Experience that informs the story

Joe Hartwell is a former police officer. He left the police because of situations like the one described in this story: a rape victim being questioned like a criminal. In All God’s Kids he draws directly on that career to write the police procedure and the courtroom drama, and on having been present at several births to write the delivery suite. The medical detail in the novel is factual.

He had a strict Catholic upbringing, and says himself that this makes some religious ramifications in the story inevitable. They are not decorative. The novel’s quietest character is a midwife who goes to confession because he believes the sacrament means something, and the last scene in the book is a man kneeling in a box trying to work out whether a kindness counts as a lie.

He divorced from his first wife in 1995 and has two daughters. He now lives in Northamptonshire with his second wife and son.

All God’s Kids is his third novel, following Hunted Down and The Sacred Claim.

From the author’s note

“Rape is a very serious crime. The attitudes and opinions described in this story are not necessarily mine, but those of the characters, and all of these, together with most of the events in the story, are pure fiction.”

The writing

What he brings to the page

Procedure from the inside

The arrest, the caution, the interview, the crown court. Written by somebody who did the job rather than somebody who researched it, which is why the novel is far more interested in what the process does to a witness than in getting the paperwork right.

The delivery suite

Hartwell has been present at several births. It shows in the pacing of those chapters: the long boredom, the sudden emergency, the exhausted comedy, the particular language midwives use to keep a room calm.

A Catholic conscience

Confession, penance, absolution, and the awkward edge cases where the system has no good answer. The religion in this book is not scenery, it is a working machine that one character has to operate under pressure.

Influences

Five writers, and what they explain

Hartwell names Frank Richards, Dennis Wheatley, James Herbert, Graham Masterton and Tom Sharpe among his greatest influences.

It is an unusual list, and it explains a great deal about All God’s Kids. Richards was a writer of long-running serials about a closed community, which is more or less what a half-mile of English road turns out to be. Wheatley wrote about ordinary people crossing lines they could not uncross. Herbert and Masterton wrote horror that stayed at kitchen level, the terrible thing happening in a house exactly like yours.

And Tom Sharpe accounts for the register that surprises most readers of this novel: the willingness to be broadly, unrepentantly funny in the middle of a serious book. A man faints in a working men’s club. A judge delivers a verdict and then, in the same breath, dismantles the defence’s entire view of the woman in front of him. The comedy is not relief from the subject. It is how these people actually survive it.

Cover of All God’s Kids by Joe Hartwell: three couples with their babies standing outside a stone church on a grey afternoon.

The book

Why he wrote All God’s Kids

The premise is a question a midwife can be handed on any ordinary shift: the blood groups do not add up, and now several lives depend on what one person decides to say.

Around that, Hartwell builds three marriages that have each made a private arrangement their neighbours would not believe, and lets a year happen to them. The novel ends where its cover begins, outside a church, with a photographer going round in circles, and a line spoken over a font that gives the book its title.

The last page says to be continued.

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Every baby who is born, no matter how he, or she, is conceived, and however they arrive, they are all children of God.

The line that gives the novel its title

Joe Hartwell