Adam Simcox tackles time travel in his gripping new thriller, Time Jump (Image: Courtesy Adam Simcox)
It’s enough to send shivers down the spine of any author – picking up someone else’s book and suffering a crisis of confidence in your own work. But that’s exactly what caused Adam Simcox to redraft huge sections of his new novel. “I read All the Colours of the Dark by Chris Whitaker and junked 70,000 words from Time Jump because I knew it wasn’t good enough,” he admits. But Adam has no complaints and it’s unlikely his readers will either. “It’s good to have a benchmark to aim for,” he continues with a smile. “I find it inspiring.”
He cut his teeth with his 2021 debut The Dying Squad, which heralded a brilliantly creative trilogy imagining a spectral police force made up of the recently deceased. But his latest book, Time Jump, is a big, ambitious standalone and it’s great fun. Set in an alternate 2026 where time travel is a commodity that can be bought like any other, when Adam’s heroine Rachel Groves unexpectedly gets the chance to Time Jump, she grabs it. Landing back in 1997, days before she accidentally killed Oliver Jones on the day Princess Diana died and destroyed her life, she changes the past and future.
And the fireworks really begin when she arrives back in her present. “She rewrites fate and finds Oliver in 2026, an alive and thriving businessman and politician, the connection between them sparks into a fairy tale ending,” explains Adam.
Time Jump by Adam Simcox is out now and it’s a belter (Image: Renegade)
But as rumours circulate about young women going missing from Oliver’s chain of rehab centres, Rachel begins to suspect the man she travelled back in time to save might have been a monster in waiting. Has she inadvertently made the present worse by saving him?
It’s a terrific concept and Adam, 49, a filmmaker who grew up in rural Lincolnshire before studying law and then taking a masters degree in documentary making at Salford University, handles it with a deft, entertaining touch with plenty of Nineties nostalgia.
“There’s always a pop-culture element to my writing, and that comes from both my passion for music and film, and also my work as a cameraman/photographer,” he explains. “I love bringing those elements in, because they help give weight to the more fantastical elements of my work. I started my career by writing and directing three independent feature films, then moved into shooting music videos.
“Writing was something I’d always done and enjoyed, and gave me a degree of control over film projects. My first feature – The Superhero – was probably my most successful; a production company picked it up and sold it worldwide, including to Netflix. Although it was Netflix before it was Netflix – if you had a decent cat video in those days, they’d have probably made an offer for it.”
When it comes to time travel, there must be something in the water. Ruth Galloway creator Elly Griffiths won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award 2026 for her own time travelling thriller, The Frozen People. Adam credits the smash-hit 1985 film Back to the Future among his influences.
“It’s a perfect film. It doesn’t blast you with the science, which is true of Time Jump, it just sets up a killer premise, and goes wild with it,” he says. “That was why Time Jump was so much fun to write – jumping back to the 1990s but with the knowledge I have now.
“A theme in the book is how that breeds arrogance in time travellers, making them believe they’re better than those in the past. The truth is, human beings have the capacity to screw up, no matter how much they think they know whatever decade they’re in.”
Michael J Fox as Marty McFly in Back to the Future (Image: Amblin Entertainment)
Rachel is indeed messy and flawed – “like the best people,” says Adam. “She made a very bad mistake in her youth, and she’s been paying for it ever since,” he continues. “We’ve all got something in our lives that we wish we could go back and change, and that was an idea I found particularly exciting to play with. It’s a powerful theme: what would you change if you could?” His own answer, he chuckles, is “pathetically vapid”.
“I had the chance to go and see Daft Punk in Las Vegas in 2007, with two guys I met at a party. I love Daft Punk, and it would have been a great adventure. To be honest, it would be a cracking start to a book. But I was in America to promote my first film, I was on a very strict budget, and so for perhaps the only time in my life, I made the sensible decision and didn’t go!”
Adam, who lives in south-east London with his wife, Kirsty, and their two sons, is clearly comfortable crossing genres and mixing and matching crime with elements of fantasy and even sci-fi in his new book.
“I never really set out to mix genres up, it’s just something that seems to happen,” he says. “At the heart of it, for me it’s all about the characters – that’s what powers everything. The cross-genre elements are the cars body work, whereas the characters are the engine. Ben Aaronovitch and Jo Callaghan do this very well, and I read a great book called Pagans recently by James Alistair Henry which managed it brilliantly.
“The Dying Squad was urban fantasy, but there very much was a fantasy element; the trilogy wasn’t governed by the laws of physics and normality. Time Jump very much is, both the nineties and present-day elements deal in locations and situations I know well from everyday life. A lot of my film and photography work takes me to Camden, so I knew I wanted to feature that heavily.”
Adam deleted 70,000 words after reading someone else’s book (Image: Courtesy Adam Simcox)
Does he miss his former life as a music video maker, I wonder? “Making music videos is a chaotic, exciting, messy business, at least, it is on the lower budget scale of things. For every great shoot with a band like [Britpop legends] Echobelly, there are car crashes,” he says.
“A few years ago, I hired out my equipment to a young team who were shooting a music video. What I didn’t know – but the police, apparently, did – was that it was a drill rap video, with a massive gang fight arranged. The police busted up the shoot, arrested everyone involved, and impounded all my camera gear. It took me several months to get it back. I tended to stick to more commercial work after that…”
As for what’s next, he adds: “I’ve just finished the next book, it’s Daisy Jones and the Six meets Knives Out, a proper locked room rock and roll murder mystery – in space!”
Time Jump by Adam Simcox (Renegade, £22) is out now
