In Conversation with John R. McKay

By Gillian Hamer

Hello, John, tell us a little about you and your writing.

I live with my wife, Dawn, in the North West of England in a town called Wigan which is between Manchester and Liverpool. I have two daughters, Jessica and Sophie. I served in the Royal Air Force for seven years before working for seventeen years at the control room of Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service.

I have always been interested in literature and modern history. When I was in the military, I spent time in northern Europe around the battleground areas of the First World War, and this generated a keen interest in that period of history. I also became fascinated with the Second World War and read many books, both factual and fictional based around that period.

When I decided to give writing a go, I used this interest and the knowledge I had gathered over the years to form the basis of my work. There are so many stories to be told about this period and when researching my second novel, ‘The Absolution Of Otto Finkel’ I came across little known incidents that I managed to incorporate into the story.

I normally tend to stick to this genre, but I have dabbled in contemporary fiction also, for my novel ‘Mosquitoes’, which tells the story of a man who cannot deal with major changes to his life which results in a nervous breakdown. This is a black comedy of sorts and I had a lot of fun writing it, as the research was quite minimal and it was completed in a very short time.

I am always looking for new ideas to write about and my latest novel, ‘The Worst Journey In The World’, originated at a presentation I attended at my local museum, which my ex-high school English teacher had arranged. There I met a gentleman by the name of Bill Halliwell who gave an excellent talk about his life in the Royal Navy during the war and his voyages escorting merchant ships to the Soviet Union. I interviewed him a couple of times and he also gave me lot of reference material. I would never have written this novel if it hadn’t been for him.

Where do you find your plot ideas?


I like my novels to have some substance to them rather than just a story about ‘what happens’. I like to use events that actually happened and then put my characters into them and develop how they think and feel, and how this determines their ultimate fate. I always need a plot before I start and this usually comes about when I carry out the research for the novel. For example, for ‘The Worst Journey In The World’ I knew I wanted to write about the Arctic Convoys and so decided to base the central character around a young man from Liverpool. As my family are from that region, I knew a little of what was happening in the city around that time and so was able to bring that into the story to develop the character.

Sometimes sub-plots develop themselves. What I mean by this is that I could be writing a piece of dialogue and by changing the response of one of the characters, it can give me another idea of ‘somewhere else to go’ within the novel. This then gets my creative juices flowing and before you know it, I have a new sub-plot or maybe even a complete change in direction to where I originally intended. In a pivotal scene in ‘The Sun Will Always Shine’ I was about to write an important sentence but then suddenly thought ‘what if I flip this around?… what if I write the total opposite of what I intended?… where would that lead?’ I was bold and did it, and it changed the whole direction of the book, which I believe made the whole thing better and a book that I am very proud of.


Any other genres you fancy trying one day?


I love watching science fiction films but have never read any books of that genre, oddly enough (apart from a short Edgar Rice Burroughs novella when I was younger). I think there is so much you could do with science fiction as you can pretty much make it up as you go along. If you want to create a character with two heads who can read people's thoughts then you can have one and nobody will think you odd for doing so. I might give this some thought in the future but will probably stick to what I know for the time being.


Research – which camp are you? Love or loathe?


I love it. I see research as a part of the whole project and enjoy it almost as much as the writing process. First I get a basic idea or theme for a story, then I think about the plot and how to develop that idea. Next I look to research the parts that I don’t know about. I like my novels to be as historically accurate as possible right down to what the characters would have eaten and especially getting dates right. Sometimes research can lead to new ideas to include within the plot. For Marco’s story in ‘The Absolution Of Otto Finkel’ he was originally going to be an officer in the Italian army. However, once I became aware of what happened in Rome during the Nazi occupation, my whole original idea for him was scrapped completely and instead he became an Italian priest.
I have read so many great books for the novel I have just started and broadening my knowledge on the subject has been a great experience.

What’s the best thing about being a writer?


The sense of achievement when you write the words ‘The End’ at the bottom of the first draft. The sense of self-pride is unbelievable and I remember dancing around my living room when it first happened. ‘Look at me’, I thought. ‘I’ve written a book… I’ve actually written a book!’ However, it took many, many edits before I was happy with the final product.


And the worst?


Reading the first draft and realising it’s probably a load of old tosh! The editing process is not half as enjoyable as writing it fresh. I also find the promotion and marketing of my work a bit of a challenge.


I’ve read two of your books now, both with war themes, why does that period of history interest you?


When I was a young boy I watched many old black and white war films on the TV and with my father’s tales of what he got up to when he served in the British Army, my interest in military history developed. I also used to like reading the old ‘Commando’ and ‘Battle’ comic books and this also added to my interest.

I am also totally fascinated with how Germany allowed the Nazis to take over their country and how they caused such utter devastation and horror throughout Europe, particularly when it all happened not long before I was born. It all seems so unreal.

I still believe that there are stories to be told from that period of history and have tried to pay homage to some of those involved. This is why I was so happy to meet Mr Halliwell and write a novel based on his experiences during the Arctic Convoys of World War Two.

(I have also very recently visited Auschwitz/Birkenau and even though I have read so much about what happened there, it now just seems like they were just words on paper. You have to actually be there, to see it, to have a full appreciation of the magnitude of the horrors that happened in those places. I had a small scene there in ‘The Absolution Of Otto Finkel’ and am pleased that I got that part historically accurate.)


Which 3 books would you take to a desert island?


It is very difficult to choose only three books to take with me but I have finally narrowed it down to the following three.


Les Miserables by Victor Hugo - probably the best piece of literature I have ever read. I read the unabridged version a few years ago and once you get used to the ‘style’ of the writing it was very hard to put down. Very moving story and just utterly brilliant. No other way to describe it!

The Shadow of The Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon - again a wonderfully written book. Set in Barcelona (the home of Zafon) it tells the story of a father who takes his young son to the ‘Cemetery of Forgotten Books’ where he is allowed to pick any book he wishes to take away with him. It then follows what happens when he tries to find out about the writer of the book he has chosen. Not long after reading it I had a trip to Barcelona and visited all the locations of the book. It has to be one of my all time favourites and I have read it more than once, which is not something I normally do. No doubt I will revisit it again in the future.

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks - probably the most beautiful book ever to be written about war. I am a huge fan of Faulks but this has to be his finest work and will no doubt be regarded as a classic in years to come.


What are your future writing plans?


I have just started writing my sixth novel which is as yet untitled. This book will be linked to ‘The Absolution Of Otto Finkel’ and will tell the story of the fifth child from the boat and what happened to him during the war and beyond. Not wishing to give any spoilers away, I have again gone into extensive research to ensure that the historical aspects of the story are correct.

I also have ideas for two more novels, one being another historical fiction story set around a Spitfire squadron during the Battle of Britain and the other a contemporary spy thriller.

However, once my current project is finished I am thinking of adapting one of my novels, the World War One drama ‘The Sun Will Always Shine’ into a screenplay. This is something new to me and so I will have to make sure that I know what I’m doing before I begin.


What important piece of advice do you live by now that you wish you had known before your debut novel was published?


I suppose it would be not to get too downhearted when you hit a mental block. When writing my first novel, I remember sitting there for ages looking at my computer screen, typing a paragraph then immediately deleting the lot… over and over again. I got to the point where I thought, ‘What’s the point? I can’t do this!’.

I realise now that I have to be in the mood to write. Some say that you should ‘write your way through’ writers’ block but I believe the opposite works for me. If I don’t feel it, then I don’t bother. I put the computer away and go and do something else. By writing rubbish it only makes me worse. However, I look back at my first book and see that, yes, in fact I can do this. I’ve done it before after all.

Eventually, sometimes in the middle of the night or when I least expect it, a phrase, or a bit of dialogue will hit me and then I will write it down quickly before it leaves my head. Before you know it, I am back at the computer, my mojo has returned and all is well again!

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Unsilenced - In Conversation with Preti Taneja

Preti Taneja - photo by Louise Haywood-Schiefer

We That Are Young is a darkly comic study of a monstrously dysfunctional family that is also so much more. Directors of Shakespeare’s plays can suggest settings in time and place the give context to the drama. But in transporting the story of King Lear to India and fleshing out the location through the rich medium of the novel, Preti Taneja has at once breathed entirely new life into a classic text, held a mirror held up to the faults and frailties of modern India, and created a powerful metaphor for greed, cruelty and corruption everywhere.

We That Are Young has been longlisted for the Jhalak Prize and shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize. Here, Catriona Troth talks to the author, Preti Taneja, about the writing of the book.


Hi, Preti. Thank you for talking to Words with Jam. You have a background is in film-making, and We That Are Young is a very visual book. Can you tell us first about your work with Ben Crowe at ERA Films? And how would you say that film-making has influenced your writing?

ERA Films was Ben’s idea - he’s a self-taught filmmaker from Whitely Bay, in the North East and he’s from a family of grassroots educators and political activists in Labour and the Co-op party. He began the collective in 2008 because he could see that small and medium sized NGOs and education organisations could use film for advocacy, but didn’t always have the in-house knowledge or capacity. We had worked together on his first short fiction film, the man who met himself, and I’d always worked in the charity sector – first at Children’s Express, (now called Headliners) training young people from disadvantaged backgrounds across the UK and Northern Ireland in media skills, where I made participatory films, and then as a journalist and editor for an NGO. One of our first commissions as ERA Films had us following the journey of books donated by publishers in the UK to libraries in Kenya, including one in a vast slum that provided a safe space for children of all communities during violent clashes in the 2009 elections. I was always a writer first but maybe filmmaking as a practice and with its own ethics made me want to write about, and in the style of the powerful, persuasive and all consuming nature of visual media, with its influence on our perceptions of the world.

It was to India that you turned for this novel based on Shakespeare’s play. Why King Lear and
why this very specific point in modern Indian history? 

I was born in the UK – my parents came here in the late 1960s and the state classifies me as ‘British Asian (Indian)’. I grew up on the white side of a small town in Hertfordshire. I did Shakespeare at school, and at home we had this other life: language, attitudes to family and money were different to my friends’. We had Indian family in different parts of the UK and went to India for holidays to see family as well. Sometimes it felt like navigating many worlds and trying to pass in each one; like putting on a uniform or costume according to what place I was in or language I was speaking. I always wanted to be a mix of all my identities, in any way I chose to express that. Don’t we all? I remember challenging my school uniform policy to be able to wear a navy blue salwar kameez instead of skirt, and having fights over being allowed to wear denim at home. They were small battles then, but they meant a lot.
Shakespeare was part of the Empire’s arsenal of cultural colonialism; Empire is at the root of why Asians live in the UK. Bringing Lear to bear on India is my way of bringing those two sides together and showing what comes out now: hybridity of people, language, attitudes. It’s a critique of how dominance impacts all of us, but out of that a literature can emerge and grow. I’m writing from the UK about India – both are part of who I am; and that can stand alongside writing about diaspora experience, alongside Indian writing from India. It’s a hybrid literature in response to UK/Indian colonial history. It’s made through syntax, aural puns, language, play between myths: by bringing different perspectives and identities together in one story. 

Once you’ve read the book, the pairing of Lear with modern India seems pre-ordained. But I am sure a great deal of craft went into making it look so inevitable. Can you tell us something about the process of creating that fit?

I’ve always read a lot about India in fiction and non fiction I got in India and in the UK, as well as different magazines and so on, online. All of that went towards my research. Some of the novel is based on childhood impressions of Delhi – a certain critique of nostalgia is there. I went to Delhi and Kashmir in 2012 to work specifically on the novel, and that involved going to as many marches and slum areas as I could to meet people, and to as many elite events as I could wangle invites into. I eavesdropped, I interviewed people in hotels at all levels of society. In Kashmir, people shared their homes and took me around some of the parts of the city hardest hit by the long conflict, which began with Partition in 1947. Everyone I spoke to was so generous with their insights. I was also able to pick up books in Srinagar I couldn’t get anywhere else, and all that went into the novel. It took about seven full drafts and infinite work on each sentence until I ran out of time and had to give the manuscript up to the publisher – about two weeks before it was actually published!

The novel format gives you space to explore the points of view of the five members of the younger generation. To begin with the novel gives a voice to, and elicits sympathy for, Gargi and Radha and Jivan – the counterparts to Shakespeare’s villains, Goneril, Regan and Edmund. But then, superficially, the narrative appears to turn against the two women in particular. Did you intend this as a way of showing how society turns on women as soon as they begin to exercise power or agency?

You’ve put it so well – that the narrative turns against the women. I wanted to tell to the story as a social tragedy, impacting all of us. You’re right - I wanted to stick to seeing the horror of patriarchal capitalism, and neo-colonialism, and the price it exacts against those trying to simultaneously conform and to escape. I couldn’t change Shakespeare’s ending – how could I when in 2012 we could see where we were heading: that there was a rise of toxic masculinity in power, and of religious fascism across the world? My experience of being silenced and watching my mother’s struggle, and my grandmother’s pain from her losses in Partition went into my decisions about the ending too.

As women we can exercise power and we have agency; some do that by fighting for space and then replicating existing structural violence and racial or class discrimination when they get through. The real threat in Lear is the idea we can join together and not do that. That sisterhood across all of that is actually possible. It’s the most terrifying thing to Lear. And so he perpetrates a ‘divide and rule’ strategy on his daughters at the beginning of the play. In the novel they are always trying to reach each other - the social world prevents them. To me, that’s where the real struggle is. There’s an awesome power rising in the world now, calling out misogyny and sexual violence – I hope the choices I make at the end of the novel – showing the danger rising – fuel readers to action, towards that.


Clever and unexpected to have Bapuji’s mother, Nanu, take on the role of Lear’s Fool – the one person who can speak truth to him. How did that choice come about?

I was actually worried it would be too obvious! Indian grandmothers are the centre of many families – and yet remain curiously invisible within and outside the home. They are expected to be the carriers of culture, expected to pass down morality in traditional families – and police other women’s moral goodness. But without any economic or reproductive value they are treated as beings to respect, then ignore. She’s the only character who could speak to the patriarch that way; he has to seem to listen, at least.


The one character you did dispose of from the play was the King of France. Did you ever toy with the idea of keeping him in the narrative, or was it always clear that he needed to go, in order to give Sita (Cordelia) autonomy and a voice of her own.

Yes, there is an early draft in which the King of France and Duke of Burgundy make an appearance. In that, Jivan watches the love test from the bunker in real time hours after he arrives in Delhi. But structurally that wasn’t working – and then Sita developed into more of an activist and the myth of her sexuality, the other characters’ fear of it; became more powerful to explore and the suitors had to go.

The Company is surely richer and more powerful than any actual company or family. Is that intended as a metaphor for the role of private wealth and power – in India and in the world at large?

It’s so fascinating to me that in the UK some readers have found the wealth outlandish – when all you have to do is think about the Ambani family, the Tata family – they are just as wealthy and have a much bigger reach than my Company – because they own international interests in petroleum, steel and manufacturing; they influence and work within political and cultural elites across the world, from the USA to the UK and Russia. The level of wealth implied in We That Are Young is real and exists – but I actually held back quite a lot – you know – there’s no gold plated elevators etc - remember Nigel Farage at Trump Towers? Except for Jivan– he’s the character who provides the Western gaze – I didn’t want the text to gawp at this wealth because it’s written from insider points of view. The metaphor of the Company is easy to track back to Empire, the British East India Company. Here it is in its latest iteration – capitalism unchecked in its power to own everything and everyone; (the word also has theatre references) so in that sense it’s a comment on the rich owning the rest of us, it’s a comment on freedom.


You keep many of the iconic plot points from King Lear – e.g. the chaining up of Kent, the blinding of Gloucester. How did you manage to use them in such a way that they retain their shock value?

It took a lot of drafts to get away from Shakespeare’s text, and yet stay near enough to suggest how that influence operates in culture. With the violence, I think it’s about building enough of a world around the characters so those moments seem organic. It’s a brutal society. Radha for example – she’s violent because she’s learned to be from her husband and father and ‘Uncle’ – she’s learned violence to survive. And she’s had great violence done to her.

The real social world seems a violent place to me though it certainly contains absolute kindness and community. What we see on the outside – who we think we know, and how people behave – what shocks us about others, and what we are capable of ourselves – and what the roots of that are in our literature, culture and mythology – that’s what I wanted to explore. 

I loved the ‘take it or leave it’ way you sprinkled the text with untranslated Hindi and other languages. Were you ever tempted to go soft on your monoglot readers and offer in-text translations or a glossary, or did you always intend them to make to work at it?

Explanations wouldn’t work in a world where multilingual Indian characters are speaking to each other and I had to be true to that. The main languages in the novel are Sanskrit, Hindi, English, Hinglish and Napurthali (which is made up). I love that you use the word ‘monoglot’ rather than ‘English’ or ‘Western’ like some have – because of course a lot of ‘English’ and ‘Western’ readers are Hindi speakers too. Lots of monoglot readers have told me, like you, that they love this aspect of the book because its so immersive, and others who speak both languages have said how glad they are to see it written like this, the way they speak, without that sense of having to explain themselves.

I’m OK with readers having to ‘work at it’ and it certainly was a political and aesthetic decision. There are so many registers of language in English – for example – a kind of dialect code that if you don’t know it, you won’t get it. I’ve had to navigate that all my life. We all do. Language and the way we use it makes us both familiar and strange to each other, and we have to be alive to that hybridity – it’s exciting and I think not knowing makes us honestly more equal.

Doubt - especially about what we think we know is fundamental to my work. That’s what I want to get to on the page and into the reading experience. Self-doubt is such a powerful emotion since it’s based in fear of our own mortality. We have to embrace it – it makes us braver, more willing and able to work things out for ourselves and find empathy for what we don’t understand.

In addition to your writing and film making, you are also the founder of Visual Verse – can you tell us a bit more about that?

Kristen Harrison and I started Visual Verse in 2013 – she knew I needed a project to get me out of a creative slump. She runs The Curved House, a small publishing and digital media company; she came up with the concept and brought in the wonderful designer Mr Pete Lewis who contributed his skills for free. Visual Verse is an ekphrastic writing prompt site – people submit 50-500 words, written in the space of an hour, in response to an image we post. We change the image each month, and kick start things with three or four pieces by lead writers I commission beforehand. Then we open it up to the public – and that means writers from all over the world. We read every submission, and post the ones we like best: we run it around our jobs, we publish writers of all ages and backgrounds, and it’s totally free. It’s four years old now and it’s gone from 30 subs a month to over 250. We’ve had kids, written books, changed countries, had health issues, got dogs, lost them – and yet it keeps going – because the community of writers is so fantastic. We publish big names, emerging voices and first-timers together. The site makes me happy every day! 

You must be still in a whirl of activity round the publishing of We That Are Young. But do you know where you might venture next?

It’s been brilliant to publish We That Are Young with such an avant garde press in the UK as Galley Beggar Press. The book has now been picked up by some incredible editors and publishers in different parts of the world. The next thing is going to be set in the UK; that’s all I can say. I’m very glad to be working on it while We That Are Young makes it’s voyage out.

Thank you, Preti.

Thank you!

You can read Catriona Troth’s review of  We That Are Young on Bookmuse here.

60 Seconds with Lisa Regan

By Gillian Hamer

Author, paralegal, former martial arts instructor, former certified nursing assistant, former bookstore manager - Lisa Regan has worn many hats in her life but writing has always been her greatest love. She has been writing novels since she was eleven years old when one of her parents brought home an old-fashioned typewriter and set it in front of her.

Lisa's first two suspense novels, Finding Claire Fletcher and Kill For You were published in 2012 and 2013. And she has gone on to have many bestsellers since, her latest Vanishing Girls is published in January 2018. 

Tell us a little about you and your writing.

I am a mother, wife and full-time paralegal living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the states. I have been writing fiction since I was eleven years old. I write every spare second I can get. I write crime thrillers, and they tend to be very gritty and dark.

What’s the best thing about being a writer?

Being able to create and just make things up. I love getting onto the page and the exhilarating feeling of freedom that comes with making up a new story or new set of characters or even a new plot twist. I get to use my imagination on a daily basis. It’s great fun.

And the worst?

I think any writer would say not being able to please all readers all the time. That’s a completely unreasonable expectation, of course, because everyone is different and people have different tastes. Writers know this intellectually, but I don’t think it stops them from wanting to knock it out of the park every time they sit down to write. The writing business is so subjective. But you always hope that readers will respond favourably to your work so if they don’t, it’s tough.

Why do you write? And why did you choose this genre?

I have always written to make sense of my world. I’ve been a bit obsessed with why people do bad things and how other people survive those bad things my entire life so all of my books are a sort of exploration of those themes. You’ll see in some of my books, I explore the bad guys as well as the good guys because I’m trying to figure out what makes them tick. I chose this genre because I’ve always been a huge mystery/suspense fan. I grew up on Scooby Doo and Nancy Drew. As a reader, I love trying to figure things out and put the puzzle pieces together. I find it just as fun as a writer.

Do you have a special writing place?

No, not really. I wouldn’t have time to sit in it even if I did. I write whenever and wherever I can. Sometimes it’s the car. Sometimes it’s waiting in line at the post office. The best place to get writing done is any doctor’s waiting room. You always have to wait forever, and it’s nice and quiet.

Which writers do you most admire and why?

So many! My all-time favourite is Karin Slaughter because I love her blend of gritty realism and deep, fleshed-out characters. I also love Dennis Lehane—again for the grit but also because he has such a unique and irreverent voice. I love Angela Marsons as well. Her books are so well-plotted with really original premises, and I think her Kim Stone lead character is so unique. I can’t get enough! Other authors I love: Jennifer Hillier, Nancy S. Thompson, Carrie Butler, Katie Mettner, Dana Mason, Michael Infinito, Jr. All of them are amazing and talented, and I can never put their books down.

If you could choose a different genre to write in for just one book – what would it be?

Oddly enough, probably fantasy. I’d love to try and create my own worlds. I’m thinking of fictional worlds like Game of Thrones and even Wizard of Oz as fantasy worlds I’ve loved. It seems like the possibilities for creating a fantasy novel would be limitless! You could go in so many different directions.

What was your inspiration behind your new release, Vanishing Girls?

I’ve been obsessed with missing persons’ cases and fictional accounts of missing persons since I was a child. I was reading about a woman who had been abducted in the U.S. and then, thankfully, she was found alive. The fiction writer in me said, “What if that wasn’t the end of the story? What if being found was just the beginning of the story?” and I kind of went from there. So you’ll see that Josie comes into contact with two young women who vanished and were later found alive, and that is just the beginning of Josie’s journey in this book.

What three tips would you offer up-and-coming authors?

Write, write, write. Write every day if you can. Just get it all out and worry about fixing it or making it good later. The best way to hone your craft is by doing it constantly!
Read. Read as much as you can. You’ll learn so very much from other authors’ work. Also, make sure to read as much as you can in the genre you hope to write in so you have a feel for what’s out there.

Don’t be afraid to destroy what you’ve written. You have to be prepared to cut scenes, cut characters, change your plot, and make all kinds of adjustments to your work if you really want to get better. I know it hurts but sometimes that scene you wrote that is the most perfect piece of prose ever to flow from your pen just doesn’t belong in the book. You must be flexible and open to change.

What are your future writing plans?

Right now I’m working on the final edits for the second Josie Quinn book, The Girl With No Name, which comes out this April and I’m at work writing the first draft of the third Josie Quinn book, The Bad Mother which is due out in August 2018.

Find our more about Lisa here....           

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In Conversation with S.E. Lynes

By Gillian Hamer.

Hello, Susie, and welcome! Can you tell us a little about you and your writing?

Sure. I’m married with three kids and as well as writing I teach creative writing at Richmond Adult Community College. I used to run four courses, but since getting published, I now run two: Creative Writing for Beginners, and Critical Workshop, which is for more advanced writers. I used to write children’s stories, which I did when I lived in Rome and when my children were little. Two of those stories have since been published in Italy, which is lovely.

About twelve years ago, when we moved to London from Rome, I took a creative writing course at Richmond College called How To Write a Novel in a Month, taught by the fabulous Sara Bailey, author of the novel, Dark Water. That course taught me to write without fear, and to stop criticising myself constantly. It was all about producing quantity not quality and I thought – ah! Quantity I can do! From there I went on to study for an MA in creative writing at Kingston University and started teaching at the college, just one course a week at first. Ten years later, in 2016, my debut novel, VALENTINA, was published by a small independent publisher called Blackbird Digital Books, run by the extraordinary luminary, Stephanie Zia, and it went on to be a success both critically and commercially. I then signed a three-book deal with Bookouture and they published MOTHER in November, 2017. My third novel, THE PACT, is out very soon - 27th February 2018.

You had huge success last year with your first novel with Bookouture, MOTHER, how did that feel?

After VALENTINA, MOTHER was another level due to Bookouture’s immense standing on the publishing world stage. It felt great, just great. The thought of the story reaching and affecting so many people is surreal and joyful and strange and wonderful. The best bit by far is having readers contact me to tell me that they were utterly absorbed in the story and that the story stayed with them for a long time afterwards.

I particularly love it when they notice the writing because I spend a lot of time trying to make the sentences flow by reading my work aloud and I try to use language in a beautiful way if I can, without resorting to purple prose, so that the reader will enjoy the whole experience of the book, not just try and guess ahead, which always seems to me to be a shame – as a reader I like to simply immerse myself in the story and the writing and let myself be carried forward. It’s important to me not just to tell a story but to tell it in an original way if I can and to explore larger themes through smaller specifics.

What was the inspiration behind the novel?

A friend of mine who is a broadcaster was going to interview a very successful businessman. As she left, she mentioned that his success wasn’t the most interesting thing about him, it was that he had sought out his birth mother and … something had happened, which I can’t tell you here for fear of spoilers.

His story was a very happy one but I write psychological thrillers and am bound always to ask, what if it hadn’t worked out so well? This friend also told me about a friend of hers who had found out he was adopted when he discovered a letter in his mother’s handbag. It was from a convent and the letter began: we write to inform you of a baby boy, born only yesterday. And I used that line in the book.

You have a background in journalism, is that a help or hindrance in novel writing?

I have a background in radio journalism as a features programme maker for the BBC. The main thing about that job is getting the opportunity to talk to people from all walks of life – from anthropologists to wild boar farmers, from ice cream makers to old ladies who make scarves from dog hair. People love to be asked about what they do, as I am loving answering these questions!

I think in terms of my writing, my background provided me with a great many people and stories. I have also lived in several countries and have met an awful lot of people in my life from backgrounds very different to my own. I really do love meeting people. I have no real interest in status or wealth or any of those things – I like to find out what makes people tick and have realised that none of us really know what we’re doing, or whether we’re doing it right; we’re just muddling through. I try to present characters who are as complicated and flawed as the rest of us.

What attracts you to your genre of psychological thrillers?

The thing that draws me to this genre is that, at its best, it explores the dark space between what we think we know about the world and the world as it actually is. That dark space terrifies me. How do any of us know that our perception of even the simplest event is anywhere near accurate? You have only to hear two people relate the same story – how differently they tell it!
Sixty percent of communication is non-verbal – we can sense tension, atmospheres, dishonesty, hate, attraction … how? That something hovering outside of our senses. I love to explore characters and situations where the truth is in that place, somewhere just out of reach.

Would you like to write in a different genre one day? If so, what and why?

I would quite like to write a comedy of some kind, maybe about modern love in all its forms or about parenting in this paranoid world of social media we live in. I use humour in day to day life to cover up for my own pretty impressive social awkwardness and anxiety. I like to send myself up after I’ve performed some heroically painful interaction such as explaining my entire life to the waiter who is just trying to take my coffee order. I’m not sure who said this but art is a process of holding up one’s humiliations to the light and making them shine. I have so much personal material of this type.

What themes interest you as a writer?

What it means to be a human being, how difficult it is to be a human being. The need to love and to be loved. Love, both platonic and romantic. Trust and betrayal. Friendship. The outsider, always the outsider – why is the outsider so popular in fiction? Because we all feel like the outsider at least sometimes. I’m interested in the different ways we are mad and believe that we all are, it’s just a question of how – and that this is why your best friends make you feel sane, and like your reactions to things are perfectly normal. This latest theme underlies the book I’m working on at the moment.

Your follow-up novel, THE PACT, is out next month – how did you cope with the difficult second/third novel?

THE PACT is my third novel, not counting the three in the drawer I wrote during the rejection years, and I wrote it very fast indeed. I wanted to look at parenting and social media, real danger vs the perception of danger. In the information age, it appears that our children live in such a dangerous world and yet they have a lot less physical freedom so should, in theory, be safer. Kids don’t fall down wells but they do suffer increasing mental health problems. I wanted to ask if we are protecting our children too much and in so doing, effectively making them less safe, less able to develop those all-important street smarts.

Kids are aware of their appearance more than ever before due to the likes of Instagram and Facebook – does this mean we are raising a generation of narcissists for whom appearance is everything? I wanted to look at how difficult it is to parent right now and ask questions about whether our children are in more or less danger than before and how we go about keeping them safe, if indeed we can.

THE PACT is about three strong female characters, a mother and her daughter, who live with the mother’s sister. Very soon after beginning the book, I realised that in their alternative family unit, these women formed a triangle, and that it was unclear who lay at the base supporting the one at the top. I still don’t know but what was clear was that it was in this triangle that they found their stability, their strength and ultimately, their redemption.

If you could give three top tips to newbie writers – what would they be?

• Write. Write your head off. Don’t worry if it’s no good at first, it has no right to be, just keep going.
• Don’t compare your first efforts to the books you enjoy – what you’re reading is usually the result of about ten years constant work.
• It is all about the hours you put in. Work makes the writing better and generates ideas. Talent and inspiration are a small part of what it takes.

How would you like to see your writing career developing over the next 10 years – what other writing goals would you like to achieve?
 

I would love for my books to be translated all over the world – especially into the languages of countries where I’ve lived. I would love for one of my books to be made into a film or a television drama. I would love simply to be allowed to keep doing this and to have enough time outside the work to be with my family, catch up with my pals and to go to literary events and meet readers. I love meeting readers.

Learn more about Susie and her books here ....

Facebook: http://goo.gl/fvGGpK

Twitter:     http://goo.gl/WCuhh3

iTunes:      https://goo.gl/hZbQGQ

60 Seconds with Carol Lovekin

By Gillian Hamer

(c) Janey Stevens

Carol is a writer, feminist & flâneuse based in west Wales. She writes contemporary fiction threaded with ghosts, Welsh Gothic and magic.

SNOW SISTERS, was published on 21 September, 2017 by Honno, the Welsh Women's Press. It has been chosen by the Welsh Books Council as their October Book of the Month.

GHOSTBIRD, her first novel, was published in March 2016. The book was chosen as Waterstones Wales and Welsh Independent Bookshops 'Book Of The Month' for April 2016. It was longlisted for the Guardian 'Not the Booker' prize 2016 and nominated for the Guardian Readers' Book of the Year 2016.

Welcome, Carol, tell us a little about you and your writing. 

I live in west Wales in a small flat overlooking the hills which, more often than not, are shrouded in mist. I’m a feminist and something of a flâneuse. My stories are rooted in Wales and concern the nature of family relationships, in particular those between sisters, and mothers and daughters. I lace them with birds, secrets, old houses and a touch of Welsh Gothic.

What’s the best thing about being a writer?

Waking up each day knowing exactly what the plan is. And being published – twice – is a lovely bonus!

And the worst?

There is no worst! I enjoy every aspect of writing.

Do you have a special writing place?

I’m fortunate to have a spare bedroom which I use as a study.

Which writers to you most admire and why?

I have a particular fondness for Virginia Woolf and never grow tired of reading her diaries and letters. I admire the stylishness of these writers in particular: Edna O’Brien, Daphne du Maurier, A S Byatt, Eimear McBride, Amy Sackville, Alice Hoffman and Harper Lee. So many writers to admire – far too many to list.

If you could choose a different genre to write in for just one book – what would it be?

Having found my niche as a writer, I have no inclination to write in a different genre. I’ve played with stories for children but it’s a unique discipline; I don’t think I have the patience.

What was your inspiration behind your latest novel, Snow Sisters?

Initially, a hankering to write snow scenes! One of the main protagonists in the story – the younger sister, Meredith – was a left-over character from a novel I was never meant to write. I knew I wasn’t done with her and when the notion of a Victorian ghost came (from wherever these ideas do) I knew Meredith, with her insatiable curiosity and courage, was the key to unlocking the ghost’s voice.

What three tips would you offer up-and-coming authors?

Read everything: widely, critically and insatiably. Write every day – even if it’s only a note on the back of your hand – and never, ever use the word ‘aspiring’ about yourself. If you are writing, published or not, you are a writer. 

You can follow Carol here:

Twitter: twitter.com/carollovekin
Website: carollovekinauthor.com
Facebook: tinyurl.com/y79ezaxd

One Woman's Struggle in Iran - a memoir from Nasrin Parvaz

by Catriona Troth

Many Prisoners in One Room by Nasrin Parvaz

In 1979, Nasrin Parvaz returned from England, where she had been studying, and became a member of a socialist party in Iran fighting for a non-Islamic state in which women had the same rights as men. Three years later, at the age of 23, she was betrayed by a comrade and arrested by the regime’s secret police.

Nasrin spent the next eight years in Iran’s prison system. She was systematically tortured, threatened with execution, starved and forced to live in appalling, horribly overcrowded conditions. One Woman’s Struggle is both an account of what happened to her during those eight years, and evidence that her spirit was never broken.

In 1990 she was released and in 1993 she fled to England, where she has been a client of Freedom From Torture. She has given talks on the violation of human rights in Iran, both in Farsi and in English, in a number of countries. She has spoken at Southbank Centre (2015 and 2016), Bare Lit Festival (2016 and 2017), and for organizations such as Amnesty International, Cambridge PEN and Freedom From Torture.

Nasrin’s prison memoir was published in Farsi in 2002, and in Italian in 2006. The English edition is now seeking support on the crowd-funded publishing site, Unbound.

One Woman’s Struggle is not an easy book to read. The opening chapters, which detail her interrogation under torture, are devastating. This is the reality of which dystopian depictions of totalitarianism, like V for Vendetta, merely skim the surface. Small wonder that many break under torture. Far more extraordinary are those who find within themselves the strength to endure.

Once the interrogations end, the hardships and degradations of daily prison life begin. The dirtiest trick of totalitarianism is to persuade its followers that those who it oppresses are no longer entirely human. The regime in Iran played this trick with brutal effectiveness. But Nasrin’s memoir also shows how the humanity of the women in prison nonetheless survived. It is a story of friendship and mutual support, of how the women drew strength from one another and found endless small ways to show kindness and even find tiny specks of joy.

The book begins and ends with fleeting encounter, when Nasrin recognises one of her tormentors in a London supermarket. The guard is terrified, but Nasrin turns and walks out into the spring sunshine.

Some things in Iran have changed since Nasrin was released. The interrogation centre where she was first held has been turned into a museum. School children are taken there on tours, but they are told that it was only used in the Shah’s time. Other things remain. In an echo of an incident described in the book, when international ambassadors visited Evin Prison earlier this year, political prisoners were hidden away where they could not be seen.

This book, however, is not simply about the prison system in Iran. It is about oppression – and especially the oppression of women – wherever it takes place. It deserves to stand with Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man as an indictment of cruelty, brutality and the dehumanising of fellow human beings.

Here Nasrin talks to Catriona Troth about her hopes for the book, for Iran and for women the world over.

Prison by Nasrin Parvaz

When you started writing One Woman’s Struggle, did you imagine it would be published one day, or was it initially something you did for yourself, as part of the healing process?

I started writing it to publish it. Publishing was my only aim as my prime aim was to communicate. My personal experience is not just personal but is part of the universal history of oppression and struggle.


How did Freedom from Torture and the Write to Life group help you?

I received therapy from FFT for a few years and my therapist was really kind and helpful. She helped me in other areas of life, as well as in the therapy room. For example, I wanted to study psychology and she helped me to find a bursary, so I only had to pay half the price of the course. Things like this that I wasn’t aware of!

When Sonja Linden started the Write to Life group, I was one of her first clients and I must say, if it wasn’t for Sonja, and later on, Hubert Moore who was my mentor, I might have not continued writing! English was not my first language and I was trying to learn it by exchanging one-to-one lessons with people who wanted to learn Farsi.

The Write to Life group helped me in many different ways – including learning how to put my prison experience into words and how to write a story.

The book has already been published in Farsi. Why is it important for you that it is published in English as well?

Actually I first started to write it in English, but half way into it I realised it wasn’t good enough, so I began to write it in Farsi. I want to tell the world what is happening in Iran and to tell them that the government is carrying out crimes such as imprisoning and executing people for what they believe in – or what they don’t believe in.

Because of my personal experience when I started to write my book, I could only see that torture and execution were happening in Iran; but now I can see that this is happening everywhere. Some might say it’s not happening in western countries, then I’ll tell them that I see it whenever I walk down the road. Yes, the homeless people living in the streets of London and other cities of the world are subject to physical and mental torture. I no longer see that torture - as a means of crushing people - is something that happens only in prison, but as something that is part of the world’s system. Witnessing something so dehumanising is psychological torture for passers-by: it is for me. Every time I see a homeless person, the same feelings of frustration and helplessness I experienced in prison when I was being tortured or my cellmates were being beaten come over me and I feel depressed. 

 

As much as the book is an indictment of oppression, it is a celebration of the strength of women and women’s friendship. How do you think that spirit survives when everything in the system is designed to crush it?

The strength of women and our friendship was one of the ways in which prisoners put up resistance to that system. The Iranian women’s resistance started in 1979, when only a few days after Khomeini arrived in Iran, he announced women should wear the chador – which is like a burqa, except that the woman’s face is uncovered. The next day, on the 8th of March women poured into the streets of Tehran and many other towns. It’s true that the regime eventually forced women to cover their hair; but it took three years till they made it a law and they couldn’t put women into sacks; head scarves became compulsory and nowadays, women are arrested if they don’t observe this law.

Unfortunately so many men have not supported women’s struggle against this sexual apartheid and actively benefit from it.

How optimistic are you for the future of Iran, and particularly for the role of women in the country?

I can’t separate Iran from the rest of the world. We all are in the same boat that is running fast with the current towards a future full of more misery, unless we do something about it. In Iran – the same as in the rest of the world - we need a just system that safeguards freedom and equality.

Regarding the women of Iran, I must say that they haven’t given up their struggle for freedom and equality with men. Since marriage gives all the rights such as divorce and custody to men, for many years it has been common practice for some women to ask their husbands to sign papers giving both parties equal rights. Many of the new generation don’t even bother with marriage and simply live together, even though this is illegal.

What is the most important message you would like people to derive from the book?

That we need to struggle for a just world: a world without torture and execution.

Thank you, Nasrin. I hope many people will support your book and enable it to be published! It deserves to be widely read.

To pledge support for Nasrin's book, please visit the Unbound site here, where you can also watch a video interview with Nasrin.

You can follow Nasrin on Twitter at @NasrinParvaz

Crime, Calcutta and the End of the Raj - interview with author Abir Mukherjee

Abir Mukherjee is the author of historical crime fiction novels A Rising Man and A Necessary Evil, both set in Calcutta in the aftermath of WWI. A third novel, Smoke and Ashes, is due out next year, and he has just received a contract for another two. 

Here he talks to Catriona Troth about his inspirations, his research and his plans for the series.

As someone who began as an applied mathematician, I am always fascinated by others who have made a less-than-conventional journey into writing. Can you tell us a bit about how you got started?

Thanks so much for having me on your blog!

I suppose it was a bit of a mid-life crisis. I’m an accountant by profession and had spent the past twenty years in finance. I was thirty-nine, hurtling towards forty and I thought, maybe there might be more to life than accounting.

Then I saw an interview with Lee Child on BBC Breakfast where he talked about how, at the age of forty, he started writing, and I thought, why not? I’d always wanted to write a book but had never had the confidence, and anyway, it seemed safer than other methods of dealing with my stage of life, like buying a motorbike and piercing my ear.

I started writing A Rising Man in September 2013 and a few weeks later I came across details of the Telegraph Harvill Secker Crime Writing Competition, looking for new and unpublished crime writers. The judges were looking for the first five thousand words of a novel, together with a two page synopsis of the whole thing. The only other stipulation was that, in keeping with Harvill Secker’s focus on the best of international crime fiction, there be some ‘international element’ to the submission. By this point I’d already written about ten thousand words, and as the plot was set in Calcutta, it seemed as though what I was writing was tailor made for the competition, so I tidied up the first few chapters, wrote the synopsis and sent off my entry. I really didn’t expect to win.


Why Calcutta and why this particular period of Indian history?

I find the period of British rule in India a particularly fascinating place and time, unique in many respects and one that’s been overlooked, especially in terms of crime fiction. I think that period in history has contributed so much to modern India and Britain, and it was a time that saw the best and the worst of both peoples.

I made a conscious decision to set the series in Calcutta, not just because it was the place my parents came from, but it’s a fascinating city, unique in many respects and in the period that the series is set, it was the premier city in Asia, as glamorous and exotic a location as anywhere in the world. But it was a city undergoing immense change and it was the centre of the freedom movement, a hotbed of agitation against British rule. The history of Calcutta is the history of the British in India. Their presence still cries out from its streets, its buildings and in its outlook.

It would have been harder for me to write authentically while setting it in another Indian city. While I know Bombay and Delhi quite well, I don’t speak the language. Also, I don’t think either city had the same hothouse atmosphere that Calcutta had during the period.


Your books are brim-full of period and location detail. How do you go about researching the background to your books? And conversely, how do you avoid the trap of getting so lost in the research that you forget about the writing?

My research tends to happen in several phases. In the first stage, I’ll do a lot of general reading about the time I’m hoping to write about – in the next book, Smoke and Ashes, which comes out next June, I knew I wanted to set the book in 1921, so I started my general research on that year in India. It turns out that 1921 was the year that Gandhi launched his first all-out non-cooperation campaign and that seemed really interesting to me, so I decided to set the book against that backdrop. I then narrowed my research to the effects of that campaign, both on the Raj and on Indians, so that I could get the background to the book to be as authentic as possible.

At the same time, I’m working on the plot, and deciding how to enmesh it into the period and the setting. I’ll then start writing the first draft, and that is where the next stage of research comes in. At this point it tends to be very specific, micro-issues, that are fundamental to the authenticity of the action. For example there is scene at a fairground in the new book and I needed to make sure I knew what sort of stalls and entertainments there would have been at a fair in India at that time.

You’re right though, sometimes there is the temptation to get bogged down in the research and then put as much of it as I can in the story. But then I remember that no one is likely to be interested in intricacies of things like the Calcutta sewer system.

You have two brilliant main characters – Captain Sam Wyndham, British war veteran, newly arrived in Calcutta, and Surendrenath (Surrender-Not) Banerjee, his Harrow-educated, Bengali detective sergeant. But it is Sam whom you chose as your point of view character and the voice of the narrative. Why him and not Surrender-Not?

There were a couple of reasons for that. Firstly, I needed my narrator to have access to all levels of society – from the Viceroy all the way down to the poorest sections of Calcutta society, and at that time, an Indian policeman, even one educated at Harrow and Cambridge, just wouldn’t have been able to access the British parts of that society.

At the same time, and more fundamentally, I just didn’t feel I could write authentically from an Indian’s perspective, even though my parents and heritage are Indian. I’d like to write something from Surrender-not's perspective – maybe one day when I’m more confident in my writing.

You say in your Author’s Note that A Necessary Evil was inspired by the Begums of Bhopal. Can you tell us a bit more about them, and how they triggered the kernel of your second novel?

Between 1819 and 1926 four Muslim women rulers reigned over Bhopal, the second largest Muslim state of India, despite staunch opposition from powerful neighbors and male claimants. The British East India Company also opposed female rule in Bhopal until the Begums quoted Queen Victoria as their model and inspiration.

As I researched the period, I found that these women, and others like them in other kingdoms, seem to have been very influential and somewhat forgotten by history. Often, while the maharajahs became debauched, it was the their maharanis and princesses who became the true keepers of the traditions of the kingdoms. I found this fascinating and wanted to make it a part of my story.


The line that made me laugh out loud came when Sam tells Surrender-not that Indian women are just as capable of murdering their spouses as English women. “Not Bengali women, sir,” Surrender-not replies, “They just browbeat their husbands into submission. I doubt the need for murder would arise.” Reminded me of a couple of friends of ours! I have a feeling there might be a story behind this, if you’re willing to share.

Of course!

Rather than one story, though, it’s more an amalgam of many examples I’ve seen over the years, both from my parents' generation and my own. It might be because Bengal has historically been a pretty liberal part of India, where women have played a more equal role in society than their peers in other parts of the country, be it in terms of education or workplace opportunities. Whatever the reason, Bengali women can be fearsome!

In terms of stories, probably the best illustration is the tale of the weekly poker game which my father and some of his friends used to hold most Saturdays. One of his Bengali friends who lived close by, was given strict instructions by his wife that he was not to attend as he tended to lose money most of the time. So he gave her his word that he wouldn’t. Instead he told her to go up to bed for a nap while he tidied the house. Being a clever chap, however, he simply switched on the hoover, and leaving it running, he left the house and came over to ours for the card game. Half an hour later, there was a terrible banging on the front door and an irate auntie looking for her husband, who by this time was fleeing out the back way.

I believe you have some pretty long-reaching plans for this series. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Ideally I’d like to look at the whole period of British India between the end of the First World War and Indian Independence in 1947, which is almost thirty years. I want to see how the relationships between the British and the Indians evolve during this period, and I think that will be mirrored in the changing relationship between Sam and Surrender-not.

And I think Ian Rankin has told you that you really ought to write something contemporary as well. Any temptation to follow his advice? And if so, what might you write about?

I would love to write something set in the present day, looking at issues around radicalisation of Muslim youth or some of the other problems facing British society. The problem really is one of time. I’m still working full time and my publishers, Penguin Random House have just given me a new contract for another two Sam Wyndham novels. I’d like to think that once I’ve written them, I’ll be able to take a break to write something more contemporary.

Thank you, Abir. Looking forward to reading Smoke and Ashes as soon as it comes out!

You can read Catriona Troth's reviews of A Rising Man  and A Necessary Evil on BookMuseUK.



Abir Mukherjee grew up in the West of Scotland. The son of Indian immigrants, A Rising Man, his debut novel, was inspired by a desire to learn more about a crucial period in Anglo-Indian history that seems to have been almost forgotten. The first in a series starring Captain Sam Wyndham and ‘Surrender-not’ Banerjee. It won the Harvill Secker/Daily Telegraph crime writing competition, was a Waterstones Thriller of the Month and is currently shortlisted for both the CWA Gold and CWA Historical Daggers, and also for the HWA Debut Crown 2017. His second novel, ‘A Necessary Evil’ is out now.

You can follow him on Twitter at @radiomukhers

In Conversation with Lisa Jewell

By JJ Marsh

If I were a bookseller, I’d say you’re hard to categorise. Now you’ve gone and made it even harder with Then She Was Gone. Do you purposely try to stay out of a box/ off a particular shelf? 

I don’t really do anything on purpose. I often wish I did. Then She Was Gone has been such a brilliant success and not only that, almost universally liked by everyone who’s read it that I would love to be able to purposely write something that could replicate that reception. But it’s impossible. Books are so nebulous and I don’t plan or plot so really I just start at point A and end up at point B with no real idea how I got there. I think my publishers have found it quite awkward publishing me at times. I have had a sense over the years of oh God, what have you brought us this time; back to the drawing board everyone! But as a team we are trying very hard now to stay on one shelf which means, I think, that I will need to keep killing off characters so that I can be published in the thriller genre.

Since your arrival onto the literary scene in the 90s, your life has changed in all kinds of ways. How does your own personal development trigger your work?

When I wrote my first novel I was newly divorced and newly in love with someone else, I was twenty seven and kind of directionless. But incredibly, deeply happy. So although I have always loved dark themes – I love reading books about serial killers and skipped quite happily through American Psycho – at that time I was more hormonally and emotionally geared towards writing light-hearted romances. Then I got married again, had a baby, lost my mother, had another baby, went through a long period of time when my husband was physically disabled and of course I got older and more experienced and braver in many ways. So yes, life does definitely inform and shape the things you want to write about and getting older gives you the confidence to push boundaries.

Looking back over my well-thumbed paperbacks, you seem to be less of a ‘write what you know’ author and more of a ‘write what you’re curious about’. A fair assessment?

This is mainly true with some grand exceptions. After The Party was a very closely fictionalised account of the pressures a second baby brought to bear onto my own marriage, Joy’s marriage to George in Vince & Joy was almost 90% the story of my own first marriage and The Girls was set in a communal garden exactly like the one I live on in London. But generally, yes, I feel a sense of curiosity about something and then find a way to explore that curiosity via story-telling. Obsessive hoarding disorder was a perfect example of that. I looked through a dirty window into a hoarded house one afternoon and thought; god, who on earth lives in there, how did they end up living like this and what impact must it have had on their family? Then I went home and started writing The House We Grew Up In.

One characteristic I associate with you and your writing is empathy. Not only do you identify and understand some difficult characters, but you ask your readers to do the same.

Yes, absolutely. I feel sad, for example, that a lot of readers didn’t see the two sides to Lily in I Found You. I tried so hard to make her nuanced and not just a two dimensional cold-hearted witch. But the majority of readers disliked her and found her gaucheness and abruptness impossible to get past. I thought she was really funny and just trying her hardest in a terrible situation in a strange country with no cultural cues to help her. And this was why I took the reader straight into the heart of Noelle in Then She Was Gone. I couldn’t see the point of writing about a person doing a terrible thing unless you could make the reader at least attempt to understand why they might have done it. Otherwise you’re just creating characters to move the story along, not to give the story layers. That seems a wasted opportunity to me.

The trauma behind Then She Was Gone must have put you, as a parent, through the wringer. Did you cry in the coffee shop while you were writing?

No, the traumatic bits didn’t make me cry. I’m pretty hardcore when it comes to things like that and if I can read a book about Fred and Rose West and what their victims went through without crying or feeling traumatised then I can most definitely write about a made-up thing happening to a made-up person without finding it too gruelling. But the epilogue was a last-minute decision. I wrote it after my first big edit of the book and I still cry every time I read the last line.

You’ve got a pretty disciplined routine of 1000 words a day and you say you’re not a plotter, more an explorer of ideas. Do think the real alchemy is in the first draft or the editing?

It’s very much a mix of the two. The first draft is the world you’ve created and if you get that right then you know you’re onto something. The edit is where you make sense of the world, put it all into the right order. I love editing. I don’t do much as I go – apart from the occasional really dramatic excising of thousands of words or a whole storyline – but once I get the manuscript back from my editor covered in post notes and paperclips I get really intensely into it to the point of not noticing what time it is. And yes, that is when the magic really happens.

It’s coming up to 20 years since Ralph’s Party was published. In what ways has the world of publishing changed over two decades, in your view? And is it better for readers and authors?

Publishing has become much more risk averse. No one, for example, would have picked EL James’s 50 Shades books from the slush pile these days. That only got published because of the huge online success it had had. I think of the late 90s, when my first book was bought and published, as a kind of heyday for publishing – there was a lot of money flying about and publishers were really keen to try new things and see what took off. Nowadays they tend to want to replicate what’s gone before and pay less when they do take a risk. But the book world as a whole is incredible right now – social media has brought authors, readers and publishers together into the same sphere and there are so many forums for people to share their passions. Being a reader has become much less of solitary pastime and more of a wonderful universal experience.

E.B. White in Charlotte's Web said “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer”. I suspect you’d disagree, as you have a wonderful circle of authors as friends. How important is it to have an understanding group of writing mates for you?

It is hugely, enormously important and again, a situation for me which has been facilitated greatly by the internet and social media. When I was first published and the internet was quite a fresh, new place, a writer’s husband set up something for a group of us called a ‘chat room’! We’re still on it, twenty years later and out of that core group of people have come more groups and sub-groups and every time you do an event you’re meeting new authors and they get absorbed into your circle and we all use each for support and reassurance and wine and nights out and it is just brilliant. My writer friends are one of the best – and most unexpected - things to have come out of my career. And no, there is no competition between us. Readers buy up to 50 books a year so there’s plenty of the market to go round and the more good books there are out there the better for all of us.

Last question - best of three. Which book affected you most as a teenager? What’s been your best read of the year? Which book is your comfort read?

I barely read as a teenager. I just listened to the radio and wrote letters to pen-pals. But in my pre-teen years I read like an animal, anything and everything, under the covers into the early hours. My biggest passion then was Agatha Christie – I read four of her books a week and once I’d exhausted her oeuvre I sort of stopped reading until I was in my 20s. My best read this year I suspect I have not read yet as I have five amazing books lined up for a week in Tenerife in October all of which I am expecting to completely blow me away. But thus far I have adored The Vanishing Act of Audrey Wilde by Eve Chase and, in the thriller genre, Here and Gone by Haylen Beck. I don’t re-read books so I don’t have a comfort read. If I were to re-read something from the past it would probably be The Country Life by Rachel Cusk; so incredibly funny.


Then She Was Gone is a Sunday Times Number 1 Bestseller – available now (Century Hardback, £12.99)


Read JD Smith's review on Bookmuse

In Conversation with Sam Blake (Vanessa Fox O’Loughlin)

By Gillian Hamer.

Sam Blake is a pseudonym for Vanessa Fox O'Loughlin, the founder of The Inkwell Group publishing consultancy and the popular national writing resources website Writing.ie. 

She is Ireland's leading literary scout who has assisted many award winning and bestselling authors to publication. 

Vanessa has been writing fiction since her husband set sail across the Atlantic for eight weeks and she had an idea for a book.


Hello and welcome! Can you tell us a little about you and your writing?

Hello, and thank you for having me! I write crime as Sam Blake - the first in the Cat Connolly trilogy LITTLE BONES was published in 2016 and was a bestseller in Ireland, it was followed by IN DEEP WATER which is out in the UK in February 2018 and the third in the trilogy NO TURNING BACK will be out in Ireland in 2018 and in the UK in 2019.

Congratulations on the huge success of your debut crime novel LITTLE BONES – how has your life changed since its release?

LITTLE BONES was far more successful than I ever expected, it was No 1 in Ireland for 4 weeks and stayed in the top 10 for another 4 which was totally amazing. Now I get to be Sam Blake as well as me and it’s incredible to meet someone who has read it and loved my books! That never ceases to surprise me!

What was the inspiration behind the novel?

Cat Connolly is a twenty-four-year-old detective who is based in Dun Laoghaire just south of Dublin City and LITTLE BONES is about the story that unfolds when she finds a baby’s bones hidden in the hem of a wedding dress.

Stephen King talks about story being the collision of two unrelated ideas – the ideas behind Little Bones weren’t entirely unrelated but they collided one sunny Sunday afternoon as I was driving back from a Readers Day that author Sarah Webb and I had programmed at a hotel in Dublin Airport. I put on the radio and a documentary was starting on RTE about Kerry born playwright George Fitzmaurice. Fitzmaurice is best remembered for his play The Country Dressmaker which he submitted to the Abbey Theatre. It was such a success that it rescued the theatre after the problems of John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in the same year. Born in 1877, Fitzmaurice became introverted and isolated as he grew older and died in 1963, in a rented upstairs room in No.3 Harcourt Street, Dublin. He was aged 86 years and left no will and few personal belongings – apart from a copy of every play he had ever published and a few in draft form, which were in a suitcase under his bed.

It was Fitzmaurice’s suitcase that caused the collision of ideas.

Several years previously I’d watched an RTE TV documentary about a young Irish girl who was living in lodgings in Manchester. Belinda Agnes Regan discovered she was pregnant before she left Ireland but, unmarried, had no choice but to hide the pregnancy. She delivered the baby herself, incredibly in a room she shared with another much younger girl who apparently slept through her ordeal. Wrapping the baby in a shawl, she crept to the bathroom but when she returned, the baby wasn’t breathing. Hiding the body in a suitcase, she left it under her bed, returning home to Ireland to talk to the family priest. While she was away, the body was found by her land lady and she was arrested for infanticide.

These two stories, quite separately lit a light bulb in my head and on the drive home I started wondering about dress makers and what would happen if the bones of the baby had ended up in a dress – a wedding dress – the crucial thing that Belinda Agnes Regan must have yearned for, for nine long months. At that point I had no idea who owned the dress, or how the bones got there, or WHY…that was the start!

Why did you choose to write in the genre of crime fiction?

I’ve always read crime and I’m fascinated by puzzles and what makes people tick – why they act and react in a particular way. I think most writers write what they read, and I love a good story that keeps me hooked until the end and then surprises me. That’s what I try to do in my books.

Who are your favourite crime authors and is there one in particular you would list as your inspiration?

I adore Lee Child, Michael Connolly and Karin Slaughter. They have all been huge influences. I love the fast action of the Reacher books and the characterisation and complex stories in Michael Connolly and Karin Slaughter’s books. Good stories are all about unforgettable characters and all of these writers characters stay with you. I love Alex Barclay’s Ren Bryce for the same reason.



Why did you choose to write under a pseudonym?

My full name is Vanessa Fox O’Loughlin which is far too long for a book cover and people outside Ireland struggle to pronounce O’Loughlin. The key for any author is that readers can remember their name long enough to find them in a library or on a bookshop shelf - Sam Blake is MUCH nice easier one to remember. Being a B, I’m in great company on the shelf and there is a theory that men don’t like reading books by women, so Sam adds an additional layer of subterfuge...

Would you like to write in a different genre one day? If so, what and why?

Years ago I wrote a romance novel – with lots of intrigue – called TRUE COLOURS, I was between crime novels and had an idea about an interior designer and her lost love. It got rave rejections from publishers when my then agent submitted it, but now I know it wasn’t a big enough story to be a breakout novel, so it didn’t get picked up. It seemed silly to leave it in a drawer so I self-published it, launching it free on World Book Day in 2012 (I think!) it had 25,000 downloads and shot into the top ten in contemporary fiction when it switched to paid, which was rather unexpected to say the least! It definitely wiped its face in terms of costs.

Could you give us a condensed version of your route to publication?

I started writing in 1999 when my husband went sailing across the Atlantic for eight weeks. Obviously I thought the first book would be a bestseller (it was truly awful – the opening chapter is about a doctor returning to Dublin to commit suicide and he’s dead for the whole book) but despite being rejected by everyone on the planet, the bug had truly bit and I kept writing.

By the time I got to book 3 I knew I was getting better but I needed to learn more about the craft of writing. My husband was in the Irish Police force (Gardai) and worked shifts - I couldn’t get to a creative writing evening class so I decided to set up my own intensive one day fiction writing workshops – all facilitated by best-selling authors. I learned loads!

Inkwell grew into a publishing consultancy and I kept writing – my now agent is Simon Trewin from WME who I was working with doing events and as a scout, but whom I had forgotten to tell that I wrote myself. One day I mentioned it over coffee in London and he wanted to see my book immediately (bit of a scary moment) Thankfully he loved the book, which was then called THE DRESSMAKER. He had lunch with Mark Smith from Bonnier on a Thursday, sent him the book, and Bonnier made an offer for three books on Friday!

If you could give three top tips to newbie writers – what would they be?

Just keep writing – best advice I was ever given from Sarah Webb

Finish your book – Liz Nugent’s top tip

And: Read, read, read. Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. Edit, edit, edit. – the fabulous Monica McInerney’s advice

And read On Writing by Stephen King (sorry that’s four) – EVERY published writer had read it and has it on their shelf. I could quote from it for ever!

Finally, your next book ‘IN DEEP WATER’ will soon be released - how tough was it writing the ‘difficult second book’?
Not as tough as writing book 3! I had an idea for IN DEEP WATER but had a couple of false starts because I’ve now discovered I need to get the crime exactly right before I begin (I know that sounds rather obvious) – once I knew what had happened and how, I flew through writing it.

I know this sounds mad, but as an unpublished writer you have the huge luxury of time to get your first book right – once you’re under contract that all changes and you have to speed up! Because LITTLE BONES was in fairly good shape, I had more time for IN DEEP WATER and really enjoyed coming up with the twist at the end. My editor wasn’t very keen on the multiple points of view that were in the original draft, so that meant a good bit of rewriting – IN DEEP WATER is a much more linear story than LITTLE BONES, but keeps you hooked.

When I came to write book 3, I only had a few months to come up with an idea and get stuck in. I’d forgotten to ask when my actual deadline was and was at 70k words when I discovered it was the next day! I managed to write 30k words in 9 days and deliver almost on time, but after the first edit I’ve decided I don’t like the end, so I’ve just changed it – it’s with my editor now so fingers crossed she likes it (YIKES!)

Social media

For SAM BLAKE
T: @samblakebooks
FB: https://www.facebook.com/SamBlakeBooks/
W: http://www.samblakebooks.com/

For Vanessa/Inkwell
T: @inkwellhq
FB: https://www.facebook.com/people/Vanessa-Fox-OLoughlin/652124128
FB: https://www.facebook.com/TheInkwellGroup/
W: http://www.inkwellwriters.ie/
For Writing.ie
T: @Writing_ie
FB: https://www.facebook.com/writing.ie/
W: https://www.writing.ie/

Instagram for everything!
https://www.instagram.com/writing.ie/