Where authors talk directly about their life, their books and many more things.
While I’ve been a little unfaithful (more than once), it’s fair to say that I’m in a committed relationship with crime. Crime novels, that is. The signs that I’d be a crime buff were there since adolescence. When my friends were off reading Babysitters’ Club, I preferred the company of Dr Kay Scarpetta. What’s not …
The biographer and the detective are not as far apart as you might imagine. This analogy has been made before, and there are much less generous ones. Famously, commentator, Janet Malcolm, likened the biographer to an ‘eavesdropper’, a ‘voyeur’, a ‘snoop’. Some times what I do feels uneasily close to these transgressive manifestations. Not literally, …
I’m a children’s educational writer by trade, but recently I’ve just released a crime-ish adult book, Life Before. People ask me how the two types of writing mesh together? Has being an educational writer been a help or a hindrance to writing for adults? My answer to that is that my background is probably more …
Some would say it’s because I’m a Gemini, but I have the habit of doing two projects at once aside from my regular career. True to form, this year I will have my first two books published: a true crime tale, The Secret Art of Poisoning and The Red Devil (written with Les Parsons). Researching …
‘We had to do it ourselves before we did it on others … If anything goes wrong and the skid row bum dies, and the experimenter has not done the experiment himself, he is liable for murder. It’s as simple as that. A man is entitled to risk his own life. He is not entitled …
Eighteen months ago I’d never have believed I’d be travelling from New Zealand to Australia to take part in a Sisters in Crime event. For starters, I’m not a crime writer. At least, I didn’t know I was. My one and only novel (so far) – All Our Secrets – is set in the fictional …
‘You’re in love with love,’ my mother told me once. I must have been all of fourteen: flat-chested, grinning in shiny braces, complete with frightening, jutting headgear I wore at night. I went to girls’ school and I had no brothers. No men in the house at all. When my mother said that, about being …
A Body of Work, my second crime novel, is a police procedural with social twists, although there is scant in-depth detail about police methods. Rather, the novel focuses on the interactions of the people in the investigating team. Social themes explored include secret adoption as a way of dealing with an unwanted pregnancy; the personal …
I don’t know why I write books. I just started one day and never seemed to stop. Familiar anyone? I do know why my books are all murder mysteries, though. And I know exactly when my writing really started. As a kid growing up in Hobart, I had a quiet life. Mostly, I just read. …
I kill people for a living these days, but my first career was as a classical clarinet player. Clarinet was a bit of an odd choice for a child whose school didn’t run to a music program, but I threw myself into learning it with the determination only a moody teenager can muster, and eventually …