Interviews with Thriller Authors

Action Adventure, Demons, And Traveling For Research. Meet the Thriller Author with J.F. Penn

July 6, 2017 By J.F. Penn

I was recently interviewed on Meet The Thriller Author with Alan Petersen about the ideas behind my thrillers and my writing process.

Click here to listen to the show, or subscribe on iTunes.

Transcript of interview with J.F. Penn

Alan: Hey everybody, this is Alan Petersen with Meet the Thriller Author. And in this episode of the podcast we're gonna be meeting with J.F. Penn who is a a New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Thriller Author. So we're really excited to have her on the podcast. How are you doing today, Joanna?

Joanna: I'm great. Thanks for having me on the show, Alan.

Alan: First, I want to thank you so much for agreeing to be on it, I really appreciate it. I'm excited to talk to you.

Can you tell us a little bit about your background for our listeners, please?

Joanna: First of all, I'm English, as you can probably tell from my accent, and I live in Bath, which is in the south-west of England. And it has 2,000-year-old Roman baths in the center of town, so very interesting place.

I have a degree in theology from Oxford, and that sort of religious aspect does come through in my books. I love walking, reading, and traveling, and I travel a lot. And that obviously comes through into my thrillers. I'm a cat person, and I like nice gin and tonic. So there you go, there's a few things.

Alan: Good stuff, yeah. Cats and gin and tonic, can't go wrong with that.

Joanna: Very relaxing.

Alan: Yeah it's very relaxing, yeah. I can just see the cat on your lap as you're having a gin and tonic.

Joanna: Exactly. I should say also, I am a full-time writer now, but I spent 13 years implementing accounts payable into large corporates. So I was a cubicle slave, in the corporate world, if people are wondering what I did before. I was a bit more creative with my life.

Alan: That's an interesting coincidence. I used to be IT support for the Accounts Payable department for a big corporation.

Joanna: There you go.

Alan: Wow, small world. So I know how exciting that was.

Joanna: I was probably phoning you all the time!

Alan: Yeah, exactly. So, can you tell us a little bit about your books? You have several series out.

The ARKANE thrillers are probably your best-known thrillers. Can you tell us a little bit about those books?

Joanna: Yeah sure. The ARKANE series has nine books now, and I say they're Dan Brown meets Lara Croft. The religious thriller with an edge of the supernatural and adventure around the world, stopping global conspiracies and always lots of thrilling stuff. But also a good dose of history, and interesting religious stuff, and myth, and I love all that. So that's cool.

And then I have the London Psychic Crime thrillers, which I describe as Stephen King meets Tess Gerritsen. They have a British detective but a supernatural edge and she works with a psychic researcher at the British Museum. So that's set in London, obviously, because London's in the title. But ARKANE is set all around the world.

And then I have a couple of standalone's. Risen Gods is set in New Zealand, with the ancient gods rising as the earthquakes shake the land and very much based in living in New Zealand and what actually happens there. So those are my main series and I'm working on something else now, but you know how it goes. You start writing and you get more and more ideas.

Alan: Oh yeah, probably can't keep them from coming in sometimes.

What's your latest book that you have out now?

Joanna: My most recent book was actually co-written with three other authors. We got on the train in Chicago and took the Amtrak down to New Orleans, and the four of us wrote a book called, American Demon Hunters: Sacrifice.

Alan: Oh wow.

Joanna: It's totally fun. It's a dark fantasy thriller and it's set on the train. The book opens when the characters get on the train and the book ends when the train arrives in New Orleans. A lot of bad things happen along the way, and the four characters meet and have to stop the demons destroying America.

That's the latest book, but I didn't entirely write that one. Obviously, that was co-written.

My latest ARKANE book is End of Days which is based around the various snake mythologies in history and religion.

The serpent in the Pit of Revelation and the serpent in Eden and the demon Lilith, and when an ancient sarcophagus is found in the deepest part of the ocean, there's a hunt for the seven seals of revelation that can open it. And Morgan and Jake from the ARKANE Agency must stop the apocalypse before the blood moon rises over Jerusalem. Very exciting stuff. All my stories are a little bit dark fantasy, end of the world type stuff, but good triumphs. That's my important thing.

Alan: Yeah, that sounds like a lot of fun.

You had mentioned that you studied theology, so that must really come in handy then when you're writing your thrillers.

Joanna: Yeah, it is really interesting because I am fascinated by the supernatural. When people say, “Oh what are the themes of your book?” and I think at the end of the day it comes down to the question of good versus evil, which I see Stephen King tackling.

mansfield college oxford — Mansfield College, University of Oxford, where I read Theology 1994 – 1997

The fact that there's good versus evil in the world. Bad things happen but hopefully, good people stop them, and there is something more than the things that we see.

It's not like I've fought demons on a train or, stopped the snake of Revelation destroying the world, but it's so fascinating when we take mythology and religious sort of text. And what I tend to do is, in the ARKANE books, the beginning of most of my books there's a quote from the Bible or from some kind of scripture, and then I take that and turn that into a story.

The books are 95% based on truth and real places, like in End of Days there's a cistern under the western wall between the Dome of the Rock, the Muslim side and the western wall, the Jewish side. And if you put something down there, there's gonna be trouble.

So, you know, things like that. I actually went down and visited the cistern and thought that this would be a very cool location for something in my thrillers. The theological aspect comes through but they're not Christian books. I want to state that. I'm not actually a Christian, but I'm very respectful of all religions. In fact, my Destroyer of Worlds, which is set in India, is based in Hindu religion. I'm so fascinated by something more than the physical world, I guess.

Alan: What's the background of your main characters? Are they soldiers or cops or theologians?

Joanna: Morgan Sierra, who is my main character of the ARKANE series, she's actually an Oxford University psychologist, but she's ex-Israeli Defense Force, so ex-military.

But her mother was Christian and her father was Jewish. So I bring in that religious aspect. Yes, she has some special skills from the military. She has Krav Maga and things like that. And she works alongside Jake Timber, who is also ex-military.

Like many thrillers, you have to have some kind of special skills that your characters have, or they can't fight. I'm definitely heavier on the myth and the places and the setting and the character than I am on guns and fighting. There are some guns and fighting but don't expect Clive Cussler or Dirk Pitt thrillers.

In the London Psychic Crime Thrillers, Jamie Brooke is a policewoman. So, again, some special skills there. But you know, I love researching this stuff, and I did try and go to a Krav Maga class, but I got kicked a lot and came home and cried and went, “You know what, I think I'll stay in the books.”

Alan: I was just gonna say, wow, that's pretty hardcore doing those courses. Preparing for the interview, I was looking at your website, and you had an article of when you were visiting Israel, and I remember seeing also a video where you were in a firing range testing different weapons.

You put a lot of research into this. You took that class and then you got kicked all over the place.

Joanna: Well, I think part of this is, 10 years ago I looked at my life when I was in Accounts Payable, and I was so miserable. I had a great job and everything, according to society, but I was really miserable. I thought, “What do I want to really do with my life?” and I really love reading, and I like writing, and I like being on my own a lot.

But I also love to travel and learn new things. So being a writer is a fantastic job and living and life for me because I basically go around doing things and then writing books that are set in those places or bringing those things into my stories. It is really cool.

That shooting range was in Budapest. I've got a book called One Day in Budapest which is based around the rise of the right-wing in Hungary, which is true, it's kind of awful. And we visited the mass grave. And my husband's family are Jewish so we went there and saw the grave of his ancestors and things. So it was really pretty amazing. And then we went down to the Soviet Bunker and shot a load of guns.

[You can watch a video about the Budapest research here.]

Now, obviously I'm British, we don't have guns generally, in our society. I mean, obviously in the criminal end, but not really in the law enforcement even. So guns are just not normal around Britain. So you have to go to Budapest to shoot some, but I figured I should.

Alan: What was that experience like?

Joanna: I enjoyed it for many reasons. I enjoyed it because I think it's good to understand how these things work and to have a healthy respect. Obviously, guns are a difficult topic, but I think handling guns with respect.

And as a thriller writer, I think it's very hard to avoid guns. I mean, it's something that is pretty fundamental in a thriller, to have some kind of fighting some point and it would be disingenuous not to have any weapons. Although often Morgan does fight with her hands, and Krav Maga is much more of a martial art.

But, yeah, I think it was really interesting. I haven't shot a gun since, to be honest, but it was fascinating from that point of view and good for research purposes. And a lot of Americans do this more regularly.

Alan: Probably a little more than in England.

Joanna: Exactly.

Alan: Or most parts of the world.

When you decided to start writing or try to write in fiction, did you choose thrillers and action? Was that a genre that you enjoyed as a reader before you tried to write a book in it?

Joanna: Yes. And I think that's so important. I don't know how you could write a book in a genre you don't love because if you want to do this for a living you have to write a lot of books and so you have to really enjoy it.

When I used to work that day job, and you'll know this, I would be there at my desk and then I would be just hanging out for a break, and when I went on lunch break I would be reading, and I would always be reading thrillers. And for me, it was escapism from my day job, my miserable day job. And then I'd spend my lunch hour in a thriller somewhere else in the world.

And so when I write now, obviously from a selfish reason I write for me because I look at all the cool places I get to travel to, but then I also am writing that book for the person who was trapped in that job and any readers who want to escape their life just for a few hours.

What we offer with our stories is a chance to escape and experience the world without leaving the armchair.

And also, I like to think I bring more than just the stories, so like I said, the question of good versus evil or whether there really is a supernatural. Because I always try and keep, obviously apart from demon hunters on the train, but my ARKANE series is very much…you could see this as scientific, you could see this as supernatural.

So I try to stay on that knife edge of is this real or is this something else, which is what I'm really interested in. I definitely write from my own love of thrillers and I read a lot of thrillers still but I also write for those people who need to escape.

Alan: And were you always writing when you were younger? Or did it just start when you decided to write these books?

Joanna: I always wrote journals, the angsty journals you wrote when you're a teenager. And I would write pen friend letters and, of course, I did English exams, A-levels they're called over here. I always read, but I never thought that I could be a writer, really, until the world changed with the advent of the Kindle, 10 years ago now, amazingly.

Alan: Incredible.

Joanna: I know, as we talk now, so 2007, 2008 as the ebook revolution started, I really saw that that could revolutionize what being a writer could be and it made it possible to make a living as a writer, and that's kind of when I made that decision. And also, I guess the other thing, I should be grateful for Dan Brown, because before Dan Brown my favorite book was really Umberto Eco's, “The Name of the Rose”. And actually that book is, I read it again recently, and it's really hard. It's a hard book to read.

bloodlinerollins — I love James Rollins' books!

The film is awesome but the book is not that fun to read. And then Dan Brown took that kind of religious thriller genre and revolutionized it in The Da Vinci Code, and then, of course, Steve Barry, James Rollins, and a whole load more authors sprung up in his wake. And I see myself as part of that group who sort of… If you can write a story about things that you're really interested in and that you're curious about, then there will be readers who are curious about the same stuff you are.

Alan: That's a good point, yeah, it's not like you're alone.

If you're interested in it somebody else is gonna be interested in it too. Never thought about it that way.

Joanna: And what's lovely about the international markets now and being on Kindle and Kobo and iBooks and all these places, is that even if, in your country, there aren't people who like that stuff, there are probably people in the world who like that stuff. You can actually reach readers all over the world, which is super exciting. And as a reader, you can read books by authors from all around the world which is also cool.

Alan: That is really cool. I've read books from British authors, but I really didn't know anything about the British police or anything like that until I started reading Indie books about British cops. Before that, nobody was really writing those. So it's really cool to see that happening in the last five, six, ten years.

What is your writing process? Do you like outline everything before you start writing or do you go by the seat of your pants?

Joanna: I tend to get an idea and then think about it for quite a long time. At the moment, I'm thinking about a new series I'm going to write which is based on maps and cartography and some really interesting ideas around immigration and stuff like that, but within the realm of a sort of fantasy world. If people have read Laini Taylor, who wrote Daughter of Smoke and Bone, and she's amazing. I want to write something that flips between two different worlds.

So I'm thinking about this, and I have the idea, and I've started to think about some of the characters, but I'm more of a pantser when it comes to writing. And a lot changes when I actually start writing. So I'm a bit of both, but certainly nowhere near someone like Jeffery Deaver, who writes a 200-page outline for a 400-page book.

Alan: Yeah, that's crazy.

Joanna: You know what I mean. And someone like James Patterson, I think, does outline a lot and works with co-authors. But then someone like Stephen King or Lee Child write just from the seat of their pants and I'd say I'm nearer the pantsers than the plotters but I have a dash of plotting.

Alan: I know this is kind of a hard question because it can vary so much.

When you're in the zone and you're writing a book, what's your writing day like?

Joanna: When I am ready to write that book…so I'm writing a non-fiction at the moment, but with fiction, as soon as I say, “Right, I'm starting the book on this day,” it's usually a Monday, because that's a good day to start.

I go to a cafe. So I have, and I totally recommend this if people want to write, I wear noise cancelling headphones and I go to somewhere away from my desk because at my desk I do things like this, and my admin, and things like that.

So I go to a cafe, I block out time in my diary, and I'm a morning person, so I write in the morning. I'll do a two-hour block at one cafe…and you really only need to buy one black coffee an hour to sit in a cafe. So I do my two coffees in one cafe and then, depending on how it's going, I'll have a walk, and then walk to another cafe and do a second session.

By lunchtime, I'm pretty much dead. So probably four hours of actual writing and I try and get that first draft done as fast as possible. So, you know, try and get it done within a month basically. So a month to six weeks to do the first draft.

And then, obviously, there's the editing phase, which can take awhile as well. But really that first draft is the only time when I will go to the cafe every single day and write. And then, obviously, then it's the editing and other things. And I do that at the cafe as well, but I listen to rain and thunderstorms through my noise-canceling headphones and that's what keeps me in the zone and it definitely helps.

Alan: That's interesting.

I've had a hard time with music because I get distracted, but that's interesting to try out nature sounds.

Joanna: Yeah, it's enough of a noise and also with the noise-cancelling, you basically shut out all the external noise and it just really helps you concentrate and get into that first draft writing phrase which can be, obviously, hard.

Alan: And what do you use? Are you a Scrivener user or do you just use Word?

Joanna: Absolutely Scrivener. I wrote my first novel, Stone of Fire in Word and I would never, ever go back. I love Scrivener. I don't know many writers who don't use Scrivener, at this point, because it's so useful. And I don't write in order as well which is why Scrivener makes it even better because I can write different scenes and then move them around later. So yeah, I totally love Scrivener.

Alan: Yeah, it's a great product. I'm the same way too, I love to be able to drag the folders around.

I really like your covers, and I remember noticing that a lot of authors like yourself and Russell Blake, you change your covers every now and then. Is that just because you noticed changes in the market and you decide, “Oh, I'm gonna change it.”

I was curious about that when I see an author's changing covers.

Joanna: First of all, changing covers is completely normal. All traditional publishers will change covers on older books. If you look at something like “To Kill A Mockingbird” there will have been myriad covers on a book like that because they re-release it every now and then with a new cover.

But in terms of my covers, some of it has been re-branding. I think when you first start to write you don't really know what you're writing.

For example, Stone of Fire the original title was “Pentecost” and I wrote Pentecost, Prophecy and Exodus, which to me, because I'm a theologian, the words had a lot of meaning. But people thought they were Christian novels, but they're not Christian novels, they're just based around Christian myth and history. And so I re-branded as Stone of Fire, Crypt of Bone, Ark of Blood, and that's, you know, End of Days, and these are my ARKANE titles now.

So I did different covers when I re-branded…sort of re-branding to more of mainstream thriller look and feel which, you know, the couple running away from certain things. There are genre conventions.

And then my London Psychic series is a lot darker, so the covers are dark. But again I tried, like, three different covers on that first one, “Desecration”, because I hadn't really worked out where that book fit in the market. And this is one of the pros and cons of being an indie author, is that you might not really know exactly where your book fits. But one of the amazing things is, of course, all you need to do is upload a new cover and move it.

“Risen Gods” is another good example. I put a cover on that and we thought it was a horror novel. It does have demons in but it's not horror, there's no gore, well, there's a bit of gore but not very much.

So we've changed it to sort of a dark fantasy, urban fantasy, with a male character on the front with a sort of the look of volcanoes and magic around it. And it's almost not even magic, it's that kind of mythology of the Mauri people. So, changing that cover actually has made a huge difference and more people have picked up that book when it has a different cover.

I think it's very important to write your book from your heart. I mean, some people do write to market, but I write from my heart. Which means I might not know exactly where it fits, but over time we find our market.

Alan: Yeah. Well, your covers are beautiful. I'm looking at them right now. They look great.

Joanna: Thank you.

Alan: I saw on your website Destroyer of Worlds has been nominated, it's a finalist for the ITW award for Best E-Book Original, that's so exciting.

Can you tell us a little bit about that and that award?

Joanna: The ITW is the International Thriller Writers and it has some really big names in, so people like Stephen King and Lee Child, and Clive Cussler. I do love Clive Cussler, and I met him the other year and I was just so thrilled. Authors of any age can submit their work or the publishers will submit work to these awards every year.

They are judged, not on sales but on the quality of writing, so they're judged by other thriller authors. And so, yes, I'm a finalist in the final five for “Destroyer of Worlds” which is set in India and is a fun romp through India and Hindu myth.

That will be announced in July. And even if I don't win, which I hope I will obviously, but if I don't win it's still validation from my peers that my writing fits into that thriller genre. And I think, for a lot of writers, having other writers judge their work it's very scary but it can also be the most rewarding thing.

Alan: Yeah, especially making it as a finalist. All the big name thriller writers are a part of ITW.

Joanna: Well, hopefully, I'll win 🙂 Fingers crossed.

Alan: Yeah, exactly. Fingers crossed. It's an honor to be a finalist though.

Joanna: Yes, exactly. That's what I think.

What are you working on now? What's your current work-in-progress?

Joanna: Well, two things mainly. One is this new series around maps and cartography but I think when you're thinking about a new series, you do have to think about more than one book. I'm waiting until I have the full sort of ideas in my head before I write it down. I know the first scene. So I keep.. I'm like, aha, gotta write that scene down, but I'm almost waiting until I can't wait any longer on that.

Because we traveled on the train from Chicago to New Orleans, and then we spent a week in New Orleans writing, but that demon hunters book is set on the train, so I have all this stuff around New Orleans that I want to write. I'm actually going to start a spin-off series which will be, United States of ARKANE. The first book is going to be set in New Orleans and probably Haiti and will be around Voodoo.

Because I learned a lot about Voodoo and, you know, what they call Voodoo versus Hoodoo, and Hoodoo is all the occult stuff and Voodoo is the actual religion. So it's really fascinating.

I want to write another ARKANE book set in America. I have one already, One Day in New York, but this will be the start of a new spin-off and then the maps book. I'm hoping to have lots of that out this year, and also short stories and… you know how it goes, there's always more to write.

Alan: Oh yes, absolutely.

Do you have a set goal that you try to publish every year?

Joanna: Well, not so much. I mean, last year I only published one novel, “Destroyer of Worlds”. This year I put out “End of Days” in January and then “American Demon Hunter: Sacrifice” and I'll definitely have one… maybe even two more by the end of the year.

I feel like this is a good year for me in terms of writing. So, no, I don't have a set number per year. Because I'm quite a pantser, I don't necessarily say, “Right, I have to have everything done at this time,” and that type of thing. Because I write non-fiction as well.

Alan: Okay. All right. Well, Joanna, I'm not gonna take up too much more of your time, it's been so awesome talking to you.

Before I let you go, is there anything that you would like to tell our listeners?

Joanna: Yeah, sure. So if you would like to try one of my books “Stone of Fire” is a free ebook on all platforms. So you can always check out “Stone of Fire” by J.F. Penn. And also you can get a free book on my website jfpenn.com/free and that's “Day of the Vikings” which opens in the British Museum and is sort of a combination of both of my series, it has characters from both of my series. So that's a pretty fun valet if you like Vikings set in the modern era. Lots of fun.

Alan: All right. Awesome. Well, thank you very much for being on the podcast. It was nice talking to you.

Joanna: Thanks so much, Alan.

Alan: Thanks, bye. Okay…

A Song Of Shadows. An Interview With John Connolly.

March 3, 2017 By J.F. Penn

I love John Connolly's Charlie Parker series, and its blend of crime and the supernatural was the major influence for my London Psychic trilogy. I met John in person at Crime in the Court in London (at left). I'm a total fan-girl 🙂 I also interviewed John for The Big Thrill July 2015 edition, and include the interview below.

John Connolly is the bestselling author of the Charlie Parker mysteries, the Samuel Johnson novels for middle-grade readers, and co-author of the Chronicles of the Invaders plus other works.

His latest book, A SONG OF SHADOWS, is the thirteenth book in the Charlie Parker mystery series.

Your latest book, A SONG OF SHADOWS, weaves European history into a string of murders in Maine, all while Charlie Parker recovers from devastating injuries.

How much of the story is based on historical truth? Why did this particular aspect of Nazi history interest you?

My eye had simply been caught by the ongoing attempts of the United States to extradite an alleged former Nazi named Hans Breyer to Europe to face war crimes charges. (Breyer died last year just before he could be extradited.) I began to wonder how many of these men and women were left, and how seriously the hunt for them was being taken.

Out of that research came a lot of surprising details about just how little energy the Allies invested in bringing these people to trial, and how the British and American authorities protected them, mainly in order to milk them for intelligence about the Soviets. I found it fascinating, and just hoped that readers would find it fascinating too.

It then turned out to be very topical because just as the book came out Oskar Gröning, the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” went on trial, and I suppose that the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps also reminded people of what had taken place in them.

I suppose I was also aware that it’s really hard to find anything new to say about the Nazis and the Holocaust, so in that sense I was a bit reluctant to take on the subject. Yet those old men and women nagged at me, and their cases found a resonance in one of the recurring questions in the Parker books: are we defined only by the wrongs that we do, and are some wrongs so terrible that they cannot be forgiven?

All the Charlie Parker books have a supernatural edge, which is what keeps me as a reader coming back. Where do your ideas about the supernatural come from? How do they fit with your own beliefs?

The supernatural elements in the books drew the greatest amount of criticism early in my career, and they still make the more conservative elements in the genre uneasy. I like the fact that Americans call crime novels “mysteries,” and the roots of the word “mystery” are themselves supernatural. A mystery was a truth that could only be revealed through divine revelation.

In a similar vein, I’ve always liked William Gaddis’s quotation from the novel JR: “You get justice in the next world, in this world, you have the law.” But mystery fiction has always been uneasy about the difference between law and justice. It does not accept that justice should be left for the next world, and that we should be content with imperfect legal systems in this one. If you take Gaddis’s view to the extreme, it implies the existence of both a moral universe and an entity governing it that is capable of dispensing justice. If we call that entity “God,” then there may also be a “Not-God.”

So I suppose the Parker novels take this idea and run with it: notions of justice, of morality, of retribution, and of redemption. I keep coming back to that word because if, like me, you come from a Judaeo-Christian background—I’m a bad Catholic—then “redemption” comes freighted with a certain spiritual baggage.

Your “good guys,” Charlie, Louis and Angel, might be perceived as “bad” in many ways. But the bad guys are always worse. How do the notions of good and evil fit into your characters? Can even the worst of them be redeemed?

I don’t think Parker, Louis and Angel are “bad.” As is remarked in one of the novels, they’re on the side of the angels, even if the angels aren’t sure that this is an entirely positive development. They are prepared to compromise themselves morally to achieve certain ends, and Parker in particular is aware of the potential cost of such compromises, but it comes back to that earlier question: are we defined only by actions that might be perceived as negative, or how bad do such actions have to be before they define us in that way?

I don’t believe that most people are evil. Selfish, yes. Fearful. Angry. Deluded. All those may result in evil acts being committed, but very few people set out actively to do evil. As someone once said, everyone has his reasons. For me, the use of terms like “evil” or “monster” is, for the most part, the equivalent of shrugging one’s shoulders and walking away. It’s a failure, or an unwillingness, to attempt to understand, and without understanding there can be no change. But the books do suggest that very, very occasionally, we may encounter acts or individuals so depraved as to suggest a deeper, darker well is being drawn upon.

The Charlie Parker books are set in the U.S., but you’re Irish and live in Dublin. How does Ireland emerge in your writing, even if it’s camouflaged?

I suspect it emerges through a fascination with folklore and the uncanny, and a comfort with letting rationalism—which is the basis of detective fiction—blend into anti-rationalism, which is the basis of supernatural fiction. I see them as complementary, rather than the antithesis of each other. I think, too, that the process of hybridization interests me, the possibility of creating or enhancing new sub-genres.

I love classic mystery fiction, but that doesn’t mean that the genre should be set in aspic somewhere between the birth of Sherlock Holmes and the death of Poirot.

You’ve said that writers are like magpies, picking out interesting things from the world and storing them up for stories. What’s fascinating you at the moment?

Well, I’m writing the next Parker book, and I want it to have a strong folkloric element, but I may have to invent my own piece of folklore for it to work. Then again, isn’t that what folklore is about? We imagine, we create, and it becomes part of an ongoing tale. I’m always quite pleased when someone reads my books and has trouble spotting what’s real, and what’s made up. When that happens, I like to think that I’ve done my job right.

You can find A Song of Shadows and all the other Charlie Parker books on Amazon and all bookstores.

Exploring The Inevitability of Fate With Crime Thriller Author, Clare Mackintosh

December 2, 2016 By J.F. Penn

Clare Mackintosh’s debut novel, I Let You Go, was a Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller for 12 weeks, and was the fastest selling title by a new crime writer in the UK in 2015. It also won the Theakston Old Peculier crime novel of the year award for 2016. Translated into more than 30 languages, it has sold over 500,000 copies.

Clare’s latest book, I SEE YOU, is for sale now.

USA Today bestselling thriller author J.F.Penn interviewed Clare for The Big Thrill. This article first appeared in The Big Thrill on 31 August 2016.

You were in the police for 12 years. How does that experience shape your crime writing?

I loved my police career, particularly the variety. I spent time as a community beat officer, a detective, a custody sergeant, shift sergeant, and operations inspector, including qualifying as a public order commander. I worked in communities I would never otherwise have had experience in, which gives me much more breadth of knowledge for my writing. Working in the police obviously also gives me a head start in terms of building authentic police characters and settings, as well as feeling comfortable writing about police procedure and forensics—although there’s still a lot I have to check.

More than anything, I think that there is a commonality between being a police investigator and being a storyteller. In the police my job was to get to the truth; to write down witness accounts and victims’ statements, to interview suspects, and to present as full a picture as possible to a court. I go through the same process as a writer; I pull together all the different threads of a story, and present them to my readers. It’s their job to get to the truth, just as a judge and jury have to. I Let You Go was inspired by a real-life case—a hit and run in Oxford, England—although the story that unfolds is pure fiction.

You’re British and much of I Let You Go is set in Wales. How did the landscape shape the story ideas?

A huge amount. My main character, Jenna Gray, is traumatized by the hit and run that happens at the start of the book. She is grieving for her son and runs to a rural village in Southwest Wales to try and put her life back together. This part of the book is set in a real place called Three Cliffs Bay. It’s the most beautiful sandy beach, encircled by three high cliffs, with a caravan park at the top. Jenna feels safest and happiest when she is outside, anchoring herself with bare feet on sand, or hands against rock, and she builds an income by taking photographs of messages written in the sand. In this way the setting is an integral part of the story, and as Jenna’s past catches up with her the landscape becomes much more threatening.

You’ve had tragedy in your life. What aspects of you are in your characters? How has writing helped you?

Conspiracy Thrillers And The End Game With Raymond Khoury

July 14, 2016 By J.F. Penn

Raymond Khoury is a New York Times bestselling thriller writer and award-winning screenwriter. Raymond’s latest book is The End Game and you can find him at www.RaymondKhoury.com.

USA Today bestselling thriller author J.F.Penn interviewed Raymond for The Big Thrill. This article first appeared in The Big Thrill on 1 July 2016.

Although you grew up in the US, you’re originally from Lebanon, which was once described as the Paris of the East, and now is more known for civil war. How does the Middle East and your experiences there flow into your writing?

Growing up there and going to architecture school during the civil war years has had a huge on my view of life, and by extension, on my writing. The urgency, the pacing, it all comes out of living under such conditions. The cynical worldview too, I suppose, though that’s countered by an immense appetite for life that arises when you see firsthand how fragile everything can be. It also gave me a pretty thorough understanding of how international conflicts play out, how politics affect the situation on the ground, of dirty tricks and terror tactics and all kinds of manipulations.

More directly, it certainly was a driving factor in my first book, The Last Templar, where I was curious about the historical basis of our major religions–in the Middle East, millions of people are manipulated into wars and generational hatred by politicians who use religion as a driver, but these people generally know very little about the historical basis of the religion in whose name they’re willing to kill (or die). My second novel, The Sanctuary, deals with longevity medicine and the desire to live longer, but it’s set in Beirut, Iraq, Turkey, during the war of 2006.

Your books could be described as conspiracy thrillers, with Templar Knights, secret agencies and religious orders. What fascinates you about these topics and how do you manage the line between people’s faith and possible conspiracy?

I only explored religion and the discrepancies between history and faith in the two Templar novels. In a completely different way, I explored the link between organised religion and politics in the US in The Sign. I think the Templar novels were mostly well received and appreciated, even by readers who would describe themselves as very religious. I think they were novels that promoted a message that was essentially a positive one, that said what a religious is based on and stands for, and the acts of those who are actually running the show nowadays (or in the past–as in, say, the Borgias), are two separate things. One’s about a message, a moral code, a way of approaching life’s big issues. The other is human nature, and it can be anywhere from its best to its worst.

The same goes for The Sign, but I think I made the mistake of perhaps too-bluntly stating my political opinion in that novel, which I felt very strongly about, and that didn’t sit well with many readers who didn’t share my partisan preference. I don’t regret what I wrote at all, I’m very proud of the book and it’s many readers’ favorite (we’re even discussing a possible movie adaptation at the moment), but with hindsight, it may not have been a great move from a commercial point of view.

What are your obsessions and the themes that keep coming up in your writing?

Betrayals by governing forces. Ageing and death. Making the planet a safer, better place to live for our kids.

French toast.

As a screenwriter, you wrote The Last Templar and also worked on other TV shows like Spooks (which I love.) How do novel writing and screenwriting compare and which do you enjoy the most? How do they both fit into your creative life?

Thanks (re Spooks)! I’m very proud of the show, and the experience was a pleasure because the production team (Kudos) were just great to work with on a human level. Novels and screenwriting are very, very different… I enjoy both, although if I had to choose one discipline, it would be writing novels. They’re so much more involved, bigger, richer, meatier. Every character needs to be imagined in full spectrum, every little detail around them needs to be thought out, researched. In a screenplay, I can write “Ext.- Paris street, 17th century, Day”, describe a character walking down a street in one line, and that’s enough. We don’t know what’s going through his mind and I don’t need to describe what the city and the street life looks like. In a novel, that line of description, even if it becomes just one paragraph, is a ton of research. So it’s a lot of work, but it’s so engrossing.

The characters become your best friends, your constant companions, you’re living every moment with them throughout the long writing process. Screenplays are much more bare-boned. Of course, the story is paramount in both, you need to concoct and tell a great story in both. But the scale is massively different. You’d lose a lot of what’s in my books if they were adapted into a 90-to-120-minute movie. I imagine them more as 4-to-6-hour miniseries (my novels tend to run 125-150,000 words, a film script typically has around 15,000 words in it).

Furthermore, what I type is what my readers read. Every word. It’s a selfish process with as little interaction as I like. Screenplays, on the other hand, are just the blueprint of the final show (or movie). Directors, producers, network execs, actors, editors, cinematographers… everyone has an impact on the final show. It’s storytelling by committee and the final show rarely, if ever, looks like what I imagined in my head when I wrote it. Which is why I tend to stay away from the set and never watch anything I’ve written after it’s filmed.

**Tell us a bit about your latest book, The End Game and how it fits into your other books.**

The End Game is my fifth novel about FBI agent Sean Reilly, who we first met in The Last Templar. I didn’t set out to write a series and my second and third novels were standalones. I had begun writing book four (The Devil’s Elixir), also a standalone, when I had the idea for a Templar sequel. I put Elixir aside and brought back Reilly (and his paramour, the archaeologist Tess Chaykin) for The Templar Salvation, and when I went back to Elixir, I realised it was a perfect Reilly story, only when I got back into it, I felt something was missing. Then it hit me: it should be in first person. Up until then, I had always written in the third person. So I reworked what I’d written of it, and it just flowed from there.

While writing the ending, I came across a question Reilly had to ask, and it would remain an open issue for him: he was given the name of someone he’d want to track down, but that would be for another book. So the next book, which became Rasputin’s Shadow, was seeded. And the same thing happened again: while writing the last chapter, I thought of something that would seed the next story: a question about Reilly’s father, who we know (well, those of us with elephantine memories who had read The Last Templar) had killed himself when Reilly was ten. This is The End Game: a standalone story about a past conspiracy that Reilly gets sucked into while investigating his dad’s death.

So, as a very long-winded answer to your question (are you regretting asking it yet?): The End Game gives Reilly closure on two issues that were seeded in previous books; it’s his end game. Where he goes from here is a whole new ballgame…

How much of you is in your characters?

My friends tell me they can hear my voice when they read Reilly's dialogue as well as his internal ramblings now that I write him in first person. I doubt they feel the same way when they read what he actually does–I can't imagine that I'd be the most valiant or heroic FBI special agent. That said, I do think there's a lot of me in my writing in general–the asides, the points of view concerning all kinds of things, the humour when it has a natural place to slot in. Even when the focus is to make sure every character has their own “voice”, their defined persona, I guess some of me always manages to seep in.

Do you travel for research? What are some of the settings that bring your books alive?

I've been an avid traveler all my life and I've been lucky enough to have experienced a lot of the places I've written about, particularly in Europe and in the Middle East, although not necessarily on actual research trips. But I do rely a lot on what I'd call second-hand research–basically reading about whatever setting I'm using. The resources available to a writer nowadays are such an amazing tool, I can't imagine how much harder it must have been before the internet and mail-order books arriving within a day.

What are your favorite thriller novels and what are you reading right now?

Marathon Man by William Goldman is definitely in my top 10 of all time, even if my one meeting with him was rather unpleasant and I can't say I'm fond of him as a person, but his writing is outstanding. What else? I remember fondly discovering several authors who remain huge bestsellers, in the earlier days of their careers, when it all felt very fresh and original to me: John Grisham's The Firm remains exceptional; James Patterson's Along Came a Spider, Lee Child's Killing Floor, Harlan Coben's Tell No One (although I think I liked No Second Chance even more), Nelson DeMille's Plum Island, Michael Connelly's The Poet;

But maybe I read too many and I now find it hard to motivate myself to read (or finish) such books. It takes something different, like Don Winslow's excellent Savages, or Stephen King's outstanding 11.22.63 (which I would call a thriller), or Gone Girl, to hook me.

Reading now? Not too exciting, sadly, as it's mostly research about the Ottoman empire, for my next book…

You can find The End Game in print, ebook and audiobook editions at all stores and at Raymond’s website, www.RaymondKhoury.com.

London Detectives, Psychometry and Crime Thrillers. Interview On It’s A Mystery Podcast

June 22, 2016 By J.F. Penn

I was recently interviewed about the London Crime Thriller trilogy on It's a Mystery Podcast with Alexandra Amor. Click here for the full audio interview.

Transcript of Interview with J.F. Penn

Alexandra: Hello mystery readers, I’m Alexandra Amor and this is It’s a Mystery Podcast. I’m here today with J.F. Penn. Hi, Joanna.

Joanna: Hi, Alexandra. Thanks for having me on this show.

Alexandra: Oh, you’re so welcome. It’s so great to have you here. So for the uninitiated, I’ll just tell them a little bit about you.

J. F. Penn is the New York Times and USA today bestselling author of thrillers with a supernatural edge. Oxford educated, British-born J.F. Penn has traveled the world in her study of religion and psychology. She brings these obsessions, as well as a love for thrillers and an interest in the supernatural, to her writing. Her fast-paced ARKANE thrillers weave together historical artifacts, global locations, a kickass, protagonist, and a hint of the supernatural. The London Psychic series, which is what we’re going to talk about today, features British detective Jamie Brooke alongside psychic researcher Blake Daniel as they solve dark crimes around London.

We’re going to talk mostly about the London Psychic series today. I’m a big fan of police procedurals, and so these were the books of yours that I wanted to read the most. I finished “Desecration” a week or so ago.

Tell us a little bit about Jamie Brooke. You know, it was kind of heartbreaking to read Jamie’s story, and I was curious about what drew you to her.

Joanna: It’s funny. I wanted to write a straight crime novel. That was what I went into this, because my ARKANE series is kind of action adventure.

I moved to London when I started writing this, I’ve moved from Australia. I was back to London after I think it was 11 years. And I wanted to do something in London, so that was kind of the first thing. I wanted to write a crime novel.

Then, and it’s a bit of a little longer story, but I’ll do it anyway. Back in London, I’m excited about getting to know the city again. And I went to the Royal College of Surgeons, along to a medical specimen museum. And you’ll know from the book, the opening few scenes are set here as a dead body is found in the Royal College of Surgeons surrounded by all the medical specimens. And when I visited that museum, I felt very disturbed by the whole atmosphere, and I decided that this visceral feeling was what I wanted to capture in a crime novel.

I really started with a setting, which is how I often write. What would be the weirdest thing here? It would be a dead body, although it was surrounded by body parts, it would be someone who’s actually been murdered. And then the interesting idea of all those — who are the body parts in the jars anyway? Where did they even come from, and kind of thinking along those lines.

Once I have the setting, I was like, “Okay, so I need a policeman or a policewoman,” and that was when I started thinking about Jamie. I write strong female characters. It was probably always going to be a woman, and I didn’t even know how it happened that she had she had a child. I think because I was thinking about bodies and the idea of the physical self versus the real self, and it’s not a spoiler at all to say that Jamie’s daughter has a very severe illness and is in basically terminal care, because of her genetic issue. So then you think okay, what does a career woman who is now a single mom to a really sort of dying daughter? That sets the scene for all kinds of stuff.

I don’t really know where she came from, except that she rides a motorbike, and I don’t but I would love to. You know she’s kind of a kickass female character is what I always write. So yeah, that’s where she came from. And I don’t have a daughter, dying or not. I don’t really know where that came from, but I think it’s very important for the book, that the daughter is there and there’s a lot of the plot that has to do with the daughter.

Alexandra: How do you think Jamie is different than Morgan Sierra? Because Morgan Sierra is quite kickass too, and one thing I noticed about Jamie is that because of what she’s going through in the book, her walls are really up, and as the book progresses, they go up even further. And she says, in the book, in fact that when people are trying to express sympathy to her at one point that she can’t even let that in.

What are the differences or similarities between Morgan and Jamie?

Joanna: Well, I think partly, I don’t know about other people, but I write as a sort of alter ego, to the main characters, to try and figure out what I think about the world, and things, topics like the meaning of the physical body. I could only tackle that through writing a story about it, and actually thinking.

For me, Morgan Sierra was always more like James Bond, you know, less emotional resonance really. She has a twin sister and niece who she cares about, and a mentor and friends that she cares about, but she has sex in my books. You don’t see it. She has sexual encounters, as in Morgan Sierra is much more separate, I guess, and a sort of action figure.

Whereas Jamie has a real job, she’s more real life, I guess. She’s a single mom. She smokes. She’s got acquaintances, but it’s really hard to find time to have friends when you’ve got a daughter in care and a job as a Detective Sergeant and everything.

There is a very magic element to her relationship with Blake Daniel, but they both are very scarred people, so that’s a longer story over there the three books. I think Jamie is, as you said, much more vulnerable, although yeah, she grows over the books. But I do really do bad things to Jamie. She has really a tough time. It’s a tough role to play.

Alexandra: You mentioned Blake. Let’s talk about him a little bit too. I was really intrigued by that character. And in the author’s note at the end of the book, you talk about the idea that sparked Blake’s talent; he’s a reluctant clairvoyant, and he can touch objects and feel or see a bit of their history.

Tell us a bit about him and what sparked that character.

Joanna: Again I really wanted to write straight crime novel, because everything I’ve written before has a supernatural element. And what was so crazy, you know, I knew I needed a sidekick character, someone for Jamie to spark off. And I just couldn’t get this psychic idea out of my head. And I go to the British Museum a lot and had been visiting a lot, and I’m fascinated by the fact that all the objects in the museum, like If you were a researcher and he could somehow see the past of an object, that would make you a really cool researcher.

And also my sister-in-law is Nigerian, so my brother, who’s white, British like me, married in Nigerian, and so I’ve been thinking about mixed race characters, and wanting to bring the essence of London, which for me, is mixed race. London’s just elected a Muslim mayor, first European Muslim mayor, which is to me, the melting pot of London. So a character like Blake, who’s half-Nigerian and half-Swedish, so it’s a mixed race character, I kind of say he looks like a disheveled boy band. He’s quite hot really.

The idea of a psychic often in fiction, on TV as well as books, is a woman. And it’s mainly portrayed as a woman, and so I wanted a male character as a psychic.The problem is there isn’t really a good word for it, but as you say, clairvoyant, but he really doesn’t want to have this ability to touch things, and he’s kind of jolted into the past. But what it gives me as an author is a chance to write historical chapters without writing a historical novel. So as a plot device, it’s actually really good.

And then what I wanted to do is bring in that what can he see in the past of the object associated with the crime that could give Jamie clues, even though you could never use it in evidence, because the police can’t do that.
I guess he was born from a sort of sense of wanting to include the museum, wanting to think about these objects. And also this antique ivory figurine which is like an anatomical Venus was used to teach anatomy, back in the 16th, 17th century. You could take the little body parts out, the little miniatures. It’s quite weird, really.

It’s starts with that, but over the books, his ability to read the history of objects plays into the story. In “Day of the Vikings,” which is a novella that spans both series because Morgan Sierra goes to the museum, and meets Blake Daniel. We get the history of the Viking attacks on Britain in a modern thriller.

[The London Detective books] are a trilogy, “Desecration,” “Delirium,” “Deviance”. I had thought I was going to write an ongoing crime series with Jamie. But what happened by the third book is she’s actually left the police. She’s a private investigator. The arc, her arc pretty much winds up, but Blake, I think, will go on to be his own separate thing. And readers have said, “Are you taking Blake north,” because there’s stuff about his father and his history in Scandinavia. I have this whole set of new possible series with Blake, because I find his ability quite addictive myself. It would be something I would love to have, and some people have it.And in fact, I have had psychics email me and say, “How did you know how that felt?” And I was like, “Well, I imagined it a bit like I imagine killing people and stuff like that.” You know, it’s called imagination. But it was great to get that right, because that’s important.

Alexandra: Yes, exactly. That’s fascinating. Nice to have that kind of feedback. And then you anticipated one of my questions. I was going to ask if the books would carry on. It’s fantastic to know that Blake might take the books off in sort of another direction.

I can see that his talent would be such a good fit for you, because you’re such a history buff, and you love research so much.

Joanne: Yeah. And it’s funny because I… I was actually thinking in the day, why don’t I write a historical novel? But I think, for me… Have you ever read any Barbara Erskine?

Alexandra: No.

Joanna: There’s an author called Barbara Erskine, whose book “Lady of Hay” was the first one I read, and I think I read it when I was a teenager, it’s quite you know is quite old now because I’m quite old. But she has this similar time track where she has one story in the present, and one story in the past.

I don’t think I ever want to write pure historical. But as you say, I love having the modern day based on history in some way. And to me, the research process is kind of what I love most or a part of the process is finding out all this cool information and doing that research in, like the three London psychic books. Getting to know London at a different level was part of what made it so interesting.

Alexandra: I learned so much about London that I didn’t know just from reading “Desecration.” So the caves under the city, I mean, I thought you must be making this up. And then when I read the author’s note, no, you weren’t.

I know how much fun research is for you, and now that you don’t live there, do you go back? Or do you do most of it your research online now, do you find?

Joanna: Yes, so my latest book, “Destroyer of Worlds” is set in India and we were in India a while back. I’ve been writing other things. For Blake going north into Norway and maybe Iceland, I will plan a trip there. London, I finished the trilogy, so I finish the cycle of those three London books, specifically. Although in “Destroyer of Worlds,” I blow up Trafalgar Square in the first scene. The ARKANE headquarters is in London, so I will always bring London in a bit, but I feel like I’ve exorcised some kind of London addiction that I had with those three books.

The last one, “Deviance,” is about the whole history of London being built on the sex trade, which is just fascinating. How much of it is on the backs of those women who are basically buried in a graveyard that’s unconsecrated, because even though the bishop took the money from these women, they weren’t allowed to be buried in consecrated ground. So these scandals the lie beneath London are so fascinating.

Now, I’ve moved west, so I’m living in the West Country, there’s a real sense of pagan England, out west. I’m quite near Glastonbury, which is a big, kind of weirdy place. It’s quite near Wales, Stonehenge. In fact, the other day, I went to a church service. I took my cousin’s children to church for a thing, and we had this ancient ceremony where we circled the church and hugged the church. And it’s called clypping the church. And I was like, “I have never heard of this before.” This is some kind of ancient pagan ritual that has been incorporated into the Christian service.

Alexandra: Wow.

Joanna: I know, and I was just like, “Okay, that’s going in my list of things to look at.” So I’m actually thinking, and I’ve got another character in mind completely, a man this time, who will somehow investigate pagan mysteries that I’m starting to research. That’s kind of like what I’m looking at next. So I think where I’m living now will spark this whole different series of books. It will have some kind of mystery aspect, a thriller aspect, a supernatural one. This pagan England, which you think should be dead is not dead.

Alexandra: And so speaking of research then, there are a lot of themes in “Desecration” that were quite dark and things that go on that were disturbing. Do you ever have trouble letting go of what you’ve learned or seen?

So for example, you talk about Torture Garden in “Desecration,” which is a real thing, a fetish club. And so when I was preparing for the interview, I went to the Torture Garden website. There’s a big warning on the front page, and so I actually backed away. I thought, I’m a little bit vanilla myself, and I thought… you can’t unsee stuff.

What’s it like for you? Are you ever troubled by what you learn?

Joanna: It’s a really good question. And let’s just be clear, Torture Garden is a sex fetish club. It is not actually a place where people are tortured. I just want to make it clear to people. It’s an act of lifestyle choice to be able to go. Let me also say I never went. I did that one online. And also like my tattoo stuff, and the skin trade that goes on in your “Deviance” and the sex trade, I don’t do everything that’s in my books, really important to say.

But yes, so I think the thing that sparked the whole series, this feeling of being disturbed when surrounded by specimens in a museum. That visceral feeling of being disturbed is kind of what I wanted people to feel and then question why. And that’s, I think, the whole point of the book is to say, “Why are we disturbed when there is a body part, say, someone’s leg in a jar?” Because I think most of us know that when you die, your body is not you. Whatever you believe religion-wise, faith-wise or nothing, I don’t think we believe that we are the dead body.

Alexandra: Yeah.

Joanna: The person is not left when the physical body is dead. So why therefore are we disturbed about what people do with the dead body. And I’m a donor, so I’ve basically said, “When I die, take anything you want.”

So why then do we still feel disturbed by babies in jars, for example? And it’s sad in one way, but also, the whole basis of our medical society is based on this type of research of doctors cutting into bodies and learning, so that we can have an operation on a live body.

In terms of forgetting what I’ve seen, I think I almost wanted to try and go so deep into the process that I unlearned the feeling of being disturbed. It’s like, “Okay, now I really understand why the body part is in the jar, how that helps me, how that helps everyone, but also to fathom why we’re disturbed that way.” I use the Bodies Exhibition in New York which are plastinated corpses. Corpse Art, for example, which is a site that’s really weird and kind of disturbing.

But the other thing is, I would say, just generally as a writer, for me, as soon as I’ve written it down. It’s out of my head.

Alexandra: Okay.

Joanna: I’ve interviewed quite a few horror writers. I don’t think “Desecration” is horror. It is crime thriller. There are some aspects of it, as you say, are a bit disturbing, but many crime novels have disturbing aspects, and there’s no torture porn as such.

But when I talk to horror writers who do write a lot more graphic stuff, they’re the nicest people, they really are, and the most psychologically healthy. I actually think that when we exorcise our thoughts onto the page, they disappear. And now I actively choose to visit specimen museums, that I really love all that. Anatomy stuff and anatomical history is just so fascinating. So that’s kind of how I do it. I sleep very well at night, and I am fascinated by the macabre, I guess.

Alexandra: One final question I just wanted to talk about, because these books are police procedurals, and you do mention in the author note at the end of “Desecration,” that book is a little bit light on the whole procedural side, because Jamie actually is removed from the case partway through. But what was it like for you as an author doing research about how the police departments work? I’ve talked to other authors, an author recently, Darryl Donahue, who was a police officer, and so he’s kind of got it made when it comes to writing about that kind of work.

<h3?what research=”” did=”” you=”” do=”” to=”” find=”” out=”” how=”” an=”” investigation=”” takes=”” place?<=”” h3=””>Joanna: Well. So I wouldn’t say that they’re police procedurals. Basically, there is really only one scene that’s kind of a crime scene, and that’s the beginning. I did research that. You can just do your on Google, like how does the police work, and how do they say… warrant card and all this, the type of language.

I also got a policewoman to beta read the books. She told me things link you don’t have enough people in your police team. There would be a lot more people. And I was like, “You know what? I don’t want…” That’s why true police procedurals have a lot more people who are police in them, whereas I wanted a lone detective who’s tackling the world on her own, therefore I almost removed her quite quickly so that she’s not even within the investigation aspect, although she them goes off and investigates on her own.

I didn’t want to necessarily create this whole sort of police force setup, because then it’s often about interrelationships between various police officers, and I wanted her to be a lone figure dealing with a lot of the stuff she had to deal with in the book. So that’s probably why by the end of book two, she is leaving the police. And that would be a spoiler, I see why, but then she is a private detective in the third book.

I started off thinking that I was going to write this standard crime police procedural. As an author, you have to be true to what your muse wants, and my muse can’t get away from the supernatural. So essentially, that aspect of Blake’s psychic ability and in book two, “Delirium,” we go much more into his mind and is he mentally ill or is there…? He starts to see demonic things in these other realms and… I really explore his aspect as well.

That’s why I moved away from the idea of a police procedural. Also because it’s not what fundamentally interests me about it. The books are crime thrillers, because essentially, at the end of the day, a crime book is about justice. It’s about some crime happening, and justice being served to the people involved. And that to me is done over the periods of the books. Justice is done, therefore it is a crime book. There was a policewoman, but it’s not really a police procedural.

Alexandra: Right, yeah. And really, that suits Jamie’s character so well, because she seems like such a kind of a lone wolf, very independent, and thoughtful about what she’s doing.

I just think it makes perfect sense that she would eventually leave the police force, really.

Joanna: Yeah, and again, it’s funny, just saying where do the characters come from, both Jamie and Morgan and this new character I’m thinking about, this male character, this lone wolf figure, I think, is just characteristic of my work. My book “Risen Gods,” which was a dark fantasy, kind of a bit different, does have two people, but each of them have their own journey until they meet.

I think that’s just to do with me. I’m not a team player. I haven’t worked in the police. I’ve worked in jobs where I’ve been part of a team, but I think I’m much happier with these lone wolf characters. I really like Jack Reacher. I like that kind of figure. So yeah, maybe that’s why I keep writing them.

Alexandra: I bet it is. Well, this has been fantastic, Joanna. Thank you so much for being with me here today. Why don’t you tell our listeners where they can find your books.

Joanna: Sure. So most of my books are on E-book, print book, audio book, and on all the usual places, or you can go to JFPenn, F for Francis, dot-com, JFPenn.com, and you can get a free E-book, “Day of the Vikings,” if you go to JFPenn.com/free.

Alexandra: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being with me here today.

Joanna: Thanks for having me, Alexandra.

Alexandra: Okay. Bye-bye.

Joanna: Bye-bye.

From the East End of London to Poland. Talking Crime Thrillers With Anya Lipska

November 13, 2015 By J.F. Penn

Anya Lipska is the critically acclaimed author of the Kiszka & Kershaw crime thriller series, set in the underworld of London's Polish community. Her latest book is A Devil Under the Skin.

This interview was first posted on The Big Thrill in Nov 2015. You can watch the video discussion below or watch the video here or read the edited transcript below.

So who are Kiszka and Kershaw and what can we expect from the books?

My main character, Janusz Kiszka, was born in Poland, but came over to London in the '80s, when Poland was still under communism. Older readers may recall the Solidarity years when Poles were fighting for their freedom. He was caught up in all that and had some terrible experiences so he came to London, like many did, in the '80s.

To begin with Janusz did various jobs, worked in the building trade and did other casual work. Eventually he became a kind of private eye/tough guy/fixer, sorting things out for the Polish community in London.

In 2004 we got quite a big influx of Poles into the UK, when Poland joined the EU. Janusz has an ambivalent attitude to this new influx. On the one hand, he absolutely loves the fact that he can buy kielbasa, Polish sausage, and all his favourite treats in the Polski shops that are popping up on every street corner in the East End. On the other hand, he used to be an exotic rarity, and now he's just one of the crowd, another immigrant. He finds that a bit difficult to cope with.

Natalie Kershaw is my second character. I thought it was important to have a British character through which we could view the Polish, the slight strangeness to the UK audience of Poles, what they're about, and this different culture and history. She's a sharp-elbowed, very ambitious, young, female detective who's a born-and-bred East Ender, a Cockney. The whole series really is about their shifting relationship. When she first comes up against Janusz, he is a suspect in a murder case, and she thinks “typical dodgy Eastern European, he's probably a gangster”. But then she goes to his flat in Highbury, he bought it in a nice part of London when London was cheap, way back. And he's cooking jam and she just doesn't get it, because he's actually an educated guy, even though he's a big rough, tough, brick-outhouse-looking guy, he's also got this very sensitive side.

The books are fast-paced thrillers, with a lot of humour in which people learn a bit about the Polish community in London. Janusz and Kershaw come into contact with each other during various investigations, sometimes he's asking for her help, and sometimes she needs his help with an investigation that might have something to do with the Polish community or the wider Eastern European community in the East End of London. They have a growing relationship, essentially antagonists with an uneasy alliance. By book three, they are becoming friends.

Tell us about A Devil Under the Skin.

A Devil Under the Skin is book three in the series, and it finds Janusz Kiszka at a very important time in his life. He's a guy in his 40s, with an ex-wife and a kid back in Poland. It was a disastrous marriage, although he stays in touch with his kid and looks after him, of course, because he's an honourable man. But his main relationship in the UK has been with a married Polish woman called Kasia who is a devout Catholic but has finally agreed to leave her husband in opposition to the advice from her priest and despite her reservations. Janusz has lived on his own for 20 years so he's a little bit freaked out about this. His best mate Oscar, who's sort of his comedy sidekick, takes the mick out of him about what it's going to be like.

Janusz is a little bit uncertain, but broadly speaking, he's pretty excited to be starting again. Then a terrible disaster strikes. Kasia goes missing. Janusz becomes convinced that her ne'er-do-well Cockney husband has kidnapped her – because he too has disappeared.

As he begins to investigate, all is not quite what it seems. There's a lot more going on and they get entangled with East End gangsters and gangsters of another extraction that I won't give away. Soon enough there are bodies all over the place.

Janusz asks for help from his almost-mate, Natalie Kershaw, to try and help find his girlfriend because she has the resources as a cop. She really shouldn't be doing it, she's using the police computer when she shouldn't be, but she's trying to help him out.

You’re not Polish, so why write about the Polish community?

I live in East London, which is a great place but also very gritty and there's a lot going on here, a lot of crime. But there are lots of detective thrillers set in London and I wanted to do something different. Then I realized that the answer was staring me in the face. My husband is Polish, was born over there and came over here in the '80s, during the Solidarity years when Poland was communist.

So I had a great “in” to the history and culture and I thought that would be a great idea for a character, someone who's come here with an awful lot of baggage, whose past casts this giant shadow. Someone with a passionate connection to justice yet also anti-authoritarian, because you don't trust the cops in a communist state.

It was also a happy coincidence that Poles started coming to London in quite big numbers. Everyone knows a Pole now, whether it's just as a builder or their kids might go to school with Poles. It's become part of the fabric of cities in the UK. I also love to read books where I learn something about something I didn't know and I think many readers share that with me, so this seemed like a great opportunity. People might want to know about the Poles that they're working and shopping alongside. You know, what's it all about? What's their history, what's their culture?

What are some of the places in Poland that come up in the story that people might like to hear about?

Although the books are set in London, Janusz does, from time to time, have to go back to Poland to pursue various lines of investigation. So I had the chance to go on holiday there as well, which has been great. My husband comes too as my translator.

Warsaw is the capital city but Kraków's the historical city and a very beautiful place. Wawel Castle is very pretty but becoming quite touristy now with visitors from all over Europe. The great thing about Poland is that wherever you go, there's extraordinary history. So in Kraków, it's an older history perhaps, with the castle and beautiful Hapsburgian architecture. Reminders of the past are always close at hand.

Just outside Kraków there's a place called Nowa Huta It was a giant new town that the Soviets built to house 100,000 steel workers to serve the V. I. Lenin Steelworks. That's quite a spooky place. It's socialist realist architecture, a kind of vision of their heaven, but a lot of people's hell.

Perhaps my favourite place in Poland is Gdańsk, which is the Baltic seaport on a lovely river leading out to the sea. It has a great mixture of beautiful ancient history there and the Hanseatic architecture which you see all down the coast, right down to Amsterdam; beautiful curvy tops to the buildings, also medieval architecture and a fabulous cathedral. Then you come across the shipyard gates, which have been preserved, and that's where the Gdańsk shipyard strikers, led by Lech Wałęsa, began the uprising against communism from the late '70s up until 1989 when they won democracy. There's an absolutely terrific museum there as well, which covers the communist past and the impact of communism on Poland very well. So I love how the place combines the old and the new.

I think many people associate words like “communism” and “iron curtain” and “Eastern Europe” with the color grey. But you're describing something a lot more colorful.

When I went to Gdańsk the first time with my husband, I asked him, “Well, look, you know, you are Janusz, you're that age. What's it like coming back here?” And he said exactly that. He said, “What I remember is a complete lack of colour. The only colour you saw in the streets was occasionally outside of an official building. The red flag of communism or the Polish flag at the time.” And he says now that it's absolutely filled with colour because it's like every other western European city. Of course that comes with a downside, and when Janusz goes back to Poland, he bemoans the fact that his generation, and generations before his fought for freedom, and now young people are interested in McDonald's and Ikea and that kind of materialism. But that's freedom.

There's a lot of negative press about immigration these days. How do you cover this hot button topic in your books?

I hesitate about generalizing. I mean, obviously I can't be a mouthpiece for Polish people. I'm not even Polish! But I think that there is an increasingly hostile attitude to immigrants, migrants in general in this country, and that's a shame to see. I have heard some Polish friends say that they feel less welcome here than they did originally. I've also heard some of them say that, on the other hand, they can understand why some people are unhappy to compete with lower-priced Polish tradesmen.

But when it comes to prejudice and xenophobia, the most important thing is to understand other people. It sounds trite, but it is absolutely true. Lots of people who may dismiss Eastern Europeans as they're like this or like that, I hope that in some small way, when they read the books, they get a bit more of a grip of what Poland's like. It's not just ‘another Eastern European country that's emerged from behind the Iron Curtain’. This is a country that used to be at the heart of Europe, alongside France and Germany. And I hope that by understanding all that and with just a little knowledge of the culture, of what they eat, what they like to do at Christmas, that things become a bit less scary.

What is your favorite Polish food?

Probably bigos, which is the national dish of Poland. It might sound a bit horrible to non-Poles because it does feature quite a lot of sauerkraut, and I'm not generally a fan of sauerkraut. But it's all cooked down in an amazing stew with lots of game and pork ribs and flavourings and it's absolutely delicious.

Obviously Poland is one theme, but what are the other themes that come up in your writing?

I like the idea of outsiders and writing from the outsider's point of view. All writers have to do this, put ourselves in someone else's shoes, and it's more rich, more liberating to do that. Even Natalie, who's a Londoner, is a bit of an outsider in a man's world. It's only quite recently that women have been rising up the ranks as police detectives. So she, particularly early in her career, has had some struggles with that.

I guess the other thing, and this is perhaps why I was drawn to having a Polish hero, is that I like exploring ideas of honour. What it is to be an honourable person. Janusz is a mixture. He's an educated man, he's quite a sensitive soul in many ways, he likes to cook, but on the other hand, he's quite happy to dish out some judicious violence to the bad guys. So he has a code of honour, a very strong one, a distinctive one, and I often have him come up against moral dilemmas where he has a choice between doing the right thing and doing the comfortable thing. That's particularly true in the third book where he has a really, really tough dilemma at the end.

You have an interesting day job as a TV producer. How does your work in TV influence your writing, and vice versa?

I was a journalist first and then I became a TV director and producer and now I'm still a TV producer part-time. The two things that have spilled over into the writing are first and foremost, the journalism and the research. I'm very inspired by real world events and by the research that I do. I am genuinely inspired by all those books about Poland and I find that it's a rich source of ideas and twists and turns in the story. So that's one way.

And the other thing is that lots of people have said, very kindly, that they think the books are very visual and cinematic. And I think that is a result of me having been a director. Or maybe I was a director because I've always had a very strong visual sense. I always start my books, my scenes, my chapters, everything, by seeing it. Then I do the hard work of getting it down. But I'm always really keen to choose places that I can strongly visualize, so whether it's Janusz beating up some guy on a snowy night time airport on the edge of eastern Poland, or being chased through the Greenwich foot tunnel under the Thames, I love to find evocative, visual settings. Happily, the BBC has optioned the series as a possible drama, so who knows, fingers crossed.

What other thriller authors and books do you love to read? What are you reading now?

There are so many that it's really hard to boil them down. The last thing I read which was absolutely fantastic and slightly left field, was a book called “The Bees,” by Laline Paull. It's set in a hive of bees and the heroine is a worker bee. It sounds just extraordinary, but somehow she pulls it off. It's basically a thriller, but with all the rules and the science of how bees operate, but with, obviously, a newly imagined inner life. It's absolutely brilliant, a really gripping thriller and one of those books where I learned something about bees and I now know the right plants to put in my garden to encourage the bee population.

In the UK, the names that come to mind would be Ian Rankin, who is my absolute hero, and Val McDermid. I also read quite a lot of European crime fiction. I like French crime fiction, I like Fred Vargas, who is actually female, and Pierre Lemaitre, who won the international book of the year a couple of years ago with a fantastic book called “Alex.” And I can't not mention, of course, the Polish writer Zygmunt Miłoszewski. Under communism, they didn't have crime fiction in Poland. They had enough going on, but now it's a democratic society, so they're getting a bit more like the rest of Western Europe. Crime fiction is a really burgeoning genre, and Zygmunt Miłoszewski is probably one of the top guys.

We have a lot of crime fiction in the UK but we also have one of the safest countries with very little violence. Do you think that's why crime fiction is now emerging in Poland? As soon as your country becomes more settled, you start writing violent things?

I definitely think that crime fiction is a product of a very settled society. People are so keen to read crime fiction because it's to do with the bogey man, essentially. Going right back to when we sat around fires in the mouths of caves and told each other stories about the sabre-toothed tiger and the storms and the spirits and the devils that were out there. We want to dramatize the threats, and then overcome them in some way or find some resolution. That's what happens in crime fiction. We still have these fears but our fears are now just different. There are very few things to fear in a modern, developed society, but there's something in us there that fears the lights going off at night. When you're home, it's not a sabre-toothed tiger anymore but it might be a serial killer knocking at your door. There's something about us that still has that atavistic fear of the bogey man, of the outside, and I think that crime fiction, in all its forms, is a way of coming to terms with that.

Where can people find you and your books online?

My website is http://www.anyalipska.com, there's all the links and information about me there. The books in the UK are available through Amazon and all the other e-outlets, and in the shops at Waterstone's, and various independents. In America, at the moment, it's only Amazon.com.

Templars And Supernatural Thrillers With Joseph Nassise

September 20, 2015 By J.F. Penn

I love supernatural thrillers and if you add some kick-ass Templars into the mix, I'm a happy reader! Today I talk to Joseph Nassise about his Templar Chronicles series.

Where did your fascination with the Templars come from? Have you visited Jerusalem or some of the European Templar churches?

Originally, I became fascinated with the Templars when I began investigating the history behind the superstitions surrounding Friday the 13^th. Why was that day considered bad luck? I wondered. Why not some other day?

As it turns out, it was on Friday, October 13, 1307 that King Philip IV of France sent troops against the Templar strongholds, arresting all they could find, and eventually trying them for crimes against the crown and the church. That information prompted further exploration into the Templar Order and, liking what I found, I decided to use them as a key plot element in my series.

Your latest book in the series, Fall of Night, features Gabrielle, who has only been a peripheral part of the Templar series so far. Tell us a bit more about the book as my readers love a kick-ass female lead!

Fall of Night is the sixth book in the ongoing Templar Chronicles series, which features modern Templar knights acting as a secret combat squad for the Vatican, protecting mankind from supernatural threats and enemies. The earlier books center around the character of Cade Williams, a former Boston SWAT officer who gets attacked by a fallen angel known as the Adversary. That same creature “kills” Cade’s wife, Gabrielle, or so he thinks.

We find out pretty early on in the series that Gabrielle isn’t actually dead, but held prisoner by the Adversary in a kind of limbo-like plane of existence known as the Beyond. Cade spends much of the first several books trying to rescue her from the Adversary’s control.

In Fall of Night, Gabrielle at last takes center stage. Due to certain events that play out in books 4 and 5, Infernal Games and Judgment Day, Gabrielle returns to the world of the living carrying information that is vital to the safety of not just the Templars but all mankind. She needs to get that information to her husband, Cade, but he’s gone missing right at the point he’s needed most. Fall focuses on Gabrielle’s attempts to find him while safeguarding the information she is carrying.

All your books all have elements of the supernatural. What drives your obsession with what's beyond the physically real? How do your own beliefs/experiences weave into the books?

This is a tough one to answer, because I’m honestly not sure. I’ve tried to write other things, but keep coming back to supernatural thrillers/urban fantasy as my primary genre. The idea that there is something else out there, something more, is an intriguing one and I like adding that element to the stories that I tell.

Almost all of my fiction has it, from the Templar Chronicles to the Great Undead War to the Jeremiah Hunt series. Maybe one day I’ll break into some other genre, but for now, I’m happy where it am!

What are the themes that keep coming up in your work? What links the series' together?

Almost everything I write deals with the theme of redemption in some fashion and this comes out quite strongly in the Templar Chronicles. Cade is first determined to avenge his wife’s death and then, when he realizes she isn’t actually dead, he vows to give her back the life that was stolen from her.

Cade’s journey takes him deep into the heart of darkness – not just the darkness created by the supernatural creatures around him, but the darkness in his own heart as well. Darkness spawned by his belief that he has failed both his wife and himself in not protecting them from the Adversary in the first place. The entire series traces his fight to restore himself to the light, so to speak.

Where are you in the world and what does your writing space look like? Give us a hint of behind the scenes

I live in the heat of the desert in Phoenix, Arizona and my writing space is a dedicated office on the second floor of my home. I do most of my work in that room, though I will sometimes head to the local Starbucks when I need a change of scenery. I have several dogs and cats and they will often keep my company during the day while I am working.

I write full time, so my routine is pretty fixed. After taking the kids to school I’ll be in my office writing by 7:30 each day and will do so until about noon. I’ll take an hour or so for lunch and then be back at the keyboard until about three. Later afternoons and early evenings are spent doing all the other stuff that a writing career requires – answering emails, marketing and promotion, prepping for the next release, etc.

What are a few of the books you love and that you'd recommend readers check out?

I am a huge fan of John Connolly’s Charlie Parker novels, detective fiction with a touch of the supernatural. Robert Crais’ Elvis Cole and Joe Pike books are right up there as well. In terms of straight up genre fiction, I’m a fan of Kat Richardson, Richard Kadrey, Steven Savile, Caitlin Kittredge, Carrie Vaughn, Jonathan Maberry, Kelley Armstrong, Seanan McGuire, Chris Golden – hell, the list could go on and on!

Where can people find you and your books online?

People can find information about me and my work at my website – www.josephnassise.com – or on my Facebook page – www.facebook.com/joseph.nassise

From French Citadels To The Arizona Desert With Simon Toyne

September 6, 2015 By J.F. Penn

I loved Simon Toyne's Sanctus trilogy, so I was really keen to read the first in his new series, Solomon Creed in the UK, released as The Searcher in the US.

This interview was first released on The Big Thrill, the magazine for the ITW, International Thriller Writers.

You can watch the video discussion below or here on YouTube or read the transcript below.

Simon Toyne is the author of the Sunday Times bestselling Sanctus trilogy. The books have been translated into 28 languages and published in 50 countries. Simon's latest book is The Searcher, the first in the new Solomon Creed series. All the details on Simon’s website, SimonToyne.net.

So first of all, just give us an overview of Solomon Creed/The Searcher so that people have a sense of what it's about.

Solomon Creed is a man on an epic journey of redemption. He arrives at the beginning of this first book, clueless as to how he's got there, walking down the middle of an Arizona Road towards a town called Redemption. Behind him is a burning plane and he's got emergency vehicles screaming towards him.

He knows nothing about himself at all. All he has is this sensation that he is there to save a particular man, whose name he knows. But as the police cars pull up and they start to check him over, he mentions this guy and says, “I think I'm here to save him.” And the Chief of Police says, “We buried him this morning.” So that's how the book kicks off and the central mystery is how do you save a man who is already dead?

I’ve read the Sanctus trilogy which I absolutely loved. That series featured the town of Ruin and now you have Redemption. How important is sense of place to your writing and tell us a bit more about Redemption?

Sense of place is hugely important for me because environment forges character. So if you don't have a sense of the environment, then you are missing a lot of tricks, really, as regards character and setting. With Ruin, it was kind of accidental. I really tried to find a place that would fit the story and I just couldn't find one. There was nothing that quite worked and I felt really bad about taking a real place and taking too many liberties with it to try and make it fit my story.

So in the end, I just decided to create this new place which was really hard. Because you have to create a whole history and mythology. You have to make sure it looks right, that the food is right, everything. So you're grabbing bits from lots of real places to create this fantasy and make it feel real. Which is what you do with all of your fiction, really. Your characters are figments of your imagination but you do whatever you can to make them feel real.

So this time around, the whole notion of Solomon Creed is that you're not quite sure who he is, or indeed what he is. Whether he's delusional, whether he's reincarnated, whether he's an angel, whether he's a devil, whether he's just some drifting genius loser because he has enormous knowledge about the world but none about himself. I genuinely wanted to set it somewhere real. I thought, particularly if I've got this cipher of a character, it would be really good to put his feet on the ground somewhere real. And I loved Arizona and I liked that elemental walking out in the desert in the spirit of great Westerns. And so I went to Arizona.

I've been to Arizona before but never specifically looking for this kind of town. So I went there on a trip and spent a good couple of weeks going around taking pictures, really trying hard to find this very specific town. I thought I would because I did lots of pre-research and I had a hit list of places to go, ghost towns, ex-mining towns, all of which I knew needed to be part of the story. And again, none of them were quite right. They were all near misses.

And I started feeling these pangs of, “if I take such liberties with a real place, I'm going to get into trouble. I'm going to feel bad.” And also crucially, I would know it wasn’t real. So in a way, cutting myself loose and allowing myself to have total free rein in inventing a place snatched from lots of these bits, felt like the right thing to do. And it was in the end.

Ruin was a huge city with thousands and thousands of years worth of history. And Redemption has just got about 150 years worth. It came about at the time when Arizona stopped being a territory and started being a state and at the time when the copper came in. That is tied in with the story as well. It was quite nice to deal with history in recent memory, which was a change.

But place is hugely important for me. With the books you write, you need to place these things in very vivid environments. Otherwise, the fantasies we're spinning just spin away a bit too much. You have to anchor it in something solid. So, it's definitely crucial. And I spend as much time, if not more, on place, as I do on the characters.

You mentioned that environment forges character. So I wondered about your own environment and how that forges your character. As we’re talking, you’re in an unusual place, aren't you? Tell us about that.

I’m in France, but that’s not that unusual. But perhaps how I got here is more interesting. I worked in television and I always wanted to write a book. But TV was fairly full on and I was an exec so I was quite high-level with lots of stuff to do. And I just didn't have any free time. As I was approaching 40, I had a minor midlife crisis. I thought, “What am I doing? What happened to that novel that I thought I was going to do?”

So I quit. But I couldn’t just go in the spare room and try and bash out a book. I decided with my family that we would just go on an adventure. Because then if the book failed, at least we would've had an adventure, and I could sweep the book failure under the carpet of the adventure that we'd had.

Because we spoke a bit of French and because France was handy and we could drive to it, we decided to hire somewhere in France. So we just picked a place, rented it, hired out our place in Brighton, and we moved here for six months. And I wrote a big chunk of what became Sanctus here. Ever since we ended up coming back here on holiday every summer. Even though we could've gone anywhere, we always ended up coming back here. And I always ended up being very inspired here and writing. I live in a little place called Cordes sur Ciel, which means Cordes on the sky.

It's so cool because it's a hill town in the middle of a valley. And in the morning the valley fills with mist and the top of the hill is just visible. So it looks like it's floating on clouds. And whenever we came on holiday, I always have loads of ideas and I'd write loads. It was a very inspirational place. And so ultimately, what happened was we bought the place and I'm in it now.

My wife's an interior designer so we always buy total wrecks and when we bought this, there were about 50 pigeons living in the roof because the roof was like a colander and the electrics were lethal. Because I'm a full-time writer, we come here during all the kid's holidays. I just carry on working, so we're here for six weeks in the summer which sounds like the most brilliant holiday ever except they have six weeks of a lovely time and I just lock myself away in my room. So it's just hotter, as far as I'm concerned, and the food's nicer when I stop work.

It's gloomy here at the moment, not because the middle of the night, but because I'm sitting by an open window to get a bit of breeze and the shutters are shut because is 98 degrees, or something, out there at the moment. It's just boiling hot. The kids are off down the road at a pool cooling off and being quiet and letting me work.

The opening scene of The Searcher is a plane crash and there are lots of flames in the middle of the Arizona desert. So maybe that is shaped by your writing environment?

Actually, when I was thinking about the different books right from the beginning, I was considering how I could differentiate each book. At the moment it's going to be a five book series, but it's kind of open ended. I know who Solomon is, but when that is revealed is up for grabs, which is part of the fun of it because I don't know where it's going. I have waypoints that I know I want to reach with the stories. I thought one way to differentiate the first four books at least would be for the first one to be fire as an element, then water, earth and air. Just those little things to give a tonal difference to each one of them in a color palette and all of those things.

The character of Solomon Creed is an old-fashioned Ronin, almost a samurai. He's going to these places to fix something that's out of kilter and then he can move on. And so he can go anywhere. So in the second book, he's in France. Around here, actually. You write what you know and, as I said, it's very inspirational for me here. It's so beautiful and dramatic and it's got lots of history, like the Albigensian Crusades flowed through here, made famous by Kate Mosse with Labyrinth, and it's the Vichy area for the second World War and capitulation. So there’s tons of history.

The name, Solomon Creed, is fascinating in itself. How did you come up with that name?

It just came to me. I struggle with names because names are really important and I often change the name of characters loads of times. And sometimes I might be having trouble writing a character and if I just really think about their name and change their name, it becomes easier because I had the name wrong. So it's really important.

When I thought of the main idea for The Searcher, the name, Solomon Creed, just came with it. And it was one of those things that just seemed so familiar that I was convinced I must've read it somewhere. So I looked it up and Googled it and checked stuff out but it didn’t exist. It was one of those things that just came ready formed. I like names and symbolism. And it's got good connotations because Solomon's an old name and the name of a wise king and creed means belief system. I think I've moved away slightly with this book from the more overtly religious underpinnings of the Sanctus trilogy. I mean, they're there, but they're not so overt. Whereas the trilogy was about relics that were the mysteries, in this book, Solomon is the mystery which was a whole different challenge. Actually, as a writer. I’ve discovered it’s difficult to write an enigmatic character on a page.

How much of you is in the character of Solomon Creed?

Especially with main characters, you spend such a long time with them and inevitably, bits of yourself bleed into them. But I think bits of yourself bleed into all of your characters, good and bad, in order to make them real.

I would say he's more removed from me than most of my other main characters, just because he's so otherworldly. I'm very chatty and he doesn't say much. He's a strong silent type. He keeps his own counsel and he's very watchful. And again, that's really hard to write. It was a real challenge. It was probably the hardest book I've ever written. It's partly just because it felt like starting again. But also just because normally you know the center of your main character, you know what their core is. Even if they've moved away from it and they're trying to get back to it, you know who, fundamentally, they are or if there's a bit missing, what that bit is. So that that kind of dictates the narrative.

And with Solomon, he has no idea who he is. He knows literally nothing about himself whatsoever. He just arrives walking down the road, no shoes on his feet, wearing a nice jacket, walking away from a plane crash that he has no knowledge of being on, towards the town that all he knows about is that there's this guy in there he needs to save. That's all he knows. And yet he looks around and everything he looks at, like a cactus, he knows the Latin name of it, the medicinal properties, what the Hohokam Indians called it. He knows everything about everything. He has this deep medical, legal and historical knowledge. He knows tons of stuff but he has no idea how he knows it. And yet, when he thinks about himself, it's just a black hole. So that's what he's trying to fill in. He's very far removed from me, I think.

Part of the challenge was making someone so other and so uncentered feel real. The solution was by looking at him through all the other characters’ eyes. They make their own minds up based on their own situation. And so you get lots of different perspectives of him. And some people think he's good, some people think he's a troublemaker, some people think he's an angel. Some people think he's a double agent. It's for you, the reader, to try and second-guess it.

You mentioned that The Searcher isn't as overtly religious as the Sanctus Trilogy, but there is still a religious history in the book and the church is very important. What other aspects will your current fans particularly enjoy?

There are more modern crime elements going on. It's also written mainly in the third person with short chapters and a constantly changing point of view. It's very cinematic. I did a degree in English but I studied screenplays as much as books. And that cinematic technique of having short chapters and changing points of view and third person so that the reader knows as much knowledge as possible is the best engine for telling a thriller and propelling the story forward.

There are lots of twists. There are lots of characters who you're not quite sure whether they're good or bad, they’re morally ambiguous so that you know they're bad but somehow you like them because they are doing noble things. They're doing bad things for good reasons. I love all that moral fog because it's real. There are no really good people and there are no really bad people in the main. There is good in everyone, there is bad in everyone. That's what makes it real. It's also got a big twist reveal ending.

There is a difference between the UK and the US cover and title. Just talk a bit about that so people don't get confused when they look for the book.

In America and Canada it's called The Searcher and has a very different cover – a man running down a road in Arizona. In the UK and Commonwealth countries, it's called Solomon Creed. The cover is a black and white image of a man walking towards you. But it's just one book. It's not like I've been super productive and produced two books that are coming out within a month of each other! They’re both very great covers and the story's the same. So hopefully it will find readers everywhere.

It’s a very visual book. Is there a chance of it being on TV?

The Sanctus trilogy remains un-optioned and is unlikely to turn into anything visual. But The Searcher has been attracting lots of attention, various American studios, Hollywood studios, and it's been one of those things where I've been dying to talk about it, but I haven't been able to until now. I can reveal that The Searcher/Solomon Creed has been optioned by Leonardo DiCaprio's company, Appian Way for a TV series in conjunction with E1 which is a big producer of lots of fine dramas. So that's very exciting. I've literally just signed the contract, but these things often take ages or go nowhere. It's a very serpentine path to getting anything made. But I do think The Searcher, would be a really good TV series. I know I would say that but it's just very episodic and it's split into 10 parts as well. So it's almost ready made as a TV series.

What other thriller authors do you like reading?

I love Steve Berry. He's really good because I don't know that much about American history. You can read Steve Berry books and learn tons about American history because it's so well researched. At the same time, he's got this brilliant central character, Cotton Malone, and they're really good thrillers that move along and twist and turn.

Greg Isles is a brilliant writer. His Natchez Burning is the first of a trilogy which is brilliant. It dots around in recent history but it's still in the south and that whole ‘sins of fathers surfacing in the present’ kind of stuff. He's a very elegant writer, a very powerful writer.

I read a lot of Cormac McCarthy. Not strictly a thriller writer but No Country For Old Men has shades of thriller and crime. A lot of the deaths happen off the page. You gear up to it and then you cut to the aftermath with the Marshall, which is brilliant. It’s a very original way of doing it, because he's more interested in the aftermath, the consequences of violence rather than the violence itself.

You can find The Searcher and all Simon’s other books at SimonToyne.net and at all bookstores.

Interviews with Thriller Authors

Transcript of interview with J.F. Penn

Can you tell us a little bit about your background for our listeners, please?

What's your latest book that you have out now?

You had mentioned that you studied theology, so that must really come in handy then when you're writing your thrillers.

Alan: What's the background of your main characters? Are they soldiers or cops or theologians?

You put a lot of research into this. You took that class and then you got kicked all over the place.

Alan: What was that experience like?

When you decided to start writing or try to write in fiction, did you choose thrillers and action? Was that a genre that you enjoyed as a reader before you tried to write a book in it?

Alan: And were you always writing when you were younger? Or did it just start when you decided to write these books?

If you're interested in it somebody else is gonna be interested in it too. Never thought about it that way.

What is your writing process? Do you like outline everything before you start writing or do you go by the seat of your pants?

When you're in the zone and you're writing a book, what's your writing day like?

I've had a hard time with music because I get distracted, but that's interesting to try out nature sounds.

Alan: And what do you use? Are you a Scrivener user or do you just use Word?

I was curious about that when I see an author's changing covers.

Can you tell us a little bit about that and that award?

What are you working on now? What's your current work-in-progress?

Do you have a set goal that you try to publish every year?

Before I let you go, is there anything that you would like to tell our listeners?

How much of the story is based on historical truth? Why did this particular aspect of Nazi history interest you?

All the Charlie Parker books have a supernatural edge, which is what keeps me as a reader coming back. Where do your ideas about the supernatural come from? How do they fit with your own beliefs?

Your “good guys,” Charlie, Louis and Angel, might be perceived as “bad” in many ways. But the bad guys are always worse. How do the notions of good and evil fit into your characters? Can even the worst of them be redeemed?

The Charlie Parker books are set in the U.S., but you’re Irish and live in Dublin. How does Ireland emerge in your writing, even if it’s camouflaged?

You’ve said that writers are like magpies, picking out interesting things from the world and storing them up for stories. What’s fascinating you at the moment?

You were in the police for 12 years. How does that experience shape your crime writing?

You’re British and much of I Let You Go is set in Wales. How did the landscape shape the story ideas?

You’ve had tragedy in your life. What aspects of you are in your characters? How has writing helped you?

Although you grew up in the US, you’re originally from Lebanon, which was once described as the Paris of the East, and now is more known for civil war. How does the Middle East and your experiences there flow into your writing?

Your books could be described as conspiracy thrillers, with Templar Knights, secret agencies and religious orders. What fascinates you about these topics and how do you manage the line between people’s faith and possible conspiracy?

What are your obsessions and the themes that keep coming up in your writing?

As a screenwriter, you wrote The Last Templar and also worked on other TV shows like Spooks (which I love.) How do novel writing and screenwriting compare and which do you enjoy the most? How do they both fit into your creative life?

Tell us a bit about your latest book, The End Game and how it fits into your other books.

How much of you is in your characters?

Do you travel for research? What are some of the settings that bring your books alive?

Transcript of Interview with J.F. Penn

Tell us a little bit about Jamie Brooke. You know, it was kind of heartbreaking to read Jamie’s story, and I was curious about what drew you to her.

What are the differences or similarities between Morgan and Jamie?

Tell us a bit about him and what sparked that character.

I can see that his talent would be such a good fit for you, because you’re such a history buff, and you love research so much.

I know how much fun research is for you, and now that you don’t live there, do you go back? Or do you do most of it your research online now, do you find?

What’s it like for you? Are you ever troubled by what you learn?

I just think it makes perfect sense that she would eventually leave the police force, really.

So who are Kiszka and Kershaw and what can we expect from the books?

Tell us about A Devil Under the Skin.

You’re not Polish, so why write about the Polish community?

What are some of the places in Poland that come up in the story that people might like to hear about?

I think many people associate words like “communism” and “iron curtain” and “Eastern Europe” with the color grey. But you're describing something a lot more colorful.

There's a lot of negative press about immigration these days. How do you cover this hot button topic in your books?

What is your favorite Polish food?

Obviously Poland is one theme, but what are the other themes that come up in your writing?

You have an interesting day job as a TV producer. How does your work in TV influence your writing, and vice versa?

What other thriller authors and books do you love to read? What are you reading now?

We have a lot of crime fiction in the UK but we also have one of the safest countries with very little violence. Do you think that's why crime fiction is now emerging in Poland? As soon as your country becomes more settled, you start writing violent things?

Where can people find you and your books online?

Your latest book in the series, Fall of Night, features Gabrielle, who has only been a peripheral part of the Templar series so far. Tell us a bit more about the book as my readers love a kick-ass female lead!

All your books all have elements of the supernatural. What drives your obsession with what's beyond the physically real? How do your own beliefs/experiences weave into the books?

What are the themes that keep coming up in your work? What links the series' together?

Where are you in the world and what does your writing space look like? Give us a hint of behind the scenes

What are a few of the books you love and that you'd recommend readers check out?

Where can people find you and your books online?

So first of all, just give us an overview of Solomon Creed/The Searcher so that people have a sense of what it's about.

I’ve read the Sanctus trilogy which I absolutely loved. That series featured the town of Ruin and now you have Redemption. How important is sense of place to your writing and tell us a bit more about Redemption?

You mentioned that environment forges character. So I wondered about your own environment and how that forges your character. As we’re talking, you’re in an unusual place, aren't you? Tell us about that.

The opening scene of The Searcher is a plane crash and there are lots of flames in the middle of the Arizona desert. So maybe that is shaped by your writing environment?

The name, Solomon Creed, is fascinating in itself. How did you come up with that name?

How much of you is in the character of Solomon Creed?

You mentioned that The Searcher isn't as overtly religious as the Sanctus Trilogy, but there is still a religious history in the book and the church is very important. What other aspects will your current fans particularly enjoy?

There is a difference between the UK and the US cover and title. Just talk a bit about that so people don't get confused when they look for the book.

It’s a very visual book. Is there a chance of it being on TV?

What other thriller authors do you like reading?

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**Tell us a bit about your latest book, The End Game and how it fits into your other books.**