing including location description, character description, character location, and what they do in a sequential manner that are critical in script writing. Given that he was used to writing short stories, he asserts that he found the writing of the novel quite daunting, and hence he went about writing the chapters as if they were short stories and standalone pieces. When he is not writing and reading he loves to watch old films on repertory screening.