Author Robert Walker, the author of 40 books (paperback thrillers like Shadows in the White City, Fatal Instinct and Cold Edge), talked with the Charleston Gazette about growing up in Chicago. The son of a WWII vet and a hard-drinking trucker driver, Walker was "one of those guys yelling into a bar, asking if my father was in there." When he became interested in a writing career in the 1980s, he sent a letter to 10 best-selling author and asked them how they did what they did and how could he get books on the best-seller list? "Dick Francis called me from an airport," he laughed. "I didn't learn anything from him, but it was great to talk to him." Horror novelist Dean R. Koontz sent him a six-page letter, gave him advice on what to read for pointers and told him to move back toward reality-based horror fiction (no surprise), although it taught him to pay attention to trends. Still, as he points out, "I love writing, but I wouldn't wish this kind of life on anybody," he said. "The hardest part isn't the writing. The hardest part is keeping a steady income."
The Times Online featured an article on Elizabeth George. She began writing at the age of 7; the family were “quite poor” and not well educated, but her mother gave her an old Remington typewriter. She got herself to university and into the teaching profession, producing three crime novels before she was accepted for publication. Despite her subsequent success, she admits to having been in therapy, mostly due to personal relationship issues. “Happiness is an inside job - it takes a long time to learn that. I was pretty frightened to strike out on my own, but it shouldn't be such a big deal.” She was single for four years before meeting her current partner, a retired firefighter. “Between husbands I discovered that I quite enjoyed my own company.”
The Times Online also offered up a look at Ian Rankin's next novel, the first non-Rebus outing since that protagonist was killed off. Rankin told the Times that he hopes to be able to use the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August as a launchpad for an Edinburgh-set comedy thriller, which is to be formally published the following month.
James Fallows wrote in a recent Atlantic article about the Hard Case crime fiction series which he says "is justly celebrated."
The Times Union has a Q&A with Julia Spencer-Fleming. In response as to why she, as a lawyer, didn't want to write legal thrillers, she said, "When I started writing, I was trained as a lawyer. My husband at the time was a lawyer. Almost all of our friends were lawyers, and the last thing I wanted to do was spend my fictional hours with more lawyers. It bored me. And when I started my first book, back in 1998 or 1999, there were already a number of really good legal mysteries and legal thrillers. I didn't feel that there was anything new that I could bring to the field."
The Dallas Morning News profiled Elaine Viets who fought back from a massive stroke in 2007. Although she had a career as a career as a print and broadcast journalist, Viets does research for her minimum-wage Dead-End-Job Series, such as worked in a dress shop (until the owner was indicted and it closed), clerking for a year at a bookstore in Hollywood, Fla., to pay the mortgage after her husband fell ill, and working the phones as a telemarketer selling septic-tank cleaner. "I was really awful," she says. An insomniac, she
writes between 3 and 6 a.m. on a computer, then sleeps until 11 a.m.
and revises her work that afternoon. "I must be part vampire," she says.
In a recent interview, British crime writer Mo Hayder talked about going from a runaway (she wanted to be a punker) to being a bestselling author. Hayder is liberal in view of her past drug use
and says it's not drugs that kill people, it's the lifestyle that gets
attached to it. "I imagine a lot of the time it's that they're (drug takers) not
looking after themselves and they're living on the edge of life and
they're marginalised anyway."
And finally, the Ventura County Star writes about Janet Evanovich and her visit to Mysteries to Die For bookstore in Thousand Oaks. "It's one of my favorite places," said Evanovich, who visited the store often to sign books before she became a best-selling author. "As I became more popular, little independent bookstores couldn't accommodate crowds, so I make these sort of clandestine stops. It's more fun. At big signings, I don't get a chance to talk to people."
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