The Case of the Unfinished Manuscript
- 2 days ago
- 10 min read
Written by DDL Smith, Author
DDL Smith is a British novelist known for ‘Detective Dion’ and the eco-horror novel ‘Decay’. His independently published novels have attained global reach with his ‘think like a publisher’ mentality.
Detective Dion Knight is a seasoned, sharp edged detective, relentless, emotionally guarded, and, by the third novel, an increasingly unwilling traveller. Last week, my new novel, Detective Dion: Grey Knight, reached shelves in the UK and US, completing the trilogy built around him.
In this final novel, Dion’s battle with ADHD is confirmed outright, although many readers had already sensed it in the earlier books, in the way his mind moves, the way he follows instinct, the way he notices what others overlook, and the way he reaches the truth by routes that are not always conventional. His methods can seem unorthodox, sometimes chaotic. Yet, somehow, they remain elegant. Dion gets there in the end.
Writing a series of novels with ADHD is not always quite so elegant.
The third novel began its life almost immediately after the second book was completed, before that second instalment had even been released. Then, as many creative projects do, it sat for months, gathering digital dust on my desktop while other ideas, responsibilities, and distractions wandered in. Half a science fiction draft, a growing pile of ghostwriting projects, and programming work for a new game all marched in like they had booked the place. Finally, it came time to focus back on the novel before attention for it would be lost forever. Overcoming mental paralysis became the hardest part of the process.
The restless mind behind the mystery
Mystery fiction demands control. Turning a mystery trilogy into a thriller demands restraint. These are two qualities I admire enormously, usually from a safe distance. Readers must unveil clues and discover information in fragments. Writers may know the whole truth, but they are forced to reveal it in breadcrumbs. A twist in a novel should be surprising, yet upon reflection, inevitable.
The genre is built on the tension between what is visible and what is true. Sometimes the most important clue is not the object on the floor, but the reason someone noticed it too quickly, ignored it too carefully, or mentioned it in the wrong way.
That is where Dion and I began to overlap.
Dion’s mind does not work like a neat filing cabinet. It is closer to a desk covered in photographs, notes, coffee stains, and one piece of evidence that nobody else thinks matters yet. He can be difficult, blunt, obsessive, and emotionally guarded. He can miss the obvious while fixating on something apparently irrelevant. But he is also capable of seeing through noise. He follows instinct, not because he is reckless, but because his brain is constantly testing patterns.
Writing to him meant thinking carefully about ADHD, not as a label or a symptom of behaviour. Writing to him became a way to describe my way of experiencing the world.
In Grey Knight, Dion travels with a fake passport. I should probably clarify that I do not. My crimes against international travel are limited to booking flights too late, packing too badly, and complaining at airport desks about missed connections that physics had already ruled impossible.
But beneath the more dramatic elements of the novel, there is something honest in that impulse. I know the feeling of needing to escape to a new city just to complete work that could have been done at my desk. I know the strange logic of booking a flight while en route to an airport because the destination has become tied to an answer, even when that answer may be emotional rather than practical. To other people, it can look impulsive. To the person doing it, that feels like momentum.
That became central to Dion’s character in the final book.
His pursuit of Victor Stanton is not only about justice. It is about fixation, grief, and unfinished history. ADHD is often discussed in terms of distraction, yet hyperfocus can be just as defining. Sometimes the problem is not that the mind cannot pay attention. Sometimes the problem is that it cannot let go.
That is where fiction becomes useful. It is a canvas for projection. It lets you exaggerate the emotional truth until it becomes visible. I have never chased a killer across Europe under a false identity, which is probably for the best and certainly better for my passport renewal prospects. But I do recognise the feeling of being pulled by a goal that seems completely logical inside your own mind, even if others cannot see the thread connecting it all together.
In Grey Knight, Dion’s ADHD is not simply a trait added to his character. It shapes the rhythm of the story. It affects the way he investigates, the risks he takes, and the people he pushes away. His mind is restless, but the novel asks what happens when restlessness narrows into obsession.
Writing Dion as a person, not a symptom
That distinction became crucial, Dion had to be a person first, not a diagnosis wearing a detective’s coat. ADHD could not simply be a character note in the margin, something to be mentioned once for inclusivity, then never mentioned again. If it was going to be part of him, it had to be part of the whole man. The first two entries in the series touched upon this. For the last, it felt vital that this became apparent.
There is always a risk, when writing any neurodivergent character, of reducing them to a recognisable set of behaviours. Restless. Impulsive. Blunt. Chaotic. Difficult. These traits may be familiar, but they are not a person. A real character needs contradictions. Dion can be sharp and careless, perceptive and emotionally blind, disciplined in one area and completely reckless in another. He can see the flaw in a witness statement, yet miss the damage he is doing to someone standing right in front of him. That, to me, felt more honest.
I did not want his ADHD to become a convenient explanation for every flaw, nor a neat justification for every strength. People are not puzzles that can be solved by naming one part of them. Dion’s ADHD influences him, but it does not excuse him. It shapes his instincts, his urgency, his frustrations, and his ability to connect pieces of information at speed. But his choices are still his choices, and his mistakes still have consequences. The people around him still have to live with the impact of his behaviour.
That balance became important across the series, especially in Grey Knight. By the third book, Dion is under pressure not only from the case but also from grief, history, obsession, and the slow erosion of the structures that usually keep him grounded.
But Dion is not only his restlessness. He is also a detective shaped by loss. Unresolved family loss, the loss of his badge, and the loss of his friend. He had grown used to hiding vulnerability behind coldness. He became someone who often appears detached because detachment feels safer than admitting how deeply he is affected.
One of the things I wanted to avoid was the familiar idea that ADHD is only valuable when it produces something useful. The brilliant deduction. The sudden insight. The burst of creativity. The impressive moment that makes everyone forgive the mess around it. Those moments can exist, but they are not the whole story. ADHD is not only interesting when it benefits other people.
There are subtleties, too. There’s exhaustion after intensity. Guilt after impulsiveness. The frustration of being misunderstood after something he explained badly, or when a joke sounded mean and caused a negative response. Dion carries some of that, as do I, even when he would never describe it so openly himself. So the challenge was to let the reader see what Dion himself might not say.
The hardest part wasn’t starting, it was staying
Starting a novel is often the seductive part. There is a particular electricity at the beginning of a project, even when starting a new novel based on two before it. The world feels full of possibility. The plot has not yet been revealed in your head, so anything could happen. Every idea feels useful. Every idea could work with enough effort.
For an ADHD mind, that beginning can be especially powerful. Novelty is fuel. A new idea sparks a million more, a wonderful, chaotic mess. It has atmosphere, voices, questions, danger, and jokes. But then there’s the task of organising strands of inspiration into something others will actually find cohesive. That part never comes easily. The real difficulty is not always beginning. It is returning.
Returning to the same manuscript after the first rush has faded can almost feel like a chore. As pages fill up, ideas need to be more focused. Not everything will work or fit in anymore. Ideas have to be discarded, and other projects with more freedom feel more promising.
That was one of the hardest parts of writing the Detective Dion trilogy. Ideas had been set in place. While that doesn’t limit creativity, it can feel like it limits freedom. Each book had its own demands, but the series as a whole required a longer kind of attention. While others may fear a blank page and the feeling that writing a whole novel is a monumental task, I find starting easy. But once the rush has worn off, continuing becomes the challenge.
It was not enough to have one good idea. I had to remember what had already happened, what had been promised, what had changed, and what could not be contradicted. Notes became scattered across a desk, then the wall, then the floor. The chaos of changing, flowing ideas became unorganised, fixed chaos.
A trilogy asks for continuity. ADHD often asks whether we might instead do something completely different for a while.
The third book made that tension impossible to ignore. Grey Knight began almost immediately after the second novel was completed, before that second book had even reached readers. Then it got stuck in paralysis. Other projects arrived. Other responsibilities became more apparent. The manuscript sat on my desktop, gathering digital dust. As I started writing yet another unfinished novel, ideas for a video game expansion, and then a whole new video game project, the unfinished trilogy became just another item on a to do list I rarely got to.
Coming back to it required more than inspiration. Inspiration is wonderful, but it is also unreliable. It arrives like the weather. You can welcome it, but you cannot build a house on it.
What helped was structure. Notes, timelines, and details needed to be organised. Old drafts and lists of unresolved questions became a catalyst to dive back in, knowing what I needed to write next.
Those systems became a second brain. They held the parts of the story that my own memory could not always be trusted to keep in order. Don’t get me wrong, my desk was still a colossal mess of unstapled papers and scribbled notes I couldn’t read. But small goals became visible and helpful reminders.
In a way, writing Grey Knight mirrored Dion’s own journey. He is pulled by obsession, but he survives through persistence. He follows instinct, but he still has to face consequences. He moves through chaos, but the story only works if he eventually finds meaning inside it.
Finishing the trilogy didn’t feel like conquering ADHD. That would be too neat, and life is rarely that generous with its metaphors. It felt more like learning how to work alongside it, to accept the bursts of intensity, to plan for the disappearances of focus, to forgive the delays, and to keep returning to the page anyway. That, more than starting, was the achievement.
Final thought on the case
Writing the Detective Dion trilogy taught me that creativity does not always look calm, organised, or graceful from the inside.
Sometimes it looks like scattered notes, unfinished drafts, sudden ideas, late nights, long gaps, and the strange stubbornness of returning to something even after your attention has wandered elsewhere. Sometimes it looks like building a world while also fighting the part of your brain that keeps trying to run into another one. But it is still creativity. It is still craft. It still counts.
Something I struggle with during creative projects is knowing when to stop. Ideas come and go constantly. There’s always something new and exciting to add. There’s always the urge to think one more idea could make the project so expansive that it will become a magnum opus and change the face of an industry. This is why it ends up feeling like every project lies unfinished. No project ever feels like it has truly come to fruition, despite the hundreds of hours of work, solid and expansive plans, and 90% of the work being complete. But a project never gets past a finish line because there can always be something else to add that doubles the workload once more.
In Grey Knight, Dion’s journey across London, Berlin, and Malmö is not only a chase through physical places. It is also a chase through grief, memory, obsession, and identity. It asks what happens when a man who has built his life around solving other people’s mysteries is finally forced to confront the one that has shaped him most deeply. Then, not just confronting that mystery, but finishing it and laying it to rest.
For me, finishing the book also meant confronting something personal, the fear that long projects are always at risk of slipping away. That the excitement will fade. That another idea will interrupt. That the story will become too tangled to finish. This trilogy ends with the third book completed. A huge undertaking of three novels. If I had told myself, when planning the first book, that I’d need to complete three entire novels within this world, plus another novel on the side, I would’ve deemed it impossible and found another fixation for a few months to take up my free time. But now that the third is complete, it’s safe to say the project is complete.
So, as I close this article at a desk once again covered in photographs, notes, coffee stains, and papers I definitely organised two hours ago, forgetting how this article even started, I can say this, ADHD did not make writing the Detective Dion trilogy easy. It made the process messy, restless, impulsive, and often difficult to return to. But it also shaped the way I understood the main character, the way I followed the story, and the way I finally learned to finish it.
The case is closed, and a project is fully complete. Detective Dion: Grey Knight is now available from Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, and Amazon.
Read more from DDL Smith
DDL Smith, Author
DDL Smith is a London-based novelist whose cross-genre, contemporary fiction reflects issues and fears in modern society. His creative roots started from a young age with theatre and scriptwriting for online content. When transitioning to novels, his goal was to use marketing techniques to ‘think like a publisher’ while staying independent. A tactic that has his books available in book chains across the globe.
