About
Joe Gaston
Joe Gaston writes lean, character-driven crime fiction set in a fictionalised Birmingham. His Ray Holder series follows a disgraced ex-detective working the cases everyone else wants closed quietly — gritty, socially grounded stories for readers who want a serious crime novel that respects their time.
Joe Gaston is the pen name of Birmingham-based author Jodie Gaston.
The long version
How the books came about
Gaston was born and raised in Rock Hill, South Carolina. He studied history at Newberry College and went on to earn a Master of Divinity at Erskine Seminary, spending years afterward as a pastor. Alongside ministry — which he describes as too intangible a calling to sustain on its own — he has run a landscape gardening business and, for a time, a high-end bow tie factory. He has always been what he calls a “tentmaker”: working a trade alongside the pulpit.
It was a move to Wales, to help plant a church on a council estate outside Newport, that gave him the raw material for his fiction — the experience of working inside a community that felt largely forgotten. When the church became self-sustaining, a new role with his mission organisation brought him and his family to Birmingham, where the themes of that estate work — forgotten people, quiet resilience, the cost of trying to help — found their way into Ray Holder.
Fiction came later in life than he expected. Gaston assumed, if he wrote at all, it would be history or theology — fields where, after two thousand years of church history, he struggled to feel he had anything new to say. As his children grew and life slowed, and with a lifelong love of storytelling encouraged by a mother who worked as a teacher and later a librarian, he began writing the books he’d always meant to write.
He writes in three fixed three-hour blocks a week, disciplined and unglamorous, and does his real thinking on the road. He lives in Bournville, Birmingham’s Cadbury-built factory village and notably the only village in England without a pub, where he can usually be found most afternoons with a drink and a book at the Rowheath Pavilion bar.
Ray Holder has been, in Gaston’s own words, the series where he found his voice. Clair Harlow — a dark-academia psychological thriller launching with Silent Halls — is the story he wanted to tell first, and the one he’s most excited about.
When not writing crime fiction, Gaston publishes classic literature and curated anthologies under a separate imprint, Koi House Press — work he sees as coming from the same conviction: that good writing should be accessible, and that books matter.
The stories
Crime fiction from the wire rack
Crime fiction used to live on wire racks in supermarkets — small, portable, honest about human nature, and designed to go with you rather than to stop your life while you read it. No apologies, no pretence. Just people doing bad things, people trying to stop them, and everyone caught in the middle with their flaws on full display.
These books live in that tradition. They’re set in a contemporary Birmingham that rarely plays fair. The characters are ordinary: detectives who doubt themselves, civilians who get caught in the machinery, criminals with reasons that almost make sense. They’re flawed and stubborn, they make mistakes, and they keep trying anyway.
Under two hundred pages. No padding. The kind of crime novel you used to find on a supermarket spinner rack, back when they trusted you to keep up.
What to expect
Four promises
Character over spectacle
These aren’t puzzles to solve in the last chapter. They’re about the weight of the choices people make and what it costs to live with them.
British crime, done straight
Gritty, unglamorous, rooted in how things actually work — and don’t work — in cities like Birmingham.
Readable prose
No showing off. The language gets out of the way so the story and the people can do the work.
Stories that linger
You’ll finish them quickly. But they won’t finish with you.
If you like crime fiction that trusts you to care about people instead of just plot, you’re in the right place.
Free prequel novella
Start with Clean Hands
Birmingham, February 2009. A bank manager is found dead in the Sidings — one stab wound, no witnesses, and a department that wants it filed as a mugging by Friday. Detective Sergeant Ray Holder isn't so sure a mugging goes wrong like this.
Short chapters, no padding, finishable in an evening. Yours free — Kindle, ePub or PDF.