| 1)
What makes a truly great crime/thriller novel? |
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| The house is burning down around you. A sink hole has appeared in your back garden and is sucking your wife and dogs down into a bottomless pit. A full 747 has lost control and is headed directly for your front window…but you just have to finish this chapter before you do anything about it. It’s when the world you’re living in doesn’t matter nearly as much as the thriller you’re reading. |
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| 2)
Are you surprised by the diversity of the crime genre? Do you think crime readers are always open to different styles? |
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| I’m not at all surprised. New writers today wouldn’t get a look in if they churned out the same stuff that has been ‘accepted’ crime fiction for a century. You have to be different in some way to be published. I imagine twenty years ago when there were rules of engagement for the crime writer, readers were more likely to revolt if the writer broke those rules. But there’s a more global feel now. People don’t huff and say, ‘Laos? Just one of those Asian places nobody goes to.’ There’s an awareness of the world amongst readers, a real thirst for knowledge of places outside their own country. Once those barriers come down I don’t believe there are any no-go areas. Your protagonist can be a Chinese/Mexican lesbian dwarf (Eric Stone) or a 74-year-old Lao coroner. |
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| 3)
You live in Thailand now. How did you get to lay your roots in this country? |
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| Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. It all started when I was in Australia completing the research for my Masters. I met a doctor with MSF who told me about a minority group in Burma called the Karenni. They wanted someone to train their teachers and write a curriculum for their school. I went up there and started work only to get bombed out by the Burmese junta dry season offensive. I took shelter in Thailand waiting for things to settle. Things didn’t settle. I took a job at the university in Chiang Mai and I’ve been in the region ever since. It’s home now and I feel more comfortable in Southeast Asia than I do back in England. |
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| 4)
You have written several novels about Dr. Siri. Why have you decided to write a new series? |
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| In my Lao series I’m at the stage now where writing a new book is like an editorial meeting with Siri and Nurse Dtui, and Inspector Phosy and naked Crazy Rajid and the others all sitting around the table discussing the next book over a cup of coffee. These days I can barely get a word in. They’ve taken over. All I have to do is put them in a new plot and off they go. So, with the Dr. Siri series writing itself I needed a new challenge. Contemporary. No ghosts. Lite on politics. In fact I wondered whether I could hit a completely different demographic. Dr. Siri has a lot of fans ‘of a certain age’ who send him fan mail so he’s not going anywhere. But I needed a holiday in a different time and place to keep me fresh. |
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| 5)
Your new series stars Jimm Juree, a female crime reporter. What attracted you to this new character? |
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| I had to keep in mind the fact that my new protagonist was going to be compared to Dr. Siri. I needed a strong character who could match up to him in her own way, with her own strengths. We’d just moved down to a little fishing village on the gulf of Thailand. Here, a woman is a wife and a homemaker (and generally spends a lot of time scaling fish and building squid traps.) I decided on Jimm for a number of reasons but specifically because she was a successful reporter who had been wrenched from her career in the city and thrown into a setting that she considers prehistoric. I’d interviewed a lot of candidates for the role but Jimm had all the fire and intelligence and faults I’d been looking for. There are stereotypes around the world about Thai women, most of them negative. I wanted a character who could represent the modern Thai educated woman you rarely read about in fiction. And, through Jimm’s eyes and experiences I could show the wily ways of the rural female. If Siri is my elderly-power series, Jimm is my women’s lib book. |
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| 6)
Jimm’s family could be classed as ‘eccentric’. With a mother who seems to have her head in the clouds and a transsexual brother. Do you enjoy infusing your crime novels with humour? |
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| I’d always planned the Jimm books to be ensemble company rather than a vehicle for one star. As a cartoonist, characters are my strongpoint and I need a good cast to carry the stories. But I have to be careful not to caricature them to the point of ridiculousness. I took characters you’d often find in English language books about Thailand: the pretty transvestite, the corrupt policeman, the pumped-up body builder, the ambitious news reporter, and I played the ‘what if?’. What if the transvestite beauty queen aged twenty years and was ashamed to be seen in public? What if there was a cop who never took a bribe in forty years and retired broke and at the same rank he’d started at? What if the body builder was so shy and cowardly that he burst into tears at the first sign of violence? And what if our crime reporter was dragged from the dangers and thrills in the city and plopped down in a place that’s so safe and uneventful the local police station doesn’t even have a cell. I love making people laugh and if the characters can do that without the need for one-liners and slapstick, that makes my job a lot easier. |
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| 7)
You seem to have an ironic view of the ways of the country. Do you feel as an ‘alien abroad’ that you can stand outside looking in? |
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| There are expatriates in Thailand who have lived here twenty years and not seen anything but the insides of bars and Pizza Hut. So just being an alien doesn’t necessarily make you innately equipped to look in at society. Perhaps that’s why there are so many books written about the inside of bars and Pizza Hut. You write what you know which in turn explains the abundance of literature about prostitutes and drunkenness. I lived in England for the first twenty-one years of my life and I doubt whether I really saw or understood anything. Everything was just there. I was just there. I had no need to observe. I think it’s something else that makes you inquisitive. Perhaps it’s a writer’s mind. Maybe that’s why Bill Bryson in Notes From a Small Island saw an England I didn’t realize existed. I didn’t experience that England until I returned home after twenty years away and looked at the place with my writer’s mind. I think it’s the decision that you make to observe rather than to rewrite what you’ve read or seen on TV that gives you the ability to look in. |
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| 8)
All the chapter headings begin with some of George W. Bush’s more famous and toe curling quotes. What is the fascination with the ex-President and his infamous pearls of wisdom? |
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| George W was almost responsible for me not getting together with the woman who became my wife. I was in Chiang Mai and miserable after four years of GW screwing up the planet and I couldn’t believe there was a possibility he’d get re-elected. So as I sat alone and drunk on the night the results were coming through I considered throwing myself out the window. I was on the ground floor so the worst I could have done was to have broken a few hibiscus bushes. It was late and all down to Florida and my tearful viewing of CNN was interrupted by an incoming email from a pretty teacher who wanted advice on some teaching point. Didn’t she realize what was happening to the world? Didn’t she realize there would probably be no need for education if GW got re-elected? It obviously hadn’t worked in America. How irresponsible was this woman? I might have been rude in my reply. In fact in the light of morning I might have even forgotten I’d sent it. She didn’t. But, to her credit, she forgave me. |
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| 9)
Your books have multiple cases like the Dalziel and Pascoe novels (you investigate the bodies in the camper van and the death of a monk in your latest). Do you enjoy weaving different cases for your readers? |
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| Yeah I suppose I do weave for the readers, but I weave even more for me. I have the attention span of a thrush. My mind’s always shooting off in different directions wondering what would happen if I tried this or that. I invariably find myself with four or five plot threads going at the same time as I near the end of the book. I’ll ether abandon them myself when I can’t work out an ending, or I’ll be politely bullied by my editor to ‘Get rid of the mysterious guy in the Indian headdress.’ I can’t imagine writing a book with just the one storyline. I’d be bored to distraction after two chapters. |
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| 10)
How did you feel winning the acclaimed CWA Dagger in the Library for a body of work |
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| As I said at the awards ceremony, the great thing about the Dagger in the Library is that it isn’t about who you know. That’s just as well ‘cos I don’t know anyone. It has everything and all to do with what you produce. And there’s a warm and fuzzy feeling that accompanies being recognized not for one book (you can get lucky with the one and never be able to repeat it) but for an entire series. It means I’ve not disappointed my readers. I’m very proud of that. And if all those library readers go out and buy – with actual money - just one of my books I’ll be even prouder. |
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| 11)
What is your favourite movie adaptation of all time of a crime/thriller novel? |
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| 'Silence of the Lambs'. |
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| 12)
What is your favourite crime/thriller novel of all time? |
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| I have to answer these two questions with the same book. You see, I’m not much of a fiction reader. I have very little experience of having read a book that became a film. I love cinema although the nearest English language cinema from here is four hours’ drive away. I have seen thousands of movies that were adapted from novels but not read the novels. But I did have one moving experience. I’d seen The Silence of the Lambs at the cinema and it scared the bejeabers out of me. Then I was in bed with Dengue fever once and the only book in English in the house was Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs. Ho hum, I thought. How exciting can a book be after you know what happens? But I started that book and I was shaking for half of it. It did a marvellous job of keeping me on the edge of my bed. The film was a fair adaptation but the book did it better. As I lay there, the house burnt down, the dogs were sucked into a sink hole and a 747 crashed through the front window and I had no suspicion whatsoever. |
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