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

December 2, 2016 By J.F. Penn

Exploring the Inevitability of Fate with Clare MackintoshClare 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-mackintoshClare’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?

iletyougoA 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?

[Read more…] about Exploring The Inevitability of Fate With Crime Thriller Author, Clare Mackintosh

Filed Under: Interviews with Thriller Authors Tagged With: author interviews, crime, thriller

Traveling For Research, Love Of Snow And Writing Thrillers With Tom Harper

May 1, 2015 By J.F. Penn

love of snowI interviewed fantastic thriller author Tom Harper for The Big Thrill magazine. There's a transcript below and you can also watch the video below or on YouTube.

Tom Harper is the international bestselling author of 11 historical thrillers, including his latest, Zodiac Station, which is published in paperback in the US in May 2015.

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing

Tom HarperIt's something I'd always wanted to do. I remember being eight years old and telling my teacher that I wanted to be an author when I grew up. By the time I finished university, I hadn't shaken that idea and I knew it's what I wanted to do. I also knew that it was incredibly unlikely.

So I went to work for an actuarial consultancy for a while, which was a really boring job, but at an interesting company. Then I decided to have a crack at writing seriously. I saw an advert for a crime writing competition, the Debut Dagger Competition, run by the Crime Writers' Association in the UK. It was one of those moments that changed my life.

It was just an advert in the Sunday Times one weekend. If I hadn't bought the paper or if I'd not read that section, or it had gone into the recycling, I shudder to think how my life would be different. They wanted a first chapter and synopsis of a crime novel, and the deadline was several weeks away. I sent mine off to the competition, trying to think no more of it, but it turned out that I had come runner-up, which was amazing and then I started getting contacted by the judges who were editors and agents.

I took a sabbatical from work and blasted out that book as fast as I possibly could, signing up with an agent who judged the competition. She was able to sell the book very quickly once I'd actually finished it. So it was all very fast and it's one of the real good luck stories in publishing.

Zodiac StationTell us a bit about Zodiac Station and who might enjoy the story.

All my other books have had some kind of an historical angle to them but Zodiac Station is a bit different. It’s a contemporary thriller set in the Arctic on the fictional island of Utgard. If you go to Svalbard and then up and right a bit, that's where it would be if it existed. It’s a completely deserted island in the high Arctic and the only population there is a research base with a dozen scientists in it.

It’s the story of a guy in his early 30s who has had a scientific career, and then lost it in a scandal. He gets a second chance when his old PhD supervisor calls him up and invites him to Zodiac Station. He goes up there, and the day he arrives, his PhD supervisor has gone missing and is subsequently discovered dead at the bottom of a crevasse. So it's his story of trying to discover what happened to his PhD supervisor because the top brass at the base want to explain it away as an accident. Of course, there's a bit more to it than that.

There's a whole genre of Arctic thrillers actually. There are people, and I'm one of them, who just love ice and snow and cold and these really wild places.

There is a line in Zodiac Station: ”For as long as I can remember, I dreamed of the north.” It’s in the voice of your main character but how much of that is from you?

That is exactly from me. It’s straight from the heart, because as long as I can remember, I’ve always loved snow. I love ice, I love winter. I think it's because these places are so otherworldly. It's as far as you can get off the planet while still being on the planet, if that makes sense. As a writer, I think you're naturally drawn to these places. For me, the joy of writing and reading these sort of books is being taken away from normal life. And I'd say the Arctic is about as far from normal life as you can get while still remaining on planet Earth.

Tell us about the research for the book. You went to the ice, didn’t you?

For every book, I visit the places I'm writing about. I find it very difficult to write about a place I haven't been to. So obviously when I started doing Zodiac Station, I knew I was going to have to go and visit the Arctic, which was absolutely fine with me!

I went to Svalbard, which is an archipelago belonging to Norway. It’s about 800km north of continental Norway and on the same latitude as northern Greenland. It's about as close as you can get to the North Pole without actually having to put on skis. It's this amazing set of islands with a land mass that's the area of Ireland but with very few people. I think their slogan is, 2,500 people, 3,000 polar bears. There's one main town there, originally a coal mining town, and now turning to tourism.

I based myself there and took various snowmobile and snowshoeing trips, going up glaciers. I went into a glacier cave which was incredible. You're on your belly with a tiny space between your back and the roof. And the roof is 30 meters of solid ice except a glacier is not actually solid, it's more like a river of ice and is always moving. I was hoping not to be under it when it started to move. That was pretty cool.

We went on these long snowmobile drives across sea ice, and we got lost in a white out once, which was pretty scary. You cannot even see your hand in front of your face. It's just cloud, and snow, and more snow, and ice. All those experiences went straight into the book.

What are the other thrilling and exciting things you've done for research for your books?

It's one of these paradoxical things, that in order to write a thrilling book, you have to lead a very un-thrilling life most of the time. But in between, there are these bits that are just brilliant and thrilling.

The next book, Black River, which comes out in the U.K. in September, is about a group of treasure hunters going up an uncharted tributary of the Amazon looking for a lost city. And so obviously I had to go up the Amazon! I was looking for these petroglyphs, rock carvings that are on this ginormous lump of rock in the middle of the Peruvian jungle.

No one knows who put them there or what they mean, and it takes about four days just to get there. You're wading through swamps and portaging your boat up the river, and cutting your path through the jungle and stuff. It's just incredible. It was one of those moments where every so often you just had to stop and look around and think, “Yes, I am really doing this. This is me and I'm here.”

Certainly for me, the excitement of being a writer comes from finding out new stuff. Some of that's historical, but a lot of it is geographical and new places, the cultures and the people, the landscapes. I find it incredibly exciting to learn that stuff, and it's that excitement that I'm trying to put into the book. If it's exciting for me, then it's going to be exciting for the reader. And that's really what fires me up.

I wonder if you ever get the experience of synchronicity, as I often do in research. When you think you’re writing fiction and then you discover there’s something real behind it. A coincidence of research, perhaps.

Yes, it does happen. In fact, it happened on the Peru book. I’d read a lot of stuff about different expeditions into various jungles and researched the huge area of the Amazon which is many billions of square miles of forest covering 11 countries or something. I couldn’t decide where my lost city was going to be. So eventually I had to get a big map of South America. I plotted where all the different expeditions that I'd read about had gone. Then I thought about what my lost city would have to be like.

The real lowland, central Brazilian rainforest is out because there weren't any particularly advanced civilizations there that we know of. It would have to be built out of stone because obviously it's got to survive. That means that you basically have to put it up against the Andes, and it's going to be some kind of Inca or proto-Inca civilization. Almost the moment I made those decisions, I discovered that there is indeed a legend of a particular lost city called Paititi, which I'd never ever heard of before, which is supposed to be in exactly the place that I'd decided it should be. Amazing!

You've written widely in the conspiracy and historical thriller genre. What are the themes that keep coming up over and over again in your work?

Travel is in most of my books. Zodiac Station is quite unusual in that it's quite claustrophobic. It all takes place on this one island and you can't get on or off. It’s almost a locked room mystery in that respect. All my other books have a chase element where people move quickly from place to place, often internationally. I like moving. I like keeping things in motion. I have a restless imagination.

Another thing that I realized after I'd written about eight or nine books, was that a lot of the people I write about are involved in the quest for perfection. It's about the gap between what they're trying to achieve and what they actually achieve.

So I wrote about the emperor Constantine, who was trying to achieve this perfect empire. I wrote about Johannes Gutenberg, who was trying to create the perfect book that can be replicated perfectly without any scribes messing it up and making mistakes.

As a writer, when you start writing a book, you have this vision in your head about how perfect this book is going to be. As you write it, it's a series of compromises, and inevitably it’s never quite as good as that initial, pure dream you had. But you do the best you can and then you try again. You try to make it more perfect the next time. And I think a lot of the people that I write about are doing the same thing in their different fields.

You’ve lived in a number of places around the world, but now you’re based in York in England. What is so awesome about York from a historian and thriller writer’s perspective?

It is an amazing town going back to Roman times. It's still got its city walls intact, surrounding almost the entire city, built on the foundation of the Roman walls. There’s a beautiful city center that's a mix of medieval, Georgian, Victorian, and more recent architecture. Then there’s this incredible 15th century Minster, a huge gothic cathedral right in the center of town. York is quite a small town and then you've got this massive cathedral in it. The first time I saw it, it was like an alien spaceship that landed in the middle of the square. You saw it almost as the medieval people must have seen it, as this very otherworldly thing that is just beyond scale or comprehension.

You can tour the Undercroft, which is basically a basement. The 15th-century church stands on top of the Norman church, which in turn stands on top of a Saxon church, which in turn stands on top of the headquarters of the original Roman fortress. And you can see the different layers of stone, one built on top of the other, as you go down.

To me, that's just like this beautiful, perfect metaphor for history itself. It’s not that one era finishes and then you're done with it and then you move on. Everything is actually built on top of the last, seamlessly integrating. It’s also a great metaphor for York, because everything is built on the past. You can do a 360 degree turn on a York street, and you can see buildings built in every century from the 1500s through to the 21st Century. And all still are in use. That's what's amazing.

Moving away from the serious topics now. You made a very cool Lego trailer for Zodiac Station. Tell us about that.

It was just too much fun not to do! I love film, I love movies. Like most writers, I would love to see my books turned into films. I had a really vivid, visual idea of how Zodiac Station would look as a film. And of course, I would've loved to do a full-on cinematic trailer for the book. But unfortunately, that would involve helicopters, and ships, and being in the Arctic and probably would cost millions of pounds.

I've got two boys, who are 7 and 4, so I'm quite up on what's happening in the world of Lego. The story opens with a coast guard icebreaker battering through the sea, and last year Lego released a coast guard ship set which my son wanted for Christmas. Then six months later, they released a whole set of Arctic Lego.

So I bought a couple of those sets and re-purposed them slightly. I've got this friend who works for a big visual effects company in London. So he came up, and between us, we built these models and animated them and made a film. It was just an absolute blast.

Who are the authors that you read for pleasure, whether in the thriller genre or more widely?

I'm a big fan of John le Carré as a classic in spy thriller. I love his ‘Smiley' books. He tells you very little, and has these really obscure and oblique scenes. You really have no idea what's going on and yet, you're completely hooked and you have to know what happens next.

Neal Stephenson is really interesting. He started out as a science fiction writer, and then he turned to historical fiction. He did a big book called Cryptonomicon, and then an even bigger trilogy called “The Baroque Cycle,” set in the 17th century. He writes historical fiction unlike anyone else I know. Coming from a science fiction background, he's just got this really anarchic, freewheeling, swashbuckling way of writing about history. He’s writing about the very early roots of computing and some of the really interesting stuff that was going on in the 17th century with Isaac Newton and Leibniz. It's just got this tremendous energy about it. So I love Neal Stephenson.

I love Dan Simmons on the Arctic theme. He wrote a book called The Terror, which reimagines the last days of the Sir John Franklin expedition where they get stuck in the ice for two-and-a-half years and were never seen again. I thought that was an amazing book.

Robert Harris. l like both his contemporary thrillers and the historical stuff he's done, particularly with Cicero. And in the more contemporary vein, I like Chris Ewan, who writes these really nicely put together, beautifully written thrillers that I just can't get enough of.

So where can people find you and your books online?

The books are available at all the usual places online. My website is Tom-Harper.co.uk and I’m on Facebook/TomHarperAuthor and Twitter/TomHarperAuthor.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for your time, Tom. That was great.

Tom: Thank you, Joanna.

Filed Under: Interviews with Thriller Authors Tagged With: author interviews, ice, thriller

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!

Dominic SelwoodSo 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.

stonehenge
Stonehenge

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

Filed Under: Interviews with Thriller Authors Tagged With: biblical, conspiracy, interview, thriller

Action Thriller Author Scott Mariani On The Ben Hope Series

December 14, 2014 By J.F. Penn

Scott MarianiScott 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.

Scott MarianiIn 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.

nemesis programI 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.

Filed Under: Interviews with Thriller Authors Tagged With: interview, thriller

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!

Jeremy RobinsonToday 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 nJeremy Robinson Booksot 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.

Filed Under: Interviews with Thriller Authors Tagged With: action, interview, thriller

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!

Simon KernickI 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.

Simon KernickAnd 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.

Ultimatum KernickI 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

Filed Under: Interviews with Thriller Authors Tagged With: interview, thriller

Assassin John Milton And Kickass Beatrix Rose Thrillers With Mark Dawson

October 12, 2014 By J.F. Penn

Mark DawsonIt'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 sword of godtrying 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.

Filed Under: Interviews with Thriller Authors Tagged With: female character, interview, kickass, thriller

The Darker Side Of The Dreaming Spires With Dan Holloway

May 11, 2014 By J.F. Penn

I recently read No Exit by Dan Holloway, a dark novella. There are a lot of books that feature the dreaming spires of Oxford, but this one offers a very dark and different viewpoint.

Dreaming spiresAlice is drawn into Petrichor, a group of Parkour enthusiasts who portray decay as beauty, and death as just another choice. When her friend Cassie is bullied into suicide, Alice makes a choice that will change her life. The writing is poetic in places, shocking in others, and the length is just right for a short, twisted tale. Fans of Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects, and my own Desecration, will enjoy.

Here's an interview with Dan Holloway, based on my questions from the book.

So many people only see the tourist side of Oxford, tell us about some of the darker sides that you perceive, places that inspire darkness in your writing?

There are so many sides to Oxford. I started out as a student, and that’s the world I wrote about in The Company of Fellows. But even then I was more interested in the underbelly of ego and hidden perversions and desires that I sensed the tips of in my student days.

no exitSince then I’ve come to know Oxford best through its rich cultural life, in particular the spoken word scene, which has very little to do with tourist Oxford. Oxford is home to Hammer and Tongue, one of the UK’s oldest poetry slams that’s been going for over a decade, and the best bookshop I’ve ever been in, The Albion Beatnik. These are worlds of political activism, from LGBT rights and Reclaim the Night through incredible projects with the homeless community like the Old Fire Station’s Crisis Skylight Café to guerrilla campaigns against climate change. It’s a world where the people you meet are as likely to live on a boat as in a cloister.

It’s not necessarily a dark world – though as recent news stories have shown, Oxford has that. But it is a world the tourists don’t see – and most of all it’s a world of passion and creativity that’s raw, flawed, and brilliant – everything tourist Oxford isn’t.

I love Petrichor and the theme of the beauty of decay – what drew you to that?

Oh that’s such a hard question and I need to tread so carefully because the answers come from the world around me as I grew up, and I don’t actually want to imply that Stroud is a rotting carcass of a town…

[Read more…] about The Darker Side Of The Dreaming Spires With Dan Holloway

Filed Under: Interviews with Thriller Authors Tagged With: crime, dark, oxford, suicide, thriller

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