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Jesse Murdoch
Let’s talk about Jesse Murdoch.
Jesse is one of those characters who started out as a very easy to dispose of secondary character. I kind of planned on him sacrificing himself to save Eve at the end of On Her Master’s Secret Service. In the first outline, he was not wearing a vest when the bad guys show up.
But as things go in my world, I kind of fell for him.
I think he’s the first of what I like to call puppies. And he’s a kind of angry puppy.
He’s got a terrible backstory filled with trauma and abandonment and pain, and yet he longs. He longs for a family. Longs to do good in the world—which gets him into trouble. I like these characters because of the dichotomy. Jesse is gentle and loving. He’s funny and kind. Every now and then he turns into a whirling dervish of murder.
Jesse comes into the series as I know it’s winding down, and I’ve got two characters left after Ian and Charlotte close up the original storyline begun in The Dom Who Loved Me. Perhaps that’s why I saved him, why he went from martyr to a puppy with teeth. His friendship with Simon gives both depth.
Jesse is one of the few characters I have actual photographic inspiration for. Back then I would have covers designed long before I wrote the book and this picture came from a series of photos that eventually became the original cover. He’s gorgeous, but there’s a sweetness to his smile. He’s essentially Jesse.
As for his name…well, that goes back to an old television show from the ’80s. Howling Mad Murdock was a member of The A-Team. My father loved this show, and I watched it with him every week. It was about a group of former military who become mercenaries who fight for… Yeah, I just got that. Sometimes the stories of our childhood run deep and still influence us decades later.
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