interview

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.

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, Freemasons And The Ark Of The Covenant With Dominic Selwood

March 18, 2015 By J.F. Penn

It's always wonderful to meet authors who, like me, are fascinated with all things biblical/historical/conspiracy/thriller-ish!

So it's especially cool to interview Dominic Selwood, historian, rock star (see below!) and author of The Sword of Moses, which is a fantastic fast-paced Biblical thriller backed by impeccable research.

Tell us a bit more about you and your writing background

I grew up in Salisbury, a place which fired my imagination a lot. The austere windswept trilithons of Stonehenge intrigued me. The great seductive Gothic cathedral seemed like a time machine to another world of amazing creativity. And the vast green plain, with its ancient images carved into the hillsides, was endlessly romantic.

I also spent some years in Cyprus, which was a sleepy place back then. I was free to roam about the ancient temples and ruins with no tourists or fences. It was an amazing place for daydreaming. I went to boarding school in England, then university in Oxford, Paris, Poitiers, Wales, and London. I did my doctorate on the Knights Templar, the real medieval ones. In 1999 I published a textbook on the Templars called ‘Knights of the Cloister’. [Read more…] about Templars, Freemasons And The Ark Of The Covenant With Dominic Selwood

Action Thriller Author Scott Mariani On The Ben Hope Series

December 14, 2014 By J.F. Penn

Scott Mariani is the author of the worldwide-acclaimed action-adventure thriller series featuring ex-SAS hero Ben Hope. Scott’s novels have topped the bestseller charts in his native Britain and are translated into over twenty languages worldwide.

His next book released in the US is The Nemesis Program, available Feb 15, 2015.

I interviewed Scott for The Big Thrill magazine – free for thriller readers. The full edited transcript will be available there in Jan 2015. Below is an excerpt as well as the audio interview.

What are the themes that you return to in your books?

There is always a historical element. I’m very interested in history, but also the Ben Hope books belong to a certain genre which grew up out of Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code.

In that genre, there’s always some kind of historical theme running through each book. Ben’s not a historian; he’s not even interested in history, but it’s interesting from my point of view, having to find something that’s going to happen, some intrigue that involves history but has a relevance today, that somehow manages to involve Ben. There’s always a different way in which Ben manages to get embroiled in these historical things.

With regard to the modern-day element, there’s very often a conspiracy involved, sometimes on a huge, epic scale, sometimes involving massive global forces, other times involving more private conspiracies, and more low-key things involving maybe just one individual or a few individuals. I’ll very often find a character with suicide not really being suicide, with people being bumped off because they know too much or they’ve discovered something or found out something and they become dangerous or a threat, and somebody’s out to get them. Of course then Ben Hope has to come in at a certain point and sort things out. But the conspiracy element is something I quite enjoy. And some of them one could believe in, I think.

I wouldn’t say that I was a huge conspiracy buff, but I definitely have dark opinions about a lot of things that go on in the world, to the point where I couldn’t really discuss them too openly, because I’d probably get assassinated or something. But yes, there are a lot of very terrible things happening in this world, and we are not told the truth about very many of them, which of course forms a wonderful resource for people like me who can conjecture from that.

There’s also a lot of action and shooting and driving and cool chase scenes in your books. How do you do the research, and do you do some of those thrilling things yourself?

The driving part is all imaginary, because I’m a very, very timorous, slow, unadventurous driver! I drive an old Landrover, which physically can’t do more than about 45 miles an hour, so all this sort of high-speed stuff is just my imagination. I have done a lot of shooting and things in the past. I was, back in the day, a pistol shooter, before they banned it in Britain.

I still shoot; I do a lot of target shooting but I don’t kill things: I don’t go out and murder God’s little creatures, honest! But I do a lot of target shooting, so I’ve murdered enough little paper targets in my time, and I still do a lot of that. I love it: it’s just something I’m very passionate about. It’s not terribly exciting or thrilling. I also do a lot of practical shotgun, which involves a lot of running around and shooting at make-believe bad guys, knocking over steel plates and things, which is great fun, and it’s probably the most action-orientated shooting discipline still available to people in the UK, and that is enormous fun.

Joanna: I want to do that now!

Scott: It’s great, honestly: you’d love it. It’s like paintball shooting and things. I like that we all go out in the woods and kill each other! With paintballs!

It’s great fun, as long as you’re safe. Safety is obviously the most important thing. But once you know what you’re doing and you’re safe with it, it’s enormous fun.

Joanna: And you’re an archer as well, I think?

Scott: Yes! The good thing about archery is that you don't deafen yourself; it’s lovely and quiet. I’ve got a little archery range in my back garden, and I can go out there any time I like and shoot all day long without bothering the neighbors, although we’re quite remote here: nobody would really hear, I think, even if you were to let off a cannon! But yes, archery is a wonderful sport, and again, it’s something that I’ve always done. Even when I was a kid, I used to make my own bows and arrows out of branches from trees and do all sorts of irresponsible things, shooting arrows where I shouldn’t have been shooting them. But that is also a great sport. You should take it up: you’d love it!

Joanna: I’ve done a bit of archery, actually. Do you find it like a meditation?

Scott: Well, there is a sort of martial arts background. You have the whole Zen thing with archery. You step up to the target, and you have to get yourself into this meditative kind of state. But this is also true of shooting, as well. When you get in the zone, when you’re target shooting and you’re hunkered down behind a rifle on a firing point, completely still, and you have to lower your heartbeat, and your breathing is very controlled, and it’s possible to get into a really almost Zen-like state. Ben Hope is very good at getting into that state. He’s much better at it than I am. But he’s got sniper training and all that. Anything I can do, he can do ten times better!

It’s very cathartic and restful, until you pull the trigger and it goes Bong! That’s not so restful. But with archery, it’s a lovely thing to get into. I definitely would urge anyone who hasn’t tried it to try it.

You can find Scott at ScottMariani.com and his books on all online stores.

On Writing Monsters, Action And Horror With Jeremy Robinson

November 25, 2014 By J.F. Penn

If you like fast-paced action/adventure you'll enjoy the Jack Sigler series. If you like monsters, check out Island 731, and if you like horror, check out Jeremy Bishop's books!

Today I interview bestselling author of over 30 books, Jeremy Robinson, who also writes as Jeremy Bishop. You can watch the video below or here on YouTube.

In the interview, we discuss:

How Jeremy started out at art school and went into comic book illustration, and then into comic book writing, then screen-writing. After being inspired by a James Rollins novel, he moved into writing novels.

Monsters are a recurring theme in Jeremy’s books, including his recent book Island 731. He talks about his TV and film influences and why monsters have been part of his inspiration. ‘Island 731’ is about a crew stranded on an island that had been used for human experimentation during WWII.

Jeremy writes horror under Jeremy Bishop, the first book was ‘Torment’ which is a very dark book based on a nightmare he had. The Raven is the next book in the Jane Harper series, coming soon, where Jane has to deal with parasitical zombies that can zombify anything mammal, whilst out on the high seas. Ridiculous fun!

We talk about ‘I am Cowboy’, which is not a Western! Cowboy is the main character who first appeared in SecondWorld (about Nazis returning to take over the world). Cowboy is a conspiracy theorist obsessed with cowboy movies. He’s from the Czech Republic and he has a line ‘I am cowboy, I am gunslinger’.

How much of Jeremy is in his characters? It depends on the characters – some of them are very similar. In the YA series, the Last Hunter, Solomon is based on 50% Jeremy and 50% on his son. But many of the characters are nothing like Jeremy – the books are not autobiographical!

Is Jeremy as exciting as the protagonists of his kick-ass, fast-paced books?

Jeremy talks about his writing space and you can see some of his Japanese movie monsters behind him in the video. He has a big office which is packed with pop culture objects, posters etc. It inspires him, and he does a lot of video as well as writing. He also paints and his kids play in the room.

Jeremy makes video trailers for all his books as well as ‘viral video’ campaigns, which are usually ridiculous. You can check out Jeremy’s YouTube channel here.

You can find everything at his sites: JeremyRobinsonOnline.com and JeremyBishopOnline.com

This interview was originally posted on Killer-Thrillers.

Explosions And Action Thrillers With Simon Kernick

November 5, 2014 By J.F. Penn

I love fast-paced action adventure books and Simon Kernick is a master of the genre, with non-stop books that keep moving until the last page!

I dare you to read Ultimatum and put the book down mid-way through!

I interviewed Simon about his books recently. You can watch the video below or here on YouTube, or read the transcript below.

Simon Kernick is one of Britain’s most popular thriller authors with his fast paced novels topping the Sunday Times bestseller list.

His latest book, Ultimatum, is just out in the US. It opens with an explosion in a central London cafe and a threat from a terror group that promises escalation of the violence. Can Detective Inspector Mike Bolt and Deputy Commissioner Tina Boyd stop the atrocity before it’s too late?

So, Simon, just tell us a bit about your life before writing bestselling thrillers.

I’ve always wanted to write, ever since I was a little kid, and so I was always writing stories of some description. But to pay the bills, I’ve done a number of different jobs, from bar work to road-building, laboring and Christmas tree uprooting, obviously very seasonal work.

And eventually I had a career for some years as an IT software salesman, which never gets a second question, so I’m going to move swiftly on! I did that for about a decade, and while I did that, I was trying to get published, and eventually, I was lucky enough to get a publishing deal. And the minute I got one—which is pretty much almost thirteen years ago today—I went full time. And I’ve been full-time writing ever since, and I don’t want to go back to work anymore!

Your books feature a lot of famous British landmarks, so I wondered if you could talk about a couple of places in Britain that are particularly special to you, and how they feature in your books.

Well, London is the main location for the vast majority of the books. They do move out into the UK a little bit more, but as a general rule of thumb, it’s London. My latest book, ULTIMATUM, features a very new and very famous London landmark now, the Shard. It’s an amazing looking tower.

I love London to walk around, to see how the old and the new can just live together, and the rich and the poor merge together; it’s such an amazingly cosmopolitan city. But when you get on the South Bank of the Thames, and you see the Shard stretching up like a piece of glass into the sky, it’s an absolutely incredible scene, and pretty much the moment I saw it, I wanted it to feature it somewhere in a book.

And then to move completely away from London, to the other end of the country, my book Stay Alive, which I think comes out in the States next year, and which just came out in the UK this year, is all about a kayaking trip that goes wrong in the wilderness of Scotland. I spent a few days up in a place called Glen Affric, a huge glen about twenty miles south-east of Inverness, and it’s right in the middle of nowhere.

You can’t believe that in a country as heavily populated and as small as the UK you can have such amazing wilderness, but it contains an a magnificent ancient pine forest, beautiful waters and mountains, and it was a fantastic backdrop for the book and obviously a fantastic place to go and do some research.

You write a lot of action scenes and thriller readers love explosions! Have you got like a hit list of things you want to blow up in your books?

Do you know, I’ve never thought about that. I do quite like a big explosion but I don’t think I’d like to explode any landmarks in London, because I quite like them, and I don’t really want to lay waste to the city—I think it’s much better on the page, to be honest.

I would like one time to actually blow something up myself, something that was ready for demolition, like one of those big tower blocks they have. I’d like to push down the detonation thing, whatever it’s called, and set one of those bombs off, but I have never done it.

I have been, though, to the Army Bomb Disposal School in the UK where they told me how to make a bomb, pretty much from household components, which was research for a book, and I’ve actually handled various plastic explosives that they let me mess around with up there, but I’ve not actually blown anything up as yet. And that’s probably no bad thing!

What are the other thrilling things you’ve done in terms of your research expeditions?

Well, two of my books were set, at least partly, in the Philippines: A Good Day to Die and, The Payback. I spent some time there moving around the islands and checking out and exploring Manila, which is probably one of the most ugly cities in the world, because it was the second-most bombed city in the Second World War, after Dresden. It was bombed by both the Japanese and the Americans trying to get it back and so it was completely flattened. It’s pretty much made up of low, two-story, three-story breeze-block buildings all over the place. It’s an incredibly ugly place, but very exciting and interesting.

That’s probably my favorite location for research, because it’s a little bit like the Wild West in the Philippines. It’s nothing like anywhere else in South-East Asia. They’re a bit more violent, there are a lot more guns about, and there are a lot more soldiers and police, and there’s always kind of something going on in the background, so it was an amazing location for the books.

There’s a lot of political upheaval going on in the world with ISIS in Iraq and other things happening. Do you get any ideas from that bigger political scene?

Yes, I do. I’ve written books, such as Siege, and Ultimatum, where they take on board things that are happening in the world currently, particularly on the terrorism front, on the Islamic fundamentalism front, and the rise of separatism. You always have to put your own slant on things, because I don’t want to write a book that’s very specifically current affairs. I just think it’s good to have a story which has some level of escapism from the horrible parts of the world that we keep hearing about, but at the same time, where it’s quite obvious from the plot that those events are impinging a little bit.

So I mix and match, really. It’s good to put the current affairs in, but my books are escapism: they’re there for excitement, action, twists and turns, and ultimately, I want someone to finish a book and think, “Ah, I really enjoyed that and I want to read another of his,” not, “Oh, my god, that’s so depressing, the world is collapsing all around us.”

Your books are set at breakneck speed, a non-stop pace. Is that how you live your life, or what do you do to relax?

Well, it’s a good question, actually. I do quite a lot of exercise. I do a fair amount of kayaking, although I’ve never ended up on the kind of trip where people are trying to kill me, as they do in Stay Alive. I do quite a lot of outdoor and fairly exciting activities, but at the same time, I lead quite a nice life, as well. When I’ve finished writing for the day, I relax. If I’m really knackered, I take a nice long walk down by the River Thames where I live, and then come back, cook some dinner, and just slob out in front of the TV, watching usually American box sets and comedies. And that, to me, is a nice way of relaxing.

But, funny enough, I am quite an impatient person, and I have a fairly short attention span a lot of the time. I can be talking about one thing and suddenly I move very quickly to another, and then quickly to another, and quickly to another. A lot of people have described me as fairly manic, so I think maybe that’s influencing the books as well. I couldn't write a slow one, I don’t think.

Joanna: No, I guessed that. No literary fiction in your department!

Simon: No, it’s too slow: I like things to move fast. But that’s how I like to read them, as well. A book has to engage me from the first page, or I don’t really give it too much of a chance anymore. I think a good book is always engaging in the first page, even if it’s a fairly slow plot, so that’s what I try to do with my books, and then just keep people reading, yanked in right until the very end.

What are the themes that obsess you, that you keep coming back to in your writing?

I think the fear that the criminals are winning. There is always a fear in my books that the police, the law, doesn’t protect the victims as much as it protects the criminals, and that this isn’t a good thing. So, the fear that the police are often battling as much against their superiors and the establishment and the legal system as they are against the criminals is a recurring theme.

And the need by almost all my protagonists, both police or not, to break the rules, because the rules themselves are too much of a straitjacket. So there’s this thing about how far do you go to break the rules, and how far can you go without becoming a criminal yourself and losing the sympathy that you’re trying to get. How far can you corrupt the sense of the search for justice?

So that’s the recurring theme that I think has run through every one of my books, and is very much in the latest book, as well. That’s what always interests me.

I’ve noticed that threat to family is also a common theme. Would that be true?

Yes, because a lot of my protagonists are just an ordinary man or woman that suddenly get themselves flung into a situation over which they have no control, and to which they don’t know how to react. And I think that’s hugely important to me, but often, when it’s an ordinary person, they have a family as well, and often they’re trying to protect their family. And family to me is very, very, important.

I have two children and I’m massively protective over them, and I suppose when I’m dealing in the books with threat to family, I think of my own kids and how I would feel if they came under threat, and so that adds an intensity to the writing.

It’s the fear that I have as a parent for my children going out in the world and protecting them against all the dangers that are out there. That’s a recurring fear for me, and I think a lot of parents probably can sympathize with that.

That speaks to the father side of you, but how much of other sides of your life are in the characters that you write?

Well, I think a lot of me is in my characters, and I think that’s the case pretty much with any writer. If you’re writing a book, it’s your passions, your thoughts, your fears that go into the characters. Obviously, the characters are all fictional, and in many cases in my ones, they’re a lot braver than I would be in a lot of circumstances, but they have my sense of fear about the world; they have my sense of enjoyment when things go right, my sense of always desiring some form of natural justice as well.

I have a great thing about natural justice: I like to see the good rewarded and the bad punished, and that is a huge theme in my books: whether they’re the ordinary person in trouble or whether they’re the police officer trying to find a murderer, they all have that need for natural justice. That comes straight from me.

In talking about fear, I heard you speak at a literary festival about being abducted as young man. Would you mind telling that story?

I was hitchhiking with a couple of friends, aged 16, when we were picked up by three older guys in a very small car, and they basically drove us into my home town, late at night, and rather than actually drop us off, they drove back out of town with us in the car, and made us take our clothes off. It was a really horrible incident where we thought we were going to die.

We were eventually naked and lined up outside the car in the middle of some woods and beaten very badly, and then threatened. I think one of them said to another, “Get the shotgun out,” and I don’t know how much of it was trying to scare us and humiliate us, or how much of it was real. One of my friends actually broke free and escaped, and that’s when they let myself and my other friend go.

But it was a really, really terrifying, ordeal. It was made worse, I think, if we’re talking about natural justice, by the fact that the police knew very quickly who they were, but none of them admitted anything under detailed and lengthy questioning. They never discovered the stolen car that they were in, and the police waited weeks and weeks before they came round with a book containing photographs which may or may not have contained these guys. We couldn’t pick out the guys so they were never brought to justice. That was quite a difficult thing.

The fear that I remember from that night is a kind of fear that you never, ever forget, because for about half an hour, I really did think I was going to die. I was 16 and had never experienced anything like that before. I come from a comparatively sheltered background and lived in a small town, so it was a pretty traumatic experience. When I’m writing from the point of view of ordinary individuals in trouble, who are faced with a really terrifying situation, where they think they’re going to die, I draw upon my own experiences of that and try to infuse that in the page through their eyes.

Joanna: Thank you so much for sharing that: I appreciate your vulnerability.

Simon: It’s funny, but I didn’t think about it for years and years; I really pushed it to one side and tried to forget about it, and I never spoke about it with my two friends, one of whom I still keep vaguely in touch with. It’s still never mentioned, and it’s only in recent years with the writing that it’s come out and that I’ve talked about it more. Twenty-two years ago, I think it was. A long time ago, but you never forget it.

We often write to deal with these things ourselves. Do you think people who love thrillers are reading for that vicarious experience, or why do people love reading books like yours?

I think it’s always quite nice to be sat in the warmth of your house, feeling all cozy in bed, reading a book where some horrendous things are happening to people who you can hopefully identify with, and think, “Oh, my goodness, thank goodness that’s not happening to me.” That’s quite a nice feeling, I always think.

And I think people just really, really enjoy books where there are plenty of twists and turns; where they don’t really know what’s going to happen next, and where they can actually identify with and sympathise with the characters who are their main protagonists. That’s the really important thing about using an ordinary person like I do in a number of books. I think that the reader can see these people and think, “Yeah, actually that could be me, and what would I do in those sort of situations, and what’s going to happen,” and that, I think, is the real key to why people enjoy them.

This interview also appeared on on The Big Thrill. You can find Simon at SimonKernick.com and also on twitter @simonkernick

Assassin John Milton And Kickass Beatrix Rose Thrillers With Mark Dawson

October 12, 2014 By J.F. Penn

It's always great to find books that feature strong female characters, and recently I discovered Beatrix Rose, assassin and seriously kick ass heroine created by author Mark Dawson.

I caught up with Mark outside the Freemasons' Grand Lodge of England in London and asked him a few questions. You can watch the video below or here on YouTube.

We discuss:

How Mark got started in writing after being a lawyer in the city
The various series that Mark writes: serial killer with Masonic twist; assassin John Milton making amends for the sins he committed in the secret service; Beatrix Rose series – a strong willed character with serious issues, a daughter who she is trying to protect.
How much of Mark is in his books, and how thrilling is he anyway! How he does his research.
Mark is a busy man, but he does read thrillers for pleasure – he enjoys Lee Child, Russell Blake, Barry Eisler – and also reads a lot of non-fiction for research.
The themes of family, revenge and settling the score are important for Mark.
Mark's latest book is Sword of God in the John Milton series – influenced by Rambo and True Grit. Mark currently works in the film industry so watches a lot of films and medium is important for him.

You can find Mark and his books at MarkJDawson.com and you can start the Beatrix Rose thrillers with In Cold Blood.

Writing Dark Fiction, Research, Travel And Books I Love. Interview With J.F.Penn On Scenes And Sequels

June 15, 2014 By J.F. Penn

This interview transcript is from the Scenes and Sequels Podcast with Dave Kearney, recorded in May 2014. We talk about my research process, obsession with travel and what inspires my stories, as well as discussing my darker side! I also read an excerpt from the Prologue of Desecration which you can listen to below.

Dave: Welcome to the Scenes and Sequels podcast for readers and writers of genre fiction. I’m your host, Dave Kearney, and on today’s show, I chat with New York Times and USA Today bestselling author, J.F. Penn about her new book, “Desecration,” the first in her new London Mystery series.

Dave: Hi, all, it’s Episode Seven of the Scenes podcast, and that was the opening passages from “Desecration,” read by the author, and my guest on today’s show, J.F. Penn. Now, it’s just brilliant to be able to chat with Joanna today, because she shares some just amazing insights into her writing process, and in particular, we talk a bit about theme and just the level of research that Joanna does when she’s writing her stories. And I really think it shows in a story like “Desecration,” because as a reader, it really sort of forces you to ask the question of where fact ends and fiction begins, and that’s really cool, because it gives that story a level of believability, which I think is really important.

And, with that in mind, we also talk a little bit about Joanna’s views on challenging readers. And Joanna believes that writers have the responsibility to tackle difficult themes and to examine difficult issues from a character’s perspective, and by doing so, it challenges readers to be thinking about the story long after they’ve finished reading it. And I think that’s really cool as well. Perhaps it doesn’t hold true for every story; it’s definitely something to think about, because, certainly from my perspective, after reading “Desecration,” it definitely had me thinking for some time afterwards, certainly about some of the themes underpinning the story, and that definitely comes through in our conversation today.

Just quickly, one other thing that we chat about today is some of the challenges for writers in switching between genres, and anyone who’s familiar with Joanna’s work would know that she also writes the ARKANE thriller series, and so we chat a little bit about the different approach that she’s taken to writing her ARKANE thrillers, and the London Mystery stories.