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Thursday 17th May | ||||||||||
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InterviewsThere is no great mystery in the difference between writing for TV and writing digital fiction. It's really the same process; it's the way it's read that's different. The 'viewer' sees the pictures on a TV screen in one; they see them in their head in the other. Digital is like all good fiction that is non-visual; the writing should be of a standard that makes the reader imagine what they are reading. The idea with Boxfiction was to take the best of a popular TV show and combine it with the best of the written word. The result of this was the eSeries – new, written episodes of TV. What you end up with is like a TV show without the visual images – the reader gets to enjoy what's familiar, but still needs to call on their imagination to bring it to life... Heroic Villains: Simon Kernick On The Payback A new novel by Simon Kernick is always an event; Crime Time persuaded him to talk about Payback... I was always going to bring Dennis Milne back for another book. He's a great character to write, but then heroic villains so often are (although I'll never be entirely sure why that is). The reason for his long hiatus between A GOOD DAY TO DIE and THE PAYBACK was because I couldn't come up with a plot idea that worked for him. The fact that I made him a fugitive from justice at the end of THE BUSINESS OF DYING, always limited my options for bringing him back... Claire McGowan: Keeping Crime Writers In Line Which is harder... being the Director of the Crime Writers' Association or penning a debut novel? Claire McGowan knows the answer to that... Icelight: Aly Monroe Talks To Crime Time Aly Monroe is the author of a series involving an Intelligence Agent called Peter Cotton. The background to the stories is Britain's Imperial decline post-war. She suspects she is making some of the points Jeremy Paxman is making in his latest book about the lasting effects of empire on Britain, but is doing so with more detail and within the context of thrillers. Here she talks about reality meeting, and possibly informing, fiction. She speaks to Crime Time about her latest book, Icelight Real life has always heavily influenced my writing. For me, stories come out of experience. For me, it's what makes them feel real... John Dean tells the story behind his new novel The Secrets Man, published by Hale The Deadly Touch Of The Tigress: Ian Hamilton I had a name: Ava Lee. I had one sentence: "They always seemed to call her at that time of night, either ignorant of the time difference or too desperate to care." I was in my second day of recuperation at home after a major bit of surgery when I sat down at the computer to write. In my first career I was a journalist, and even when I veered off into government and business I kept a hand in writing. I wrote, successfully, for several magazines, and produced a non-fiction work that was a Canadian Book of the Month Club main selection when it was published. But my attempts at writing a novel always fell short of my own expectations, and the resulting manuscripts were put into a drawer, seen by no one but me, and were certainly no loss to readers. This time was different though... Gregg Olsen: Writing Young Adult (for The First Time) I wrote a novel for Young Adult readers and in turn they gave me something that I haven't felt in a long time. I've been thinking about that a lot. Let's dissect it a little. There's something very freeing about writing for a teen or young adult audience. In a very real way, teens are unencumbered by the restrictions that we adopt over time. They still dream. They still hope. They haven't had the blood sucked out of their world the way many adults have (you can say you haven't and I hope that's true, but get real). Young adult readers embrace books as a conduit to their dreams. They look for the reasons in its pages why something could be so. Not the contrary... I write timeslip novels – books where modern and historical stories interleave – because I'm fascinated by the way pieces of the past echo down into the present. My latest, Secrets of the Dead, deals with the tumultuous life of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great. As soon as I started, I knew a big part would centre on the Balkans. It's where Constantine was born (in modern-day Serbia), and where major episodes of his life played out. But it also offers juicy historical parallels. 1600 years after the last Roman legionaries abandoned their Danube forts, there are still foreign soldiers keeping the peace in the old frontier province of Moesia. It's Kosovo, now, and the soldiers no longer march under the banner of the eagles... The Things We Cherished Pam Jenoff Pam Jenoff writes: The inspiration for The Things We Cherished came from a unique timepiece, known as an anniversary clock, which my husband gave me for our first wedding anniversary. I was captivated by the question of where the hundred year-old clock had been and the lives it had touched. As I imagined its history a tale unfolded of a couple at the turn of the century in Bavaria yearning for a better life, two brothers in Weimar Berlin wrestling with issues of Zionism and assimilation, the desperate quest of a young girl trapped behind the Iron Curtain, and of course Roger's own story of love and sacrifice during the war. Taking Over The Reins: Felix Francis Talks To Crime Time The Dick Francis novels have been the family business ever since the first one, Dead Cert, hit the bookshelves back in January 1962. Not only my father but my mother too was involved, especially with the research. My brother assisted with Driving Force and my uncle, who was a wine importer, was a great help with Proof. Over the years, many friends and family have been used as sources of information. Gamble, out this week, is the forty-fifth 'Dick Francis', and I already have a contract for the next two. But why do I write Dick Francis novels? 88 Killer: Oliver Stark Talks To Crime Time 88 Killer is the story of a vicious and unrepentant killer who uses hatred to sustain his anger and focus his violence. NYPD Detective, Tom Harper and Police Psychologist, Dr Denise Levene are called upon to hunt this new killer and begin to find disturbing resonances within each of the murders. 88 Killer is about a haunting search for a missing teenager, a thrilling hunt for a ruthless killer, and a mystery about the killer's background and motivation. This mixture of missing person search, thriller, mystery and police procedural keeps the plot twisting and moving quickly and with, I hope, enough excitement to keep the reader turning the pages... Viva La Madness: J.J. Connolly Talks To Crime Time As Viva La Madness, the splendid new novel by the author of Layer Cake appears, Crime Time grills JJ Connolly... 'I saw a lot of fiction portraying London criminals as thugs and not very bright. I had seen, and met, many guys who were involved in criminality who were far from stupid and to whom violence was very much a last resort. Their reasons for being in the crime business were not to enhance any make-believe reputation but to make a great deal of money: they were genuinely able to rise far and rapidly so. Prohibition – making drugs illegal – had paved the way... But They Seem Like Such Nice Kids Brother/Sister is in many ways an untraditional crime thriller. The killers are revealed in the opening pages of the book. There is no detective with whom to identify, no slow revelation of clues to unlock the case. The tensions that usually drive good thrillers have been relocated; instead of residing in the procedural accumulation of information, they live inside the persons of the main characters... From Corpsing To Corpses: From Comedy To Crime Now here's a mystery. Why would a writer whose main work involves creating satirical comedy for radio, television and magazines suddenly take up crime? If it seems odd for me to want to write grisly murders, then I can tell you I appreciate comedy and crime for exactly the same reasons. I love the fact that structure is king in both genres. Just as there is a 'three act tragedy' in crime, there is also a rule of three in joke-telling. Any gag that contains three individuals from various parts of the United Kingdom entering a pub is an excellent example of a thriller in microcosm - trust me! When I wrote Spartan I wanted to capture the essence of what it feels like to be an MI6 field operative – the loneliness, the requirement for rifle-shot decisions, the mistakes that can be made, the intensity and complexities of a mission, and the casualties that can occur in an operation. I have been there and know exactly what it feels like. My story has a constant microscopic focus on my protagonist, Will Cochrane. There are no "cut scenes" to others' points of view; nothing shared with the reader that excludes Will, meaning the reader and Will are taking the journey together and have exactly the same amount of information. You are not completely in his head – I wrote the story in the third rather than first person – but you are constantly by his side.... It's nearly thirteen years since Mo Hayder grabbed the world by the throat with her gruesome yet compelling debut, Birdman. She was angry then, she says, but with her latest novel Hanging Hill, published in hardback in April 2011, she still has the power to scare readers witless. Even the title of the book hangs like a macabre shadow over the story. "Hanging Hill is an actual place," explains Mo. "It has an important history in terms of the Civil War. Also, it seems to have attracted villains, such as the Brink's-MAT gold bullion robbers. There's something about the geography of that area... Mark Sanderson: The Whispering Gallery As The Whispering Gallery, Mark Sanderson's splendid follow-up to Snow Hill appears, he talks about his inspiration...
As the film of Drive is about to hit our cinema screens (and James Sallis likes the movie!), we ask one of Crime Time's favorite authors about his new novel, The Kiler is Dying... here's What I Did on My Summer Vacation by James Sallis, age 66 Martin Edwards: The Hanging Wood The Hanging Wood is the fifth in my series of Lake District Mysteries featuring Detective Chief Inspector Hannah Scarlett and the historian Daniel Kind. I was working on the plot synopsis when the fourth book in the series, The Serpent Pool, was due for publication, and it was around that time that I first visited St Deiniol's Residential Library, also known as Gladstone's Library... James Becker On The Nosferatu Scroll For some writers, inspiration strikes in the middle of the night, and can be an elusive and fading memory by morning if notes are not taken. For others, ideas strike as the subconscious mind mulls over plots and difficulties, producing answers to problems as the story unfolds. In my case, inspiration arrived in the form of an email from Selina Walker, my editor at Transworld, who'd just had a Great Idea... The Wreckage: Michael Robotham Talks To Crime Time THE WRECKAGE is a major departure for me. Instead of being tense psychological mystery, it's a big international conspiracy thriller set amid the aftermath of the global financial crisis and the Iraq War. The story is told through the eyes of several people – the first of them, Luca Terracini, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist who is living 'outside the wire' in Baghdad, investigating a series of violent bank robberies... My second novel, Snapshot was published on June 9. A series of high-profile shootings by a lone sniper is terrorising Glasgow and police photographer Tony Winter finds himself, reluctantly, at the centre of it. Tony is a complex character with a tragic hidden past and an unhealthy obsession with the macabre subjects he photographs in the line of his work. As the body count of the city's notorious drug lords continues to rise, Tony investigates a link between the victims and a badly beaten schoolboy. Matt Rees On Mozart's Last Aria It might seem a long way from a machine-gun rattling in Ramallah to my new novel about the death of the great composer Mozart, but in my mind it's a straight line. I've been based in Jerusalem, mostly as a foreign correspondent, for 15 years. During the Palestinian intifada of the last decade, I soothed my traumatized mind with Mozart's compositions... Violence is more real now than ever, so all around us you can't ignore it. A good writer finds ways to explore the power of violence without ever making gratuitous use of it. What matters is the effect of it, the ripple. Fiction is about stripping people down to see what makes them work, and the proper use of violence in writing is a good way to see what's under the soft veneer we all wear like cloth... The Nightmare Thief And Designer Thrills Last year I read about a company that sells "designer thrills" to adrenaline junkies. For €900, Ultime Reality will kidnap you. For a few thousand euros more, they'll take you on a helicopter chase or let you spend a night in a morgue. They're even willing to bury you alive... Previous 25 Next 25 |
