Natasha Cooper

Interviewed by Eve Tan Gee

Natasha Cooper has long been one of the "hits" that this magazine has wanted to make in terms of an interview. The sense of picturesque decay in her titles alone whet the appetite: from Festering Lilies, Poison Flowers and Rotten Apples to Sour Grapes. Tantalising titles aside, Cooper is a fiercely intelligent writer with a hotline to the darker side of modern life, and her characterisation is non-pareil. In her elegant new book from Simon & Schuster, Fault Lines, she has her barrister heroine Trish Maguire encounter brutality of a kind that would give the staunchest pause with a possible serial rapist and killer on the loose. We began by talking about the book.

Some writers plan their novels around a character; others start with the plot. I tend to start with an emotion, around which ideas begin to cluster like crystals forming on a thread suspended in copper sulphate solution. The process can take ages and usually begins one or two books in advance. Sometimes the emotion belongs to the criminal; sometimes it's the rather different sort of feeling that pushes the sleuth into investigation; occasionally it's the victim's terror as he or she realises what is about to happen.

In Creeping Ivy (Pocket Books), which introduced barrister Trish Maguire, it was a terrorised child's reaction to an all-powerful adult's controlling behaviour that set off the process. In Fault Lines (Simon & Schuster ), which again features Trish Maguire, the first emotion was the terror of a woman waking in the middle of the night to discover a masked intruder creeping towards her, armed with a knife.

Over several months of cogitation, that woman became a social worker in her early forties, living alone after the break-up of a long-term but unhappy relationship. She grew into an excellent, affectionate, trustworthy woman called Kara, and she became a friend of Trish Maguire over a case on which they were both working.

As Kara developed in my mind, along with the London suburb to which she had moved after she left her boyfriend, ideas began to cluster around her first explosive emotion. Among them was a preoccupation with the way we let our personal reactions to people govern our response to what they do and say. In Fault Lines, Trish is still reeling from what has happened to Kara when she is confronted with a thoroughly unsavoury man. He claims to have known Kara well and to have some important information about the people who may have wanted her dead. An obviously paranoid conspiracy theorist, with an unpleasant record of his own, he tells Trish wild tales of police corruption and local authority scams. He seems the last man in the world to have appealed to Kara, and Trish herself can hardly bear to be in these room as him.

But his creepy, whispered confidences about what he and Kara had been doing just before she was murdered persuade Trish that she must at least ask a few questions. Soon she is involved not only in the police investigation but also in serious danger. And the more she gets to know him, the more creepy he seems.

At the same time her memories of Kara and the development of two other important personal relationships with solicitor George Henton and with her barely remembered absconding father make her question the emotional basis on which she has built her life.

The prologue to Fault Lines is more violent than any of my earlier novels, and the crime itself is both more realistic and more horrible. But it still falls a long, long way short of some of the explicit torture and killing scenes created by the more hardboiled crime writers, and it leaves most of the crime to the reader's imagination.

The question of how much violence to include in a novel is a difficult one and each writer can answer only for herself. I do not find violence exciting, and I happen to detest reading graphic descriptions of physical cruelty, but over the years I have been writing crime novels I have come to believe that a bit of realism is necessary.

We live in a violent society. It is not only the victims who are damaged by violence; it is also the perpetrators and the spectators. Because of that, I believe that crime writers have to walk a narrow path between producing descriptions of violence that will titillate susceptible readers (and, in extreme cases, perhaps encourage them to act out their own violent fantasies) and writing so cosily that murder seems no more important than a stubbed toe. It has been claimed that one of the reasons for violence in children is not that they have been excited by screen fights, but that they have seen people hit, shot and stabbed on screen, only to get up and walk away almost unharmed.

Sometimes, of course, writers use accounts of violence deliberately to shock readers into seeing what they might have preferred to ignore, and that may be a good thing. It all depends...

Writers have to take responsibility for what they offer their readers and yet they cannot decide who those readers will be. Back in the 1950s,during a spate of ludicrous obscenity trials, one of the more enlightened judges made the point that juries having to decide whether a novel would tend to 'deprave or corrupt' should not have to assume that the typical reader would be a fifteen-year-old girl. Adult readers can always skip a passage they find offensive or, in extreme cases, stop reading the book altogether.

Much the same goes, I believe, for the question of sexuality. It has to be up to individual writers to write what they have to write for the readership they wish to reach. No one is forced to read a novel, just as no one is forced to sit watching something they dislike on television. They can switch off the set; they can close the book. We all have the ability to make a choice. Most readers are more than capable of exercising that choice. Reading requires effort and the exercise of imagination, in a way that watching a film does not. That's why I do believe that films should be censored, but not novels. Anyone capable of making the effort necessary to engage with characters on the page ought to be able to deal with his or her own feelings about those characters and what happens to them. The minority who cannot or will not are unlikely to be motivated only by what they read. Reading is a much more interactive business than watching film, and because of that, it is also much more satisfying to those accustomed to it. I don't believe that reading is, as you have suggested it might be, 'a throwback to a vanishing past'. For one thing, it's much too convenient a form of entertainment to be thrown away. Books are relatively cheap, portable, comfortable to hold, and easy on the eye. I think they will survive.

I certainly could not be happy in a world without books. I read at every possible opportunity, mainly fiction and biography because I am more interested in people than anything else. I like to know how characters develop, what they feel (and how much they understand about their own feelings and motivation), how they come to terms with what happens to them, and how they interact with each other. I read in bed at night, over meals when I am alone, in the bath, on the tube, nearly everywhere. I haven't yet cracked the problem of how to read when swimming (my preferred form of exercise) or walking.

But both activities are highly conducive to storytelling and so the time they take is never wasted. They help me work out my plots, get to know my characters, and rehearse their dialogue. In fact there have been various occasions when I've realised from the reactions of passers-by that I've been speaking my characters' parts aloud in the street. It's more than embarrassing when it happens, and one of the great delights of talking to other writers is to discover that I am not alone in that particular eccentricity.

Most writers are a little odd. It comes, I think, from spending so much time alone with one's imagination. That's necessary. Research is often more fun than writing, as is promoting the latest book. Both involve talking to other people, watching their reactions, getting the kind of instant feedback that publishing rarely provides. Sitting alone at home with only the word processor for company, wondering whether the novel you are writing is going to work, can be a lonely business. But it's a loneliness that is important. If a writer cannot become completely absorbed in the lives of the characters s/he is creating, it is unlikely that readers will be much interested in them either.

For me, characters are the most important part of any novel in any genre. Of course the style matters, and the plot, but if I am not interested in the people about whom I'm reading, then I don't want to bother. I have to care passionately about what happens to them.

One of the great pleasures of developing a series character is meeting her again in each new novel, discovering what's going on in her life and how she's changing. At the moment the thread of Trish's next adventure is heavy with crystals in my mind. The action is to be triggered by a television producer, who comes to Trish for legal advice about a campaigning film she wants to make. The film's heroine is a woman serving a life sentence for the murder of her elderly father. Her sister, who adored him, testified against her at her trial. Her beloved mother, who is now dead, confessed to the killing herself but could not possibly have committed it. Was it a case of euthanasia? Hatred? Incompetence? A stitchup? We shall see...