The Intel: Tom Callaghan

Earlier in the week we walked the charming streets of Bishkek in Tom Callaghan’s excellent debut, A Killing Winter, which features the debut of Inspector Akyl Borubaev. Callaghan’s brutal post-Soviet noir is brutal and muscular and funny. In a corrupt state full of bad eggs, Borubaev is as hardboiled as they come.

We promised you Tom Callaghan would give you the intel on Borubaev, Kyrgyzstan and his writing, and here at Crime Thriller Fella, we deliver. Born in the North of England, Callaghan is quite the gadabout. An inveterate traveller, he divides his time between London, Prague, Dubai and Bishkek. Me, I get a nose-bleed crossing postcodes.

Tell us about Akyl Borubaev.

Inspector Akyl Borubaev of the Bishkek Murder Squad in Kyrgyzstan is tough, honest and dedicated. Having recently lost his wife to breast cancer, he is in mourning, unsure that he does any good, caught in a deep depression. But the murders continue, and he has to solve them.

Where did you get the inspiration for A Winter Killing?

I’ve always loved crime fiction, hard-boiled noir for preference, and so that was always going to be the kind of book I’d write. But who needs another crime book set in NYC, or LA, or Miami? Kyrgyzstan is an unknown place, with a lot of problems – what more could a crime writer ask for? As for the plot; (whispers) I made it up.

In the novel, Kyrgyzstan is a state engulfed by gangsters, corruption and sleaze – what do you think the good citizens of Bishkek would make of it?

After two revolutions in ten years, it’s clear that the Kyrgyz will put up with a lot as long as there is food on the table, but when corruption becomes too overt, they act.

What’s your own relationship with the country?

I was married to a Kyrgyz woman, I have a Kyrgyz son, and a home in Bishkek. It’s a country I love, for its beauty, for its culture, for its people. It’s a unique place, in an increasingly homogenised world.

It’s a very timely novel, what with many of the post-Soviet satellite countries afraid that Russia is flexing its muscles again. What do you think the future holds for Kyrgyzstan?

Now that the US air base at Manas has closed, following troop withdrawals from Afghanistan, and with Kyrgyzstan signing trade agreements with Russia over import and export tariffs, people are worried about a decline in living standards. Only time will tell. But I don’t see Putin moving eastwards.

How did the spellchecker on your computer cope with some of the more challenging, consonant-heavy names?

I ignore it: I know how to spell, to parse a sentence and the rules of grammar. Orwell’s rules are ones I live by.

What’s the hardest lesson you ever had to learn about writing?

Laundry and doing dishes always seems more important when you stare at a blank screen.

How do you deal with feedback?

As a professional writer, I have no problems with other people reading what I’ve written. I like to think I’m reasonable and open-minded to fair comment. At the same time, I’ll defend my work if I think I’m right. If I can improve my work through someone else’s suggestions, I will.

Who are the authors you admire, and why?

The Classics: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Jim Thompson. Murder taken out of the drawing room and put down a dark alleyway, where it belongs.

The Hard-Boiled Americans: Lawrence Block, James Lee Burke, Robert Campbell, Michael Connolly, Robert Crais, James Ellroy, Carl Hiassen, Joe R. Lansdale, Elmore Leonard, Ed McBain, George Pelecanos, Peter Spiegelman, Andrew Vachss. Crisp dialogue, more twists and turns than an electric eel, great locations.

The Bold Brits: Mark Billingham, John Connolly (alright, Irish, but I had to list him somewhere), John Harvey, Mo Hayder, Simon Kernick, Val Mcdermid, Ian Rankin, Peter Robinson. Murder doesn’t just happen in the USA, you know.

Foreign Settings: John Burdett (Thailand), Sebastian Fitzek (Germany), Stieg Larrson and Henning Mankell (Sweden), Jo Nesbo (Norway), Mike Nichol (S Africa). Because murder happens to non-English speakers as well.

What’s next for you?

The sequel, A Spring Betrayal, is with my agent and publisher, both of whom are very encouraging, and I’m plotting the third book now. Both of them feature Akyl Borubaev. A Killing Winter is already out in German, UK paperback and US publication is in the autumn, and Spanish and Portuguese editions follow next year.

Give me some advice about writing…

Don’t talk about it  –  nothing diminishes the desire to write as quickly as having told everybody the story. Read a lot. I mean a LOT. Read every day. Write every day. Ask for criticism, not praise; that’s what mirrors are for.

Follow Kingsley Amis’ advice: apply the seat of your trousers to the seat of your chair. Learn to spell and use grammar correctly; if you can’t make yourself clearly understood, how is your reader going to cope? Love one genre, but explore others; everything is an ingredient, to use or not, as you see fit.

Try not to be afraid of the blank page/screen, but don’t be over-confident either.

The Intel: David Mark Reloaded

Crime Thriller Fella is taking a much-needed summer break. But, hey, we’re going to meet up again right here very soon. However, do keep coming back. Over the last year there’s been all sorts of stuff we’ve enjoyed plonking on the internet, and which you may have missed, such as this Intel interview with McAvoy man David Mark…

We love writers here. Last week we reviewed David Mark’s terrific Aector McAvoy novel Original Skin, and in a couple of weeks — April 3rd, to be precise — the brand-new McAvoy opus Sorrow Bound is published. It seemed like a pretty good excuse to talk to Mark about McAvoy, Hull and, of course, how he gets those pesky words on a page. David Mark gives us The Intel on his writing.

How would you describe DS Aector McAvoy to a potential reader?

He’s a good guy, really. A pretty normal guy. He’s caring and clever and a bit baffled by how the world works. He never really knows how he feels about anything until he’s checked with his wife and his boss but he does truly believe that murder is wrong, which is why he’s a good cop. He’s dogged and very human. I hope he’s reminiscent of the actual detectives I knew when I was a journalist. He cares most about his family but would like to make his little contribution to the world. Physically, he’s 6ft 5, Scottish and able to pull a criminal’s head off if he so choose. The thing is, he’s also shy, clumsy and frightened of hurting anybody by accident. I’ve made life rather difficult for him.

Sex parties and swingers clubs form the backdrop to McAvoy’s investigation in Original Skin. I hesitate to ask what kind of research you did for this book?

Well, being a journalist for so long meant that I’m well used to asking people personal questions about what they get up into their spare time and I wrote several features on alternative lifestyles and spent a lot of time with outwardly very average people who happen to spend their weekends getting up to all sorts of things with all sorts of people. I visited a couple of ‘alternative’ clubs and spent about 40 seconds in a sex cinema in Huddersfield, which seemed like something that should have been dreamed up by Dante. I did a lot of online research and spent some time on forums that would boggle your mind.

I couldn’t get away from the feeling that people were allowing their arousal to make them forget their safety, and that was kind of the jumping-off point for the plot. There are people online asking complete strangers to come to their house and abuse them. I’m not judging, but does that not sound a little fraught with peril? And just imagine if there was a serial killer out there, setting people up for their own elaborate demise ….

Hull is a terrific location for a series of crime thrillers. What is it about the city that fascinates you?

I’m still not totally sure. There’s something about the architecture and the feel of the place that  simply seems perfect for the kind of books I want to write. It has history, and attitude, and it’s right at the end of the railway line. It’s taken its fair share of beatings and at times it seems like it’s completely on its arse. And it has a crime rate, so the people aren’t surprised by very much, which means that the murders in my books would kind of exist in the real world without anybody batting an eyelid, which adds a kind of authenticity. I guess I’m attracted a certain kind of washed out and desolate beauty. I like being able to describe the crumbling mercantile palaces and the cobbled streets next to the boarded up fish factories and the dying carnations sellotaped to lampposts. It’s just the canvas that my brain likes to hurl itself at.

What’s your writing process? What comes first – plot or character?

With writing a series based around recurring characters, these days it’s all about the plot. But I don’t do what many writers do, which is dream up an elaborate death and then try and find a reason for it afterwards. I try and come up with real people and work out why they would want to do something horrible to somebody else. Everybody has a perfectly good reason to want at least one or two people dead. Most people simply don’t do it.

I’m writing in my head all the time and when I meet somebody who starts telling me about their bastard boss or their bitch of a mother-in-law, I can’t help but start mentally riffing and expounding on how they would do it. The thing is, I come up with foolproof ways of doing it, which is no good to McAvoy, as he has to catch them at the end. In essence, I’ve met so many interesting people in my life that putting together believable characters comes quite easily. I just steal liberally from everybody I’ve ever met.

Take us through a typical writing day for you?

It used to be hellish finding the time to write. I was working full time, nobody gave a damn about my dreams and I was writing in a state of feverish compulsion and a desperate desire to change my life. Nowadays I write for an actual publisher and have deadlines and an accountant and lots of grown-up things to think about. Which means that ideally I’m at my computer by 9am, and will write until one of my loved ones comes home or rings me and tells me to stop, or have a sandwich or go for a pee.

Then I walk the dogs or do something that frees my brain up a little bit, and then I go into dad mode and pick up the kids or take something out of the freezer or fall asleep on the sofa in front of some improving but dull documentary on Sky Arts. Then it’s all whisky and mental anguish until the next day. I love it.

Who are the authors you love, and why?

One should never love an author. It’s okay to love their books but don’t ever think that they are representative of the person whose mind they were born in. I love various authors through having met them and become friends. For that reason I love Mari Hannah and Mel Sheratt and Danielle Ramsey. They are some of the nicest and most giving people I have ever met. In terms of which books I love, that’s a hell of a list. I truly admire the works of Ian Rankin and John Connolly, because they’re simply very well written and clever.

I admire the consistent high quality of Val McDermid and the late, great Reg Hill. I like the ambition and writing style of Stav Sherez. I always look forward to new books by Denise Mina, Belinda Bauer and Simon Lelic. Then there are people whose books changed my life when I was a kid, like Terry Pratchett and Bernard Cornwell and Robert Westall, who all made me want to become an author. Of all the questions I get asked, that’s the hardest one to answer!

What’s the hardest lesson you ever had to learn about writing?

I’ve learned a lot these past couple of years and I guess the hardest lesson was the old cliché about ‘less is more’. I have a kind of poetic and lyrical turn of phrase and sometimes I’ll spend four or five pages describing a sunset or a thought process or a glass of wine in intricate detail, which is all very lovely but doesn’t really move the plot along. Cutting that stuff is hard, but the years of being brutally hacked by sub-editors on newspapers gave me some kind of preparation for it. Just because it’s pretty doesn’t mean it helps the book. Thankfully, my editors are brilliant and are very tactful in the way they suggest I lose tracts of beautiful prose.

How do you deal with feedback?

I’m pretty thick-skinned so I don’t get upset by idiots on Amazon leaving me a one-star review because they don’t like the fact I’ve written in present tense or given a character a name they can’t pronounce. What am I supposed to do to please everybody? Some people just like to knock your average score down a couple of notches, and that’s because some people weren’t punched enough as teenagers. I do like to have a discussion with readers and I’m more than happy to hear other people’s opinions and love to chat about their impressions of my work – even if they don’t like it. As for positive feedback, I get all squirmy and embarrassed and uncharacteristically shy about the whole affair.

How have your own experiences shaped your writing?

We all draw on our own experiences. A baby wouldn’t have much to write about unless they were planning a surreal animated novel about life in the womb. I’m a journalist for a rough area in the North so I’ve seen a lot of things that lend themselves to crime fiction. I’ve seen acts of great charity and love, and plenty of brutality. I’ve met people from every walk of life and discovered that everybody’s pretty much the same but some are considerably more interesting than others. I guess that if I were better travelled and been born rich, I wouldn’t have set my books in one of the few cities I’ve visited, and wouldn’t have had the same burning desire to achieve something notable. This is all start to feel like a psychological assessment. Leave me alone.

Give me some advice about writing…

Just write, for God’s sake. So many people faff about wondering whether they will get a deal or pondering whether to self-publish on Amazon when they haven’t even bloody written anything yet. Get on with it. Writing is the second most fun you can have by yourself. Do it because it makes your brain work harder. Do it because you’re creating something nobody has ever written before. Don’t worry too much about plot or character or settings or accuracy in the first draft. Just get going and you’ll be amazed what your imagination hands you when it wakes from its slumber.

What’s your best advice for an author looking to get into the marketplace…

Try and come up with something new, but not terrifyingly so. The publishing world is an odd one. Publishers don’t really know what they want but they seem to know what they’re scared of. Just be true to yourself and write a book you would want to read. Then take as much advice as you can without starting to second-guess yourself. And please, for me, give yourself time to get a traditional publishing deal rather than self-publishing on Amazon three months after you’ve finished the first draft. Publishing is a slow business. Seriously, it’s not just slow, it moves like a snail dragging an anvil. But when you get a proper book deal there really is no feeling like it.

What’s next for you?

Well, it’s 11.22am on a Monday morning and I don’t think I’ve had any breakfast, so I may go see if there are any toffee muffins left in the bread-bin.  On a grander scale, I’ve finished the fourth McAvoy book, written a  historical crime novel set in Hull in 1850, and the first McAvoy book is being adapted for TV, so there’s plenty on the horizon. To be honest though, it’s the muffin I’m most excited about.

Crime Book Log: Nesbø, Connolly, Coben, Lackberg

With Easter approaching, some of writing big guns are cranking out product. Big product. Here are some shiny new hardbacks that are coming out on Thursday.

Polite Notice: If you’ve stumbled across this page in 2018 you may find these books have been out a long time, and are available in paperback. You may even have read some of them already.

Jo Nesbø. He’s good, isn’t he, with his hugely-successful Harry Hole thrillers and his terse titles like The Snowman, The Leopard and The Bat. His new one is called The Son.

The blurb just can’t make up its mind about capitalization:

SONNY’S ON THE RUN

Sonny is a model prisoner. He listens to the confessions of other inmates, and absolves them of their sins.

HE’S BEEN LIED TO HIS WHOLE LIFE

But then one prisoner’s confession changes everything. He knows something about Sonny’s disgraced father.

SONNY WANTS REVENGE

He needs to break out of prison and make those responsible pay for their crimes.

WHATEVER THE COST

Irish writer John Connolly’s first genre bending Charlie Parker novel was published in 1999. He’s now on the twelfth, called The Wolf In Winter. Parker is a private investigator who frequently butts heads with supernatural forces.

The blurb avoids local shops for local people:

Prosperous, and the secret that it hides beneath its ruins . . .

The community of Prosperous, Maine has always thrived when others have suffered. Its inhabitants are wealthy, its children’s future secure. It shuns outsiders. It guards its own. And at the heart of Prosperous lie the ruins of an ancient church, transported stone by stone from England centuries earlier by the founders of the town…

But the death of a homeless man and the disappearance of his daughter draw the haunted, lethal private investigator Charlie Parker to Prosperous. Parker is a dangerous man, driven by compassion, by rage, and by the desire for vengeance. In him the town and its protectors sense a threat graver than any they have faced in their long history, and in the comfortable, sheltered inhabitants of a small Maine town, Parker will encounter his most vicious opponents yet.

Charlie Parker has been marked to die so that Prosperous may survive.

Ooh, look, there’s a new  Harlan Coben out. Missing You is available in hardback and on Kindle. Coben is the writer of the Myron Bolitar novels, but it’s his stand alones that really generate heat. Coben’s books are usually about Ordinary Joes who discover their loved ones have been hiding important stuff from them.

The blurb is just popping out for a bit:

It’s a profile, like all the others on the online dating site. But as NYPD Detective Kat Donovan focuses on the accompanying picture, she feels her whole world explode, as emotions she’s ignored for decades come crashing down on her. Staring back at her is her ex-fiancé Jeff, the man who shattered her heart eighteen years ago.

Kat feels a spark, wondering if this might be the moment when past tragedies recede and a new world opens up to her. But when she reaches out to the man in the profile, her reawakened hope quickly darkens into suspicion and then terror as an unspeakable conspiracy comes to light, in which monsters prey upon the most vulnerable.

As Kat’s hope for a second chance with Jeff grows more and more elusive, she is consumed by an investigation that challenges her feelings about everyone she ever loved – her former fiancé, her mother, and even her father, whose cruel murder so long ago has never been fully explained. With lives on the line, including her own, Kat must venture deeper into the darkness than she ever has before, and discover if she has the strength to survive what she finds there.

There was that rather good French movie of One False Move – if you haven’t seen it, you really should – and it looks like a US movie version is finally going to happen. Coben likes his plot-twists – don’t we all? – and talks about those and about his writing in this interesting interview.

Camilla Lackberg is described as a Swedish Sensation. I’m sorry, I’m sure Camilla’s terrific, but the role of Swedish Sensation will always be reserved for Agnetha Fältskog. I’m guessing Agnetha’s not much of a crime writer though.

Camilla’s new book – hardback, kindle – sees the return of Hedstrom and Falck and is called Buried Angels.

And it has an Eastery vibe, as the blurb immediately clarifies!

Easter 1974. A family vanishes from their home on an idyllic island off the Swedish coast. They have left everything behind – including their one-year-old daughter, Ebba.

Now, years later, Ebba has returned to the island. She and her husband have suffered the loss of their only child and are looking to make a fresh start. But within days, their house is the target of an arson attack.

YOU CANNOT ESCAPE THE FUTURE

Detective Patrik Hedstrom takes on the investigation, aided by his wife, crime writer Erica Falck, who has always been fascinated by the mystery of Ebba’s abandonment and the family’s tragic history.

When dried blood is found under the floorboards of the old house, it seems that the cold case involving the missing family is about to be brought back to life. And soon, Patrik and Erica are consumed by the hunt for a killer who will stop at nothing to keep the past buried…

A former economist, Camilla wrote her first story at the age of four, in which Santa’s wife is beaten to death. Now that’s a crime writer.

 

 

 

 

The Intel: David Mark

We love writers here. Last week we reviewed David Mark’s terrific Aector McAvoy novel Original Skin, and in a couple of weeks — April 3rd, to be precise — the brand-new McAvoy opus Sorrow Bound is published. It seemed like a pretty good excuse to talk to Mark about McAvoy, Hull and, of course, how he gets those pesky words on a page. David Mark gives us The Intel on his writing.

How would you describe DS Aector McAvoy to a potential reader?

He’s a good guy, really. A pretty normal guy. He’s caring and clever and a bit baffled by how the world works. He never really knows how he feels about anything until he’s checked with his wife and his boss but he does truly believe that murder is wrong, which is why he’s a good cop. He’s dogged and very human. I hope he’s reminiscent of the actual detectives I knew when I was a journalist. He cares most about his family but would like to make his little contribution to the world. Physically, he’s 6ft 5, Scottish and able to pull a criminal’s head off if he so choose. The thing is, he’s also shy, clumsy and frightened of hurting anybody by accident. I’ve made life rather difficult for him.

Sex parties and swingers clubs form the backdrop to McAvoy’s investigation in Original Skin. I hesitate to ask what kind of research you did for this book?

Well, being a journalist for so long meant that I’m well used to asking people personal questions about what they get up into their spare time and I wrote several features on alternative lifestyles and spent a lot of time with outwardly very average people who happen to spend their weekends getting up to all sorts of things with all sorts of people. I visited a couple of ‘alternative’ clubs and spent about 40 seconds in a sex cinema in Huddersfield, which seemed like something that should have been dreamed up by Dante. I did a lot of online research and spent some time on forums that would boggle your mind.

I couldn’t get away from the feeling that people were allowing their arousal to make them forget their safety, and that was kind of the jumping-off point for the plot. There are people online asking complete strangers to come to their house and abuse them. I’m not judging, but does that not sound a little fraught with peril? And just imagine if there was a serial killer out there, setting people up for their own elaborate demise ….

Hull is a terrific location for a series of crime thrillers. What is it about the city that fascinates you?

I’m still not totally sure. There’s something about the architecture and the feel of the place that  simply seems perfect for the kind of books I want to write. It has history, and attitude, and it’s right at the end of the railway line. It’s taken its fair share of beatings and at times it seems like it’s completely on its arse. And it has a crime rate, so the people aren’t surprised by very much, which means that the murders in my books would kind of exist in the real world without anybody batting an eyelid, which adds a kind of authenticity. I guess I’m attracted a certain kind of washed out and desolate beauty. I like being able to describe the crumbling mercantile palaces and the cobbled streets next to the boarded up fish factories and the dying carnations sellotaped to lampposts. It’s just the canvas that my brain likes to hurl itself at.

What’s your writing process? What comes first – plot or character?

With writing a series based around recurring characters, these days it’s all about the plot. But I don’t do what many writers do, which is dream up an elaborate death and then try and find a reason for it afterwards. I try and come up with real people and work out why they would want to do something horrible to somebody else. Everybody has a perfectly good reason to want at least one or two people dead. Most people simply don’t do it.

I’m writing in my head all the time and when I meet somebody who starts telling me about their bastard boss or their bitch of a mother-in-law, I can’t help but start mentally riffing and expounding on how they would do it. The thing is, I come up with foolproof ways of doing it, which is no good to McAvoy, as he has to catch them at the end. In essence, I’ve met so many interesting people in my life that putting together believable characters comes quite easily. I just steal liberally from everybody I’ve ever met.

Take us through a typical writing day for you?

It used to be hellish finding the time to write. I was working full time, nobody gave a damn about my dreams and I was writing in a state of feverish compulsion and a desperate desire to change my life. Nowadays I write for an actual publisher and have deadlines and an accountant and lots of grown-up things to think about. Which means that ideally I’m at my computer by 9am, and will write until one of my loved ones comes home or rings me and tells me to stop, or have a sandwich or go for a pee.

Then I walk the dogs or do something that frees my brain up a little bit, and then I go into dad mode and pick up the kids or take something out of the freezer or fall asleep on the sofa in front of some improving but dull documentary on Sky Arts. Then it’s all whisky and mental anguish until the next day. I love it.

Who are the authors you love, and why?

One should never love an author. It’s okay to love their books but don’t ever think that they are representative of the person whose mind they were born in. I love various authors through having met them and become friends. For that reason I love Mari Hannah and Mel Sheratt and Danielle Ramsey. They are some of the nicest and most giving people I have ever met. In terms of which books I love, that’s a hell of a list. I truly admire the works of Ian Rankin and John Connolly, because they’re simply very well written and clever.

I admire the consistent high quality of Val McDermid and the late, great Reg Hill. I like the ambition and writing style of Stav Sherez. I always look forward to new books by Denise Mina, Belinda Bauer and Simon Lelic. Then there are people whose books changed my life when I was a kid, like Terry Pratchett and Bernard Cornwell and Robert Westall, who all made me want to become an author. Of all the questions I get asked, that’s the hardest one to answer!

What’s the hardest lesson you ever had to learn about writing?

I’ve learned a lot these past couple of years and I guess the hardest lesson was the old cliché about ‘less is more’. I have a kind of poetic and lyrical turn of phrase and sometimes I’ll spend four or five pages describing a sunset or a thought process or a glass of wine in intricate detail, which is all very lovely but doesn’t really move the plot along. Cutting that stuff is hard, but the years of being brutally hacked by sub-editors on newspapers gave me some kind of preparation for it. Just because it’s pretty doesn’t mean it helps the book. Thankfully, my editors are brilliant and are very tactful in the way they suggest I lose tracts of beautiful prose.

How do you deal with feedback?

I’m pretty thick-skinned so I don’t get upset by idiots on Amazon leaving me a one-star review because they don’t like the fact I’ve written in present tense or given a character a name they can’t pronounce. What am I supposed to do to please everybody? Some people just like to knock your average score down a couple of notches, and that’s because some people weren’t punched enough as teenagers. I do like to have a discussion with readers and I’m more than happy to hear other people’s opinions and love to chat about their impressions of my work – even if they don’t like it. As for positive feedback, I get all squirmy and embarrassed and uncharacteristically shy about the whole affair.

How have your own experiences shaped your writing?

We all draw on our own experiences. A baby wouldn’t have much to write about unless they were planning a surreal animated novel about life in the womb. I’m a journalist for a rough area in the North so I’ve seen a lot of things that lend themselves to crime fiction. I’ve seen acts of great charity and love, and plenty of brutality. I’ve met people from every walk of life and discovered that everybody’s pretty much the same but some are considerably more interesting than others. I guess that if I were better travelled and been born rich, I wouldn’t have set my books in one of the few cities I’ve visited, and wouldn’t have had the same burning desire to achieve something notable. This is all start to feel like a psychological assessment. Leave me alone.

Give me some advice about writing…

Just write, for God’s sake. So many people faff about wondering whether they will get a deal or pondering whether to self-publish on Amazon when they haven’t even bloody written anything yet. Get on with it. Writing is the second most fun you can have by yourself. Do it because it makes your brain work harder. Do it because you’re creating something nobody has ever written before. Don’t worry too much about plot or character or settings or accuracy in the first draft. Just get going and you’ll be amazed what your imagination hands you when it wakes from its slumber.

What’s your best advice for an author looking to get into the marketplace…

Try and come up with something new, but not terrifyingly so. The publishing world is an odd one. Publishers don’t really know what they want but they seem to know what they’re scared of. Just be true to yourself and write a book you would want to read. Then take as much advice as you can without starting to second-guess yourself. And please, for me, give yourself time to get a traditional publishing deal rather than self-publishing on Amazon three months after you’ve finished the first draft. Publishing is a slow business. Seriously, it’s not just slow, it moves like a snail dragging an anvil. But when you get a proper book deal there really is no feeling like it.

What’s next for you?

Well, it’s 11.22am on a Monday morning and I don’t think I’ve had any breakfast, so I may go see if there are any toffee muffins left in the bread-bin.  On a grander scale, I’ve finished the fourth McAvoy book, written a  historical crime novel set in Hull in 1850, and the first McAvoy book is being adapted for TV, so there’s plenty on the horizon. To be honest though, it’s the muffin I’m most excited about.