Online exclusive
In My Double Life, Kiwis – and some international guests - share the side hustles, hobbies, dual careers or career pivots that keep them busy. Right now, Hawke’s Bay booksellers Gareth and Louise Ward have a bestseller on their hands, The Bookshop Detectives: Dead Girl Gone. They’re writing about what they know because before they started selling books and writing, the husband and wife were police officers in the UK.
Gareth Ward: “I always loved reading and making up stories, but when it came to university I went down the science path rather than arts and literature. I did a joint honours degree in biology and computer science but ended up joining the marines.
“I’d been in the marines for a bit, but I got injured when I was trekking across the Isle of Skye in the Highlands in Scotland, rolled my ankle and ripped all the tendons. I took a year off to recover but I still wanted an active job, so I successfully applied to join the police force. It was less physically demanding than the marines – but I rolled my ankle during riot training. It still gives way every now and again…
Louise Ward: “I’d been studying in Wales, where I did my degree in English literature and Welsh studies. So, like a lot of graduates, I just applied for every job going – including the police force. I got a phone call that I remember well because we had a really little house, and the phone was in this little alcove.
“They said, ‘we’d like to offer you a position,’ and I told them thanks, I’d think about it. My mum wanted to know what it was about, so I said it was about a job offer, she burst into tears and told me that I was taking it because it was a job. She was obviously keen for me to get cracking!
“Training was a combination of working alongside a mentor and then going off for six-week block courses at the Ryton-on-Dunsmore Police Training Centre in the West Midlands. That’s where Gareth and I met.”
GW: “We met in classes and became friends, but we had a mutual friend who decided we’d be good together and sort of got us together at a party. It was in the early 1990s, and we’ve now been married for 29 years.”
LW: “I think the highlight of my policing career was an incident involving a horse. There’s a dual carriageway – the A52 that runs from Derby to Nottingham – that eventually merges on to the M1 main motorway. A horse escaped and was running up and down this dual carriageway and of course, someone called the police.
To be honest, we didn’t know what to do and this horse was panicking so we flagged down a car, asked them if they had any food and the woman gave us her lunch. We kind of tempted the horse with a sandwich and managed to get hold of its bridle. It made the front page of the local newspaper.
That’s the good thing about being in the police; people call you when they don’t know what to do so you get faced with loads and loads of different situations. That’s when it can be hilarious, but it can be quite sorrowful when you deal with some of the worst elements in society or you’re helping people in the very worst of situations.
“I decided to leave the police when we had our daughter in 1996. I went back to work when she was three months old and then my dad had a major stroke. I was up and down the motorway, with this tiny baby and decided I needed a career break.”
GW: “When I was in the police, I wrote some computer software to help with riot training. I ended up leaving the force and going to work for that company. It was interesting work; I went abroad quite a bit, but we first came to New Zealand on holiday around 2007 to visit Louise’s brother who had immigrated here. We both just fell in love with the place.”
LW: “There were certainly no plans to open a bookshop. Gareth was going to learn to surf and be a ‘beach bum’ and I had qualified as a primary teacher, so I worked at Hastings Intermediate School. I became assistant principal, but by then I wanted a change.”
GW: “We heard that the bookshop the Havelock North village was for sale, so we went down to take a look and speak to the previous owner. Bless her, she told us not to buy it! She said it was a dog, it was failing. The book industry goes through peaks and troughs, and this was 2012, a real trough because Kindles looked like they would take over.
“But it made sense because Louise’s thing to do in her free time was to read and I was always writing. We thought we’d be crazy not to buy it.”
LW: “We did it on a wing and a prayer, as they say, and we turned it around. We made the shop beautiful, branded it with colour and personality. We decided we were going to greet every single customer and just talk to everyone who came into the shop. It became a lovely, friendly community place and that encouraged some people to come back – and tell other people about the shop.”
GW: “We tried all sorts of ideas and for every 10 we tried, eight failed and two worked. We put our hands up every time publishers wanted to do an event or put in special window displays. We started our own book club – we’ve still got people who have been coming for the whole 12 years – and offered to host others.
We’d had the shop for about three years when people started saying we should open a branch in Napier, which is about 20 minutes’ drive away. We found a shop available pretty much exactly where we wanted it, so we signed the lease and as the ink was drying, I found out I’d won the Tessa Duder Award [for his debut novel The Traitor and the Thief].”
LW: “That we decided to write a book together was Gareth’s fault! It was New Year’s Day 2023, and we started talking about what we wanted to do in the year ahead.”
GW: “I just said, ‘why don’t we write a book together,’ and that was how it started. We thought we should write about what we know, and two things came to mind – policing and bookselling. After all, a bookstore is full of stories, isn’t it?”
Gareth and Louise Ward appear at the WORD Christchurch Festival, hosting its Lost The Plot quiz night on Tuesday, August 27 and Wednesday, August 28 talking about their book, their lives and bookselling. For more information, see wordchristchurch.co.nz/programme/
