Press kit

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. He lives in Bournville with his wife and two children, where he also publishes classic literature and curated anthologies under Koi House Press.

Joe Gaston writes crime fiction rooted in contemporary Birmingham — a fictionalised version of the city built from real streets and invented estates, in the tradition of Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh. His Ray Holder series follows a disgraced ex-detective drawn back into the cases he was supposed to have left behind: ordinary people caught in the machinery of crime, detectives who doubt themselves, and criminals whose reasons almost make sense.

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 — travel, and watching how people actually talk to each other, feeds directly into the work. 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’s 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. He’s also toying with an earlier chapter in Ray Holder’s own history: prequels set during his years as a serving police officer, closer to a straight procedural.

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.