Emily Winslow talks about writing crime fiction

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Image courtesy of Jonathan Player

 

Do you think of yourself as a crime writer or as a novelist who happens to write about crime?

I think of myself as a crime writer, but with the very broadest definition of crime. So I’m happy to have my books always be about figuring something out. I’m happy for them to always involve extreme situations, like dealing with a murder. In that sense they’re crime, but they won’t necessarily always follow a certain format.

Some might think that writing, and indeed reading, crime fiction indicates an unhealthy attraction to the dark side of the human psyche. But is it actually a healthy way of exploring fears and dangers in a safe place?

Oh 100%. I struggled with this myself when I was younger and I used to spend a lot of time in the true crime section of the library. I thought, what am I doing? What does this say about me that this is my entertainment? Am I a sadist or something, what’s going on here? I’ve thought about it and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s perfectly fine, and that when I spend time reading about it or writing about it, the focus isn’t on the crimes, the focus is on coping with the crimes, responding to the crimes, regrouping and rebuilding after something immense and world-changing has happened. If you look at most crime novels, they don’t lovingly detail the violence chapter after chapter. Something horrible has happened and then you see people trying to cope and recover afterward, and try to make something out of it and try to do the best they can to fix what’s fixable. I think it’s extremely healthy.

Would it be fair to say that you are interested in the puzzle and the crime, but you’re even more interested in how people cope with it, and the psychological ramifications of what happened?

Yes, and the psychology of what causes crime too. I know that a lot of times murder mysteries set up at the beginning a lot of different character motives. That’s one standard way to organise a crime novel and very entertaining; you realise this person would get money, this person would get freedom… But for me a motive is not enough, because to kill somebody is such a psychologically horrifying thing to do. For me, it’s not enough to say this person would benefit from the victim’s death, it’s who would benefit from their death and could actually bring themselves to do it. Also, how does it change them afterward now that they’ve done it? All of that psychology is really important to me. Motive is only step one.

You said in an article for CrimeReads in 2018 that to read or write crime fiction is to practise hopefulness. Could you elaborate on that?

Well, it’s about coping and recovering, and about building something new, when the thing you thought was going to be your future has been destroyed and taken away. For me personally, the fact that I spend so much of my life, so much of my reading and my writing, rehearsing that pattern—something terrible happens, and then you deal with it and you make something new—just living that over and over again in my mind has been helpful to me. When I experience struggle in my own life I realise okay, this is the struggle, this is chapters one, two and three, and then we’re going to start coping, and then there will be something new that’s going to come out of this. I think that reading and writing this stuff is good practice for healthy psychology in life.

And is it a safe place to rehearse things that might never happen to you, but you’re afraid of them, and it helps you cope?

Yes, absolutely. So many of our fears will absolutely never come to pass, but it’s really interesting to think about what if they did. What could be done in the wake of that? And it’s just reassuring to know there are things that I can do, things that will happen after.

You use multiple narrators in your books with differing points of view – are you particularly interested in narrative unreliability?

I’m interested in narrative unreliability in books because it represents normal human narrative unreliability. All my books have multiple first person narrators; we have the detective point of view and sometimes victim points of view, and sometimes murderer points of view or witnesses and bystanders. It’s interesting that it takes all of them to tell the story. That’s where the title of my first book comes from, The Whole World. No one character has the whole story. You need all of them to understand the whole thing.

None of us have the whole story about anything; we’re each just one voice adding to the whole. So for me, it’s not just something that I like in book characters; it’s a personal philosophy that’s deeply important to me. My books are sometimes criticised for it being difficult to tell who the main character is. And I understand that that can be a flaw from a literary perspective, but for me it’s completely deliberate, because my whole point is that there is no main character. We’re all just coming in and out of the story, which is central, but nobody gets to be the one star.

And using multiple narrators enables you to demonstrate how memory works?

Memory is one of my favourite themes in all the world, and how memory changes over time. Different memories belong to different people, and yet they’re all looking at the same thing. Memory is, I think, one of the most fascinating human things to think about.

You worked for Games magazine as a creator of complex logical puzzles – is that skill useful for creating the puzzle element of your crime stories?

Puzzles are deeply profound to me in a lot of ways. First of all, my dad was a lawyer and then when I was around seven years old he quit being a lawyer to invent board games and puzzles in the basement. It was amazing; my friends and I, we grew up hanging out in my dad’s workshop and using all his tools and things like that. We were his game testers. That was a very important part of my growing up. So puzzles came very naturally to me.

Philosophically, what I love about puzzles is you start out with something that superficially seems impossible. Even a crossword puzzle looks to me that way; I look at it and say “there is no word that can fit here”. Do you know what I mean? It says there’s a ten-letter word, I know Q is the ninth letter, and I’m just looking at it thinking there is no possible word. Eventually when I figure it out, I get that incredible “aha!” moment, going from “this was impossible” to “actually, if I change myself and my assumptions it all becomes clear”.  Philosophically, that’s just how I like to approach life, that if I could just look at things the right way they’ll make sense to me. So for me, all the emotional psychology of a crime novel is sort of on a par with the puzzle psychology, because you have to change the way you look at it to see the real answer.

Do you ever feel constrained by the conventions of crime fiction, or can working within the formulaic framework be creatively liberating?

I need the constraints of crime fiction to be an engine for my plot, because without them I’ll just wander around commenting on this relationship or that character, or this interesting observation of setting. Those are the things that delight me and excite me, but without the engine of plot, they wouldn’t all be linked and there wouldn’t be a reason to charge through and encounter all of the things that I find interesting. So I absolutely need it, or all the little things I find interesting would just be disconnected and scattered on the table.

Would you agree with Ian Rankin who said he discovered that everything he wanted to say about the world could be said in a crime novel?

Oh yes, absolutely. I think part of it depends on what people think of when they say crime novel. If somebody is very rigid in saying a crime novel is a Sherlock Holmes story and that’s it, yes, then obviously there would be some things you couldn’t explore through that character or that format, however wonderful it is. But if you have a broad idea about crime, then yes, you have the freedom to do whatever you want. Crime to me is just something serious and terrible happened and humans react. That’s very broadly applicable.

You have a very distinctive style. When and how did your authorial voice develop?

I originally trained as an actor which I loved, and one of the things that I found fascinating as an actor was that when you play one character it’s your responsibility to defend that character’s corner, and the other actors are defending their characters; all of that works together. You the actor don’t need to try to be the director. You don’t need to try to do anybody else’s part, you just do your part and that helps the others do their parts because then they have something to play off of.

So it was very natural to me to try first person first. I like stepping into a character and being limited to what they can see. To me that opens up so much depth, because the limitations themselves tell you about this character. Then when I was writing I ran into something that I wanted the reader to know that my first character wouldn’t be able to tell them. I realised I would have to change to another character at that point—page 60—and, because I like symmetry, for that book I decided well, I guess I’ll have five narrators then, because it’s a 300 page book. It made me happy to be able to explore so many different voices, so I’ve continued to do that.

Do you have a daily writing routine?

No, not at all, not at all! I’m a big believer in there being phases to writing a book. And you know, sometimes you’re doing more thinking than writing. I believe daydreaming is a huge part of writing work, and I’m always encouraging my students to count daydreaming as “I worked today”. It’s a completely necessary stage, and to denigrate yourself when you’re doing that part, to say, “Oh, I’m so lazy, I’m so terrible” I just don’t think that’s healthy. It’s vital to recognise that there’s so much that goes into creating a book besides typing. So sometimes my work is the actual writing and sometimes it’s thinking and sometimes it’s rereading and revising. There are lots of different stages.

My kids are 16 and 20 now, but when I started writing my first novel my younger son was six months old and my older son had just turned 5. We were home schooling so my life was a lot of childcare and then writing when I could. It was great that my husband’s work schedule made it so we could share the home schooling equally, so I had writing slots set aside for me during the week. But I didn’t always use them for writing because there’s a transition, there’s a ramping up to get into the writing brain.

If I had, say, four hours to write that day, I might spend three hours idly reading things or watching something and thinking and daydreaming. And then I’d write for just the last hour because I needed to use that time before to get my brain into the right place. And I did beat myself up about that and wonder if I’m a lazy and terrible person, but I don’t think I am. I think that’s just how my brain works, and now I respect it. If I sit down to take three hours for that transition, then that’s what it takes. That’s how I get my brain to do what it does, and that’s allowed.

Do you type, write by hand or use a dictaphone?

Obviously in the old days I used to write by hand because computers weren’t a thing when I was young; we hand wrote our homework or typed it on a typewriter. Now I’m all about the computer keyboard and my handwriting is a mess. I don’t think I could dictate; I have a different voice in my hands. My speaking voice is different from my typing or hand writing voice.

Do you need to have everything plotted in your head before you even start a book?

Absolutely not! I sometimes do events with Sophie Hannah and she is an amazing planner. I once saw one of her outlines for a new Poirot book, and it was 60 pages, just the outline! Then she sits down and writes what she planned to write and that works amazingly for her. When we do events, this question always comes up and we’re a nice contrast because I don’t plan at all. I often don’t even know who committed the crime or what the amazing answer is going to be. I’m in the shoes of the detective and the others looking around going, “I don’t know what happened, but I’m determined to find out!” I, along with my characters, am doing everything I can in the story to figure it out because I don’t know it either. The reader gets to join us in that adventure.

How do you keep track of all the intricacies of your plots and characters?

That’s challenging! I said I don’t plan and I don’t plan beforehand. But I often write an outline at the midpoint to analyse what I’ve written, and it gives me a nice chart where I can see, okay, these are the characters I’m dealing with, these are the different subplots they’re enacting, these are the mysteries raised that still need an answer. I turn it all into some very complex chart and often outline from that point to the end. So yes, I do need to outline, but later in the process. I do it either at the midpoint or after I’ve finished a whole first draft, to see what I’ve really done and to ask myself what I need to do to make this a satisfying book.

Do you seed clues into your plots for the reader so that they can try and solve the mystery themselves? Or do you withhold information and misdirect them so that they can’t?

A lot of people are sceptical that it’s even possible to have a satisfying ending if you haven’t planned it from the beginning. The example I always bring up is, let’s imagine that in chapter one a character stumbles, knocks over an umbrella stand and an umbrella falls behind the couch; then in the last chapter they’re being cornered by the villain and they’re able to reach under the couch, pull out the umbrella and defend themselves, okay? It could be that a planner was writing this book and they knew they would need that umbrella in the last chapter, so they deliberately set up that umbrella drop in act one, that clumsiness. Equally, if you were me, you had the clumsiness for some other reason entirely—trying to demonstrate something about their character or about a relationship or their reaction to a piece of news—and then in the end, when my character is cornered and trying to figure out how to defend themselves from the villain, I just look around and remember, oh, there’s an umbrella under the couch. I guess it’s like the difference between creationism and evolution! You know, was it all planned in advance and this was designed to be this way? Or is this just what happened to happen and each step along the way you just use what’s there? Either way can work.

As an American living in Cambridge, do you feel that coming from a different culture gives you a particular insight into life here, which then informs your work?

One of the things that’s nice about Cambridge is that it’s inherently full of foreigners, because of the University, and it’s constantly refilled by new foreigners every year. So being a foreigner in Cambridge in a way makes you a typical Cambridge person. I never feel like I don’t belong here.

And being here helped me finally write my first novel. Before I came here, when I was trying to write a novel for years, setting was a real struggle for me. If I tried to write about someplace I knew really well, I didn’t have any perspective on it. I was so deep within it I didn’t know what to say about it; it was just the air I breathed.

Then when I came to Cambridge, it was completely different from any place else, so it was very obvious to me what I wanted to tell people about it. It was also a place I was living in so I had access to knowing about it experientially in a way that I wouldn’t if I had chosen someplace I didn’t know at all. That combination of having access to know it well, while at the same time it being new to me, was what enabled me to finally write a novel. I was simply not able to do it before then.

Do you read other crime writers or avoid reading them?

I do read crime, but I avoid reading books set in Cambridge. My terror is that if I read books set in Cambridge, either I’ll subconsciously pick something up and copy it, or I’ll be so afraid that I’ve inadvertently picked something up, that I’ll feel frozen in my own writing. So I try to write about Cambridge from life, from my experience and others’ experiences, and avoid Cambridge books.

As for what I do read: I teach novel writing and crime writing at Madingley Hall, which is wonderful. So, much of my reading is either great books from the reading lists for discussion, or reading student work. Unrelated to the teaching, I read my friends’ manuscripts, which is a joy. I have a lot of writer friends and we read each other’s work and comment on it, help each other out. When it comes to reading published books I’m always either reading them just before they come out because a friend wrote them, or I’m reading them way after the fact, like “that bestseller came out 15 years ago and I’m now reading it so I can talk about it with my students” sort of thing. I’m a combination of ahead of the cutting edge and simultaneously way behind it!

Is most of your reading time used for research purposes?

No. I did an absolute ton of research when I started, research about Cambridge, research about Cambridge police. I spent a lot of time, and I have shelves of books on the topic, but now I know the foundational stuff enough that usually my research is more talking to people. That’s in fact one of the greatest things about writing novels: you get to email an expert and say I’d like to know more about what you do, could we meet up? And in Cambridge most of the time people say yes, and they’ll just explain to you how their job works. So if my character’s an astronomer and they’re studying red shift, I would ask what would that be like? Is this an accurate description of what they do? What would their day be like?

And you can even ask a question like “If you were going to commit a murder in this building, where would be a good place to do that?” People have great answers! One time I sent an email to a lock keeper out in the Fens to ask “If I wanted a body to wash up at point A would point B be a reasonable place to put it in the water?” And they were very helpful. (The answer was yes.)

And have you spoken to police officers about their work?

I met with police twice. In my second book, The Start of Everything, there are scenes of the detectives in the police station. I wasn’t sure where Major Crimes was based, just that it wasn’t in the local station, so I needed to speak with someone. (He was very gracious, though the first time I went to meet him I got turned away because he was attending to a shooting! I had to reschedule.)

In a later book my detective Morris leaves policing after an injury because he can’t function as he was used to functioning. When I wanted to bring him back, I wanted him to be in a different role; what you never want is to just have it not matter that he left. I wanted it to transform him. So a very kind detective came to my house to discuss what the options are for a police person who has had medical issues and wants to come back, and how that could transform their work. He was great, and very helpful.

If and when you get the time, what do you read for pleasure and relaxation?

I do a lot of puzzles still. Games magazine that you mentioned, which came into existence in the mid 70s or maybe late 70s. I was reading it since I was nine or ten because my dad subscribed; I still have a subscription today! At-home escape rooms and point-and-click games are a big part of my life, that sort of thing. So that’s where a lot of my “reading” is right now, in interactive story experiences.

Do you think you need to have a particular kind of brain for puzzle solving like that?

I think it’s probably a mathematical brain. It has become less mathematical as I’ve gotten older; it turns out I have difficulty solving some of the puzzles I wrote when I was younger! What’s quite fun is my husband is also good at puzzles. When we’re working together, and my sons as well, we ask each other for help; instead of just giving each other the answer we give each other hints, give nudges instead of giving it away. It’s a very social and interactive experience.

Do you find with puzzle solving that if you go away for an hour or so, then come back, the answer’s just there, as if your brain has been processing it subconsciously?

Yes, yes! And that’s what I’m saying about daydreaming and writing. Sometimes the dough of an idea needs to rise, and you’re not being a lazy baker if you take the time for that to happen.

Emily Winslow is the author of a Cambridge-set series of crime novels (The Whole World, The Start of Everything, The Red House, and Look for Her) and a memoir (Jane Doe January). She has a special interest in puzzles and in first-person narration, and teaches novel-writing and crime-writing for the University of Cambridge.

Alison Bruce talks about detective fiction

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Why did you choose to write crime fiction? 

My mum read things like Agatha Christie and British, cosy crime, but then she tended to watch American crime on the TV. Dad would sit reading his book, being very disapproving. And then when I got older I noticed what he was reading. He was reading American hard boiled crime, but he obviously didn’t really approve of the tv dramatisations.

And then when I was really quite young, quite often at tea time on BBC 2 they would put old films on, and I suspect they just weren’t quite as savvy then as now and thought “oh, old film, bung it on”, so in quite quick succession I saw Gaslight, To Kill a Mockingbird and Night of the Hunter! I can remember watching Night of the Hunter thinking, “I can’t watch, I have to watch”. And it struck me then how amazing it was to have an effect on somebody by telling a story.

And so I didn’t actually come to it planning to write crime, I liked storytelling. I initially had come up with an idea that I thought would make a good film, so I went on a screenwriting course and the guy giving the course said it’s really hard to get a film made unless it’s a book first. So I thought, I’ve read books, it can’t be that hard to go and write a book. And of course I didn’t know what I was doing at all.

But as far as it being crime rather than anything else, I do have some other story ideas in my head, but mostly I’m fairly unsuccessful at not murdering somebody! I get a few pages in and I start saying “who’s going to die?” I wasn’t planning on killing anyone but I must, so I always end up in some murderous situation somewhere! And I’ve been interested in crime in the real world since I was really small.

Why do you think detective fiction is so popular?

I think there are a few things. I think there is the puzzle. People like to know the why. If people see a headline in the newspaper, they are drawn to read the rest, it might be something awful happened and they want to know who and why.

I think when you read something horrendous, there’s a part of your subconscious wanting to learn, so you can reduce the risk of the same thing happening to you later, because you’ve read about it. Somebody is walking home alone in the middle of the night and vanishes and you think, I won’t do that, I’ll make sure my daughter doesn’t do that, because you’ve read something. And people do like to be scandalised, if that’s the right word.

You can enjoy a frisson in a safe way, can’t you? It’s frightening, but it’s not happening to you, and you can explore that feeling of fear while you’re safe at home with a book.

Yes. You’re also safe pretty much with every book in the knowledge that you’ll get to the end, and there’ll be some sort of resolution. I do think that’s important. You can put yourself in the shoes of the person who is perhaps the underdog and you’d like to think that, in a situation you wouldn’t ever want to be in, you would be the survivor or the one that comes up with the smart answer. So yes, I think there’s a bit of living it safely, like you say.

I think people explore other people’s viewpoints, explore why other people do it. It’s magnified because murder is so huge. What actually pushes somebody to the point of murder? I think most people ask themselves, could they commit murder at some point? And I think for most people they probably think they could under certain circumstances. If a book sheds a light onto somebody’s dark side and you associate with that dark side, it can make you look at yourself in a different toned mirror.

Do you need to have everything plotted in your head before you start writing?

I need some of it. I need to know who and why. I do tend to plot quite meticulously. But I’m finding more recently I get so far in the plotting and can’t plot anymore, I have to write, but by that point I know who’s done it and why. When I tried writing a book and not plotting, I wrote myself into a corner. I was about 30,000 words in when I got to the corner. That’s when I threw them away. None of my characters could have committed the crime because they all had perfect alibis and it didn’t make sense, so I had to bin the whole thing! Okay, so in that 30,000 I would hope that there were some well constructed scenes, but they’re no good to anybody because they don’t fit in anywhere, so they just have to go.

So then if I approach the same story and plot it first, and I know the beginning and the end, I can do what I like in between, I can be completely creative with my prose. I can do whatever I want and write with the security of knowing that it’s not going to be thrown away, because as long as I end up in the right place it’s all good!

 I think the psychology of the killer’s really important. The killer’s not necessarily, as I’ve discovered, the guiltiest person in the book. This came to me when I wrote The Backs. Pretty much universally any comments I had from readers about characters in that book would be how much people hated the murder victim, not the actual killer. I quite like that, I think it’s interesting that people can forgive somebody on the page for certain things more than others, because on the face of it committing murder is more serious than what the other person did, but it doesn’t always come out like that.

How do you keep track of all the complexities in a plot? Do you have spreadsheets and notebooks? 

I do get myself in trouble sometimes. I write from the beginning of the book to the end and that stops a lot of problems creeping in.

I find pictures of characters help. Once I made a mistake with a character’s hair, it started out as a blonde bob and later was auburn curls, so pictures help prevent mistakes like that! Sometimes I use pictures of actors, I’ve also used pictures from Facebook of my stepdaughter’s friends – I did that with The Silence because it was quite complicated with all the students and their families, so I had family trees and student groups. My stepdaughter came home one day and said “I see you’ve killed one of my friends”!

Do you seed clues into the plot so that people who try to resolve it might be able to, or do you hold information back so they can’t? 

There might be something that happens in the beginning that is somehow mirrored in the end, something that you think is a bit of scene setting at the start actually turns out to be really important at the end. So that’s going to blindside the reader, because they think it’s just a bit of back story, when actually it turns out to be crucial.

What the writer wants is that the reader thinks they know what’s happening, based on them identifying what they think you’re trying to tell them, and then realises that it’s going to be wrong, so they come up with a third option, which can’t be the same as the real answer.

So do you misdirect the reader in order to set up a shock revelation later?

It’s more you want to surprise the reader, but not make them feel ripped off. You can’t make them feel conned if they get to the end and think “that’s not fair!” –   If they think it’s not fair, then it’s probably not fair!

It’s like the reader has an unwritten, unspoken deal with the author, and if the author lets you down on some fundamental level, then you’re probably not going to go back to that author again, because it shatters your ability to suspend disbelief. You might forgive them that once, if you’ve read their other books, but if it’s the first time you’ve read an author, you probably won’t return to them.

If something in the plot just doesn’t make sense, or if it’s been so blindingly obvious from one of the early pages and you’ve slogged through another 300 pages just to be proved right, or if the author builds up something and then it doesn’t pay off, the reader will feel let down. The more you, as the writer, build it up, the more you’ve got to pay it off.

If you imagine breathing in, you take a deep breath, you’re holding your breath because of the tension, you have to allow the reader to exhale fully at the end, otherwise, they’re still holding their breath and they’re annoyed. You don’t want to annoy the reader. Don’t stretch expectations and then fail to deliver.

Where does Gary Goodhew come from? Is he based on someone you know, or on a combination of several people?

I’m very into the 50s and every six months I would go to this rock and roll weekend, and I would see people that I wouldn’t see for six months in between. Once you tell people that you’re writing a book, they keep asking how the book’s going. So I was talking to this guy and the next time I saw him he said “did you finish that book?” and I said no, not yet.

So this went on for six months at a time, which is a bit of a sobering milestone, when you think “I don’t think I’ve written anything since the last time I saw you”! So eventually he said “can I be a character in your book then?”

And I just I didn’t know if that was a thing or not, is that, you know, cheating? He wanted to be younger and better looking! I think that’s a real budget facelift if you ask me, but anyway I thought he could be a detective, he could be answering the phone to some anonymous phone calls a girl was making in the book I was writing. He’s not really anything like Gary Goodhew, but that’s how it started.

And I quite liked this detective who was just accidentally there, he was only supposed to be there for a page or two, a chapter or two. By the time I got to the end of the book (and I didn’t know I was going to write another book until that page) I’m sitting there finishing this page, crying because I’m saying goodbye to him! And that’s when I thought I’ve got to bring him back. My friend’s name is Gary Goodhew, and that’s how it came about. Goodhew sounds like “of good colour” – a good person and dependable.

Some of the best things when you’re writing are accidents, and I think that is because they’re not really accidents, that’s your subconscious doing the work and your subconscious is constructing something in a more naturalistic way than your conscious mind does. Whenever I have a happy accident, I completely own it. So if my conscious mind didn’t do it, then my subconscious did, and that’s mine.

It must be quite difficult in a crowded genre to make your detective stand out. What do you think distinguishes Gary Goodhew from other fictional detectives?

I think you get trends of detectives and unless you read everything you don’t know if you’re being different. I don’t know whose calculation it is, but I’ve heard that after about 100,000 words your own writing voice becomes established, and then you can completely divorce reading and writing. You just write how you write and people write how they write.

It felt as though he was the detective that I wanted to read, that I hadn’t found. He’s quite young and at the start of his career, that wasn’t particularly common. He’s a little bit idealistic because it’s the job he’s wanted since he was a kid. It’s almost like fulfilling a dream, so he’s still got that slightly idealised view of it. And he really doesn’t want to become cynical. And so he’s really a long way from being what’s become a bit of a stereotype.

Is it actually more interesting to subvert the dysfunctional loner, the alcoholic, burnt out cynic? But harder to write, perhaps?

Yes. I’ve worked with very experienced police officers, two of them I’ve been working with on the policing degree at Anglia Ruskin University are both ex-Met Detective Chief Inspectors, and they’re both quite jovial. They’ve got a bit of that morgue humour going on, they’ve seen some dreadful things, but they’re married with happy family relationships as far as I know, they’re not jaded, and they’ve both done 25 plus years, so it doesn’t always follow, no. They contribute to their communities, working with young people, doing things like leadership training with teenage boys, that sort of thing.

It was challenging to write Gary at first because he’s quite nice and it’s actually harder to write somebody who’s quite nice. When I was first looking for an agent, I met with the agent for Lee Child. He said I should make Gary Goodhew more like Jack Reacher, more alpha male, and that’s the main reason I didn’t go for him really, because I just disagreed for what I felt were logical reasons, partly because Jack Reacher’s been done, partly because he’s an ex military vigilante running around America with a gun – that doesn’t work in Cambridgeshire. You know, they send out the firearms unit and he’s dead by Chapter 2! It’s just not done. So that was not going to happen.

You can jump from fight scene to fight scene, those chapters are the easy ones to write, the words come quickly, they’re exciting for the writer and the reader. I can write violence, I’m not squeamish, the challenge is where you’ve got to get the characters from A to B where nothing’s happening, and make it interesting, they’re the tough ones.

Gary’s understated. If there’s a big fight and he does nothing, that’s not who I want to portray. When it comes to the crunch he will do something brave, but other times he doesn’t jump in, he stands back a bit, he thinks. And that’s a bit of a challenge, but I like that.

Your Gary Goodhew books are set in Cambridge – do you enjoy portraying a Cambridge that’s somewhat different from its familiar image of a pretty university town?

I lived in the West Country when I was writing my first book in what became the Gary Goodhew series, initially the book was set there, so when I moved, it made sense for the book to move. There were several authors writing about Cambridge crime at the time and I was worried that they would find out what I was doing and you know, I’d be in all sorts of trouble! I don’t read anything set in Cambridge, that’s one of my only rules really. I already have to contend with the real Cambridge and my pretend Cambridge without factoring in somebody else’s as well, so I stay away from anybody else’s Cambridge!

When you’re writing about somewhere real, it’s great because you can go there and it’s going to be a much more interesting place than one you’d ever make up for yourself, but you end up with a slightly distorted view of it, because it’s like frosted glass with some bits more magnified, because the bits that you find most interesting you bring to the forefront.

You’ve done a degree in Crime and Investigative Studies at Anglia Ruskin University, now you’re involved in the rollout of a new policing degree at ARU, so I wondered if you really want to be a detective yourself?

I don’t know, I find it interesting. I think I was at primary school and the teacher asked me what I wanted to do when I left school, and I remember saying I wanted to be a pathologist, and they were horrified, and there was just this moment of absolute repulsion when I thought “perhaps I don’t want to do that then.” But when I was older, I realised I hadn’t got the passion for biology to do something like that. It’s the solving the puzzle, it’s the investigation bit that I loved, so pathologist wasn’t the job for me. I thought for quite a long time that it would suit me to be a Scene of Crime Officer and possibly that would have been an interesting path to go down.

I have a connection to both writing and also to criminal justice in some way. I’ve got two cousins, one’s a journalist for the Evening Standard and his brother’s just retired as a police officer. I had an uncle who worked for GCHQ and his brother was a mathematician, they used to enter the competition to do the Times crossword puzzle in the shortest time, and if you won you would be sent a dictionary, so they would have a competition to see who could get the most dictionaries in a year! My aunt was an immigration officer, which is kind of in the policing neck of the woods.  So you’ve got these different branches of the family with these threads that seem to run through it, writing, maths, puzzle solving –  perhaps it’s in my genes!

I love maths, it’s my favourite subject, it teaches you how to think logically and how to work through problems quite quickly, and they don’t have to be number problems. English is the most important subject and obviously communication skills are vital, and subtleties of language are really important, but maths teaches those critical thinking skills.

Did you do your degree because you were interested in the real world of crime investigation, and did it help with writing fictional accounts of it?

I’ve got all sorts of new ideas from doing my course. I learned about some fascinating things, I found mass fatality incidents were one of my favourite modules, forensic anthropology was another one that I found really interesting. I’ve got a bit of that coming in my next book, and then there are a couple of things that I was going to include that didn’t actually work with the plot, so they’ll be moved somewhere else.

I got to know a Senior Home Office pathologist on Facebook and I absolutely loved doing research with him, I’ve only met him once in person. We’d have very long, complex and dubious conversations about what I’m going to do with my victims in my books, sometimes there was a lot of hilarity.

Finally, as we’re a reading blog I should ask you about your reading habits! Because you’re so busy with teaching at Anglia Ruskin, and with putting together the new policing degree that’s about to be rolled out, not to mention your writing, your reading time must be limited, so do you read mainly to research for your writing?

I’m doing a lot of reading at the moment that is just research reading. I’m quite a slow reader, I haven’t got that ability to read quickly and pick up on everything now, so I read quite slowly. And if I’m going to sit down with a book, then I should be sitting down writing my book.

Sometimes I’ll read a physical book, sometimes an ebook, sometimes an audio book. I’m really short of time, so audio books have become a bit of a go to for me cos I can put them on in the car.

If it’s a physical book, you’ve got to get out of bed or turn the light off, or you fall asleep with the light on and then wake up at 4:00 in the morning and switch the light off, then can’t get back to sleep. But there are authors who I will always buy in hardback, like M.W. Craven, Harlan Coben and Abir Mukherjee.

Alison Bruce
Alison Bruce has long been one of the most
adroit crime fiction practitioners in the UK.
Barry Forshaw, Financial Times
Alison Bruce is the author of nine crime novels and two non-fiction titles. Her first novel, Cambridge Blue (2008), was described by Publishers Weekly as an ‘assured debut’ and introduced both detective DC Gary Goodhew, and her trademark Cambridge setting. She went on to write six further novels in the DC Goodhew series before writing the psychological thriller I Did It for Us (2018). Her latest novel, The Moment Before Impact, is described by Ian Rankin as ‘tense, twisty, terrific’.
The other books in the DC Goodhew series are The Siren (2010), The Calling (2011), The Silence (2012), The Backs (2013), The Promise (2016) and Cambridge Black (2017). Other works include two true crime books and a selection of short stories. Her work has attracted both critical acclaim and a loyal readership. In 2013 and 2016 Alison was short-listed for the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger in the Library Award.
Alison was awarded a first in BSc (Hons) in Crime and Investigation at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge which included subject areas such as: crime scene investigation, policing practice, major investigations, mass fatality incidents, fire investigation, forensic pathology and forensic anthropology. This included practical skills such as: lifting fingermarks, bone identification, testing for bodily fluids and recovering trace evidence.
Alison is currently working on the UK’s largest policing professionalism contract which is delivering policing degrees to the Metropolitan Police and to 7 police forces including Cambridgeshire.
Alison never underestimates her readers and aims to challenge them with expertly crafted plots, vivid characters and the kind of realism which will put them in the front row of an investigation.

Grace

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Contributor: Rosalind Esche

At the beginning of lockdown in the spring of 2020 I thought I would make use of the extra time at home to catch up on my ever growing, and increasingly daunting, ‘to be read’ pile, which in my imagination had assumed an accusatory air, with each new tome added increasing my sense of failure. However, I found myself unable to pick up a book, my concentration was in shreds, my motivation non existent. This ‘reader’s block’ lasted for several months, during which I turned to the uplifting and life affirming drama series Life on Mars, which became my lifeline, as it did for so many others. And it was a tv drama which finally kickstarted me into reading again – the ITV adaptation of Peter James’s Roy Grace novel Dead Simple, starring John Simm as Detective Superintendent Grace. I enjoyed the dramatisation so much I decided to read the book, and that was it – I was hooked, and have been powering through the Roy Grace series ever since.

I like the cumulative effect of binge reading these books, I feel immersed in Detective Superintendent Roy Grace’s world, his thought processes, his working methods, his relationships and his city, Brighton. I am completely absorbed by the authenticity for which Peter James is known and respected. I am learning things about police investigation methods I didn’t know I even wanted to know! Have I always been a closet police procedural nerd without realising it? Or have these compelling books turned me into one? I don’t know, but I’m so glad I discovered this series.

The author steadily builds an atmosphere of deep concentration, absolute dedication and quiet reflection, creating an aura of resolute professionalism around his Detective Superintendent Roy Grace as he takes control of a major crime investigation. Grace exudes calm authority, and is liked and respected by his team of trusted officers, which expands into a cast of dozens as an investigation gains momentum and the field of enquiry grows ever wider. 

However, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, consummate professional that he is, is also capable of pursuing his own lines of enquiry outside the normal investigative framework when he thinks it will help solve a case. And that can lead him into some most unusual territory. Grace uses the paranormal if he thinks it will help his investigation (openly admitting that sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t), consulting mediums and pendulum dowsers. James has said that the police do this more than we might think, simply viewing them as another resource in the pursuit of information, which intrigued me.

In the first Grace book, Dead Simple, the detective faces a hostile QC who tries to undermine his authority in court by ridiculing his use of a medium during the course of an investigation (which led to a conviction). The silk taunts Grace with his line of questioning:

‘”So you regularly turn to the dark arts in your work as a senior police officer, do you Detective Superintendent Grace?” An audible snigger rippled round the courtroom. “I wouldn’t call it the dark arts,” Grace said. “I would call it an alternative resource. The police have a duty to use everything at their disposal in trying to solve crimes.” “So would it be fair to say you are a man of the occult? A believer in the supernatural?” the silk asked.’

In one of my favourite moments of the book, Peter James supplies his beleagured Detective Superintendent with an inspired response to his interrogator:

‘”What is the first thing this court required me to do when I entered the witness stand?” he asked. Before the silk could respond, Grace answered for him. “To swear on the Holy Bible.” He paused for it to sink in. “God is a supernatural being – the supreme supernatural being. In a court that accepts witnesses taking an oath to a supernatural being, it would be strange if I and everyone else in this room did not believe in the supernatural.”’

The silk sits down.

There is another reason for Grace consulting mediums and the paranormal, but that will have to wait …

I know I have books that I will never open, and on a few occasions I’ve bought them just because they are beautiful to look at!

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Contributor: Alison Bruce

Have you read more or less during lockdown, or much the same as usual?

I don’t think I have read more, but on balance the books are slightly changed and I think I have read more audiobooks, a similar amount of physical books but less e-books.

Has lockdown affected your choice of reading material?

No, I still choose crime.

Have you been using reading in a particular way – for example for comfort, raising your spirits, escapism, distraction?

I have at times used audiobooks as company in the middle of the night, but apart from that, I have just picked the books that look like an interesting mystery.

Have you been finding it harder to concentrate during lockdown?

I have had an unusual lockdown in that I have started a new job and moved house and got divorced all in the space of a few months, all of that while trying to write a book has made it difficult to concentrate at times, but I can’t really blame any of it on lockdown or Covid.

Have you started books and been unable to finish them?

Yes, now that you have asked I have to admit that I think I have given up on more books than usual.

Where do you get inspiration for the titles of your books?

I find that book titles either come when I am writing the synopsis and can visualise the complete book, or when I’m in the middle of writing it. I don’t think titles are necessarily hard to come up with, but that doesn’t mean that they are the best they can be. I often have some ideas, but discussing them with other people can either lead to a better idea, or a better version of the current one.

Where are you sourcing your books from?

I ordered some books from my local bookshop (Toppings of Ely) who were taking telephone orders, and went to collect them. I donated some books to the local drop off point. Other books I ordered from Amazon, and my audio books always come from Audible.com.

Have you embarked on reading all the books you already own but have never read?

No, I know I have books that I will never open, and on a few occasions I’ve bought them just because they are beautiful to look at!

Have you been listening to audiobooks rather than reading? If so, does listening add something to your experience of the book that you wouldn’t get by reading it yourself?

I really enjoy audiobooks, I enjoy listening to them while I am walking or on a long car journey, I also enjoy listening to them if I can’t sleep in the middle of the night. I spend a lot of time working on the computer and to be able to rest my eyes is important too. There are times when the narrator improves the experience, but there are also times when a narrator can ruin a book.

Have you been reading books about pandemics? eg The Plague by Albert Camus, Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Roses of Eyam by Don Taylor etc?

No, I haven’t read anything about pandemics!

Can you recommend any books/audiobooks that you have enjoyed during lockdown?

This may sound like a surprising recommendation, but “the Science of Storytelling“ by Will Storr is absolutely fantastic and I would recommend it to anybody who reads, or to anyone who is interested in what makes people tick – it’s fascinating and not just for would-be writers. Another one to look out for is “The Russian Doll“ by Marina Palmer. It isn’t due out until the autumn, but I had the opportunity to read it and really enjoyed it.

Alison Bruce
Alison Bruce has long been one of the most
adroit crime fiction practitioners in the UK.
Barry Forshaw, Financial Times
Alison Bruce is the author of nine crime novels and two non-fiction titles. Her first novel, Cambridge Blue (2008), was described by Publishers Weekly as an ‘assured debut’ and introduced both detective DC Gary Goodhew, and her trademark Cambridge setting. She went on to write six further novels in the DC Goodhew series before writing the psychological thriller I Did It for Us (2018). Her latest novel, The Moment Before Impact, is described by Ian Rankin as ‘tense, twisty, terrific’.
The other books in the DC Goodhew series are The Siren (2010), The Calling (2011), The Silence (2012), The Backs (2013), The Promise (2016) and Cambridge Black (2017). Other works include two true crime books and a selection of short stories. Her work has attracted both critical acclaim and a loyal readership. In 2013 and 2016 Alison was short-listed for the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger in the Library Award.
Alison was awarded a first in BSc (Hons) in Crime and Investigation at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge which included subject areas such as: crime scene investigation, policing practice, major investigations, mass fatality incidents, fire investigation, forensic pathology and forensic anthropology. This included practical skills such as: lifting fingermarks, bone identification, testing for bodily fluids and recovering trace evidence.
Alison is currently working on the UK’s largest policing professionalism contract which is delivering policing degrees to the Metropolitan Police and to 7 police forces including Cambridgeshire.
Alison never underestimates her readers and aims to challenge them with expertly crafted plots, vivid characters and the kind of realism which will put them in the front row of an investigation.

 

Why Do We Read Detective Novels?

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Contributor: Rosalind Esche

‘Crime fiction confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary, that we live in a rational, comprehensible, and moral universe.’ – P. D. James

For those who don’t read them, it would be tempting to think that those who do are sick people who enjoy indulging vicariously in violence. This may be true of some readers, but I would hazard a guess that for the vast majority the murder itself is secondary to the intricacies of the plot, the complexity of the puzzle, strong characterisation and an evocative setting. Of course we may enjoy a frisson of pleasurable fear at a safe distance, while curled up cosily at home with a book, safe in the knowledge that however frightening the story, it isn’t happening to us. Many argue that dark fairy tales serve the same purpose for children. The fact that there are so many crime novelists, and millions around the world reading them, demonstrates a universal need for what they provide.

When Alison Bruce, author of the Gary Goodhew detective novels, answered our Lockdown Reading questionnaire, she  recommended The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr for both readers and writers. This book explores storytelling from a scientific point of view, looking at research from the realms of psychology and neuroscience to explain why we humans seem to be hard wired to need stories in order to function.  Storr doesn’t share P.D. James’s belief in a moral universe, he thinks that the world is chaotic and our lives meaningless, and argues that our brains trick us into thinking otherwise through creating our own personal story, so that we can deceive ourselves that the world makes sense and that our lives have meaning. But he does agree with her on the fundamental point that we humans have a need to make sense of our experience, whether we believe in a world of nihilistic chaos or a moral universe, and that we do this through storytelling.

All of us are storytellers, constructing stories about ourselves and our experiences on a daily basis, but some people go one step further  – they tell stories for a living. How extraordinary that we human beings not only turn our own personal experiences into a continuous narrative, but we need to hear/read/watch other people’s narratives, which we then relate back to our own circumstances and experience. So we buy books, go to the theatre, watch tv dramas and films. Even the songs we listen to are stories.

Whether or not we agree with Storr’s philosophical position, we can accept his analysis of the essential components of good storytelling, including unexpected change and information gaps, which create ‘gnawing levels of curiosity’ in readers. This applies to all storytelling, but for those of us who read crime fiction it rings particularly true. ‘The place of maximum curiosity – the zone in which storytellers play – is when people think they have some idea but aren’t quite sure’ he tells us.

Storr quotes Professor George Loewenstein who, in his paper The Psychology of Curiosity, based on psychological tests and brain scans, lists four ways of involuntarily inducing curiosity in humans:

  1. The ‘posing of a question or presentation of a puzzle’
  2. ‘exposure to a sequence of events with an anticipated but unknown resolution’
  3. ‘the violation of expectations that triggers a search for an explanation’
  4. knowledge of ‘possession of information by someone else’

Storr points out that readers of detective fiction will immediately recognise the familiar components of the detective novel in which the reader is:

  1. ‘posed a puzzle’
  2. ‘exposed to a sequence of events with an anticipated but unknown resolution’
  3. ‘surprised by red herrings’
  4. ‘tantalised by the fact that someone knows whodunnit, and how, but we don’t.’

and admits that ‘Storytellers have long known these principles, having discovered them by practice and instinct.’ He goes on to remark that ‘Without realising it, deep in the detail of his dry, academic paper, Loewenstein has written a perfect description of police-procedural drama.’

However, as we readers know, police procedure without well drawn characters is ultimately limited, satisfying in the way that completing a crossword puzzle is satisfying, but lacking emotional depth and of no lasting impact. While the mystery at the heart of a detective story compels our immediate attention, there is no doubt that the detective’s relationships, be they romantic, familial or working, are an essential weapon in the author’s armoury for sustaining our interest, particularly in crime fiction series, in which we can follow personal storylines as they develop in each succeeding book. We gradually get to know John Rebus, Cormoran Strike, Roy Grace, Harry Nelson, as their personal stories unfold within the framework of each successive plot, returning to them like old friends with each new book.

In the end, for me,  it’s simple psychology – detective fiction deals with light versus dark, good versus evil, it provides the feeling of security that comes from a puzzle solved, loose ends tied up, bad people getting their comeuppance and order and safety being restored. On top of all that you get interesting characters and as often as not some humour thrown in. The crime novel provides a framework within which the author can explore human nature, morality, psychology, social issues, human relationships and more besides. As Ian Rankin said “I discovered that everything I wanted to say about the world could be said in a crime novel.”