Just weeks away from moving into her new dream home, best-selling mystery writer Elizabeth George is having second thoughts about the weather. Said dream home, you see, is situated on Whidbey Island in the shadow of the rainy Cascade Mountains of Washington State. She and her husband Tom have been overseeing its construction for three years from their Seattle condo and are ready to embrace the bucolic country life. Still, George is worried about the notorious Northwest rain—she’s afraid there may not be enough of it.

"I’m a [stormy] weather girl, I love weather," George admits. "The 34 years I spent in Southern California were really torture for me because I love it when it rains. I always have, ever since I was a child, because when it was rainy out, we were allowed to read and when it was sunny out, my mom always wanted us to go out and play. I’m exactly the opposite of most people; I find extended sunshine very, very depressing. It’s very weird."

Her atmospheric preference certainly helps lend a soaked-to-the-skin authenticity to her 14 best-selling British mysteries that feature noble-born Scotland Yard Inspector Thomas Lynley, his working-class assistant Barbara Havers and his wife, Lady Helen Clyde Lynley, who was shot and killed by a young assailant in last year’s shocker With No One as Witness.

Fans left wondering about Lady Helen’s murderer will be richly rewarded in What Came Before He Shot Her, a prequel of sorts that tracks the events leading up to the crime from the assailant’s point of view.

As the story opens, three siblings—15-year-old Ness Campbell, 11-year-old Joel and seven-year-old Toby—are left to fend for themselves in racially mixed North Kensington when their grandmother dumps them on their decidedly non-parental Aunt Kendra and jets back to Jamaica. When Ness becomes tragically involved with sex and drugs and Toby retreats into an imaginary world of his own, Joel tries desperately to keep his family out of the child welfare system by seeking protection from Blade, a neighborhood drug dealer. Events beyond his control eventually lead him to the Lynley doorstep in Belgravia with a pistol in his hand.

In Joel’s descent, the author explores some heartbreaking truths about disenfranchisement, race, poverty and the plight of children caught in a world they can neither understand nor escape.

"There are so many kids who are basically good people to whom life has dealt a very, very difficult hand of cards that they play as best they can, sometimes with tragic results," she says.

George initially planned to incorporate Joel’s story in With No One as Witness. "My original intention in the previous book was to create something called an hourglass plot, in which two parallel novels run along and then meet in one terrible moment in time, which of course would be Helen Lynley’s death, and then they go on their separate ways again," she explains. "But as I wrote, I began to see that, in order to do the Joel story justice, I was going to end up with a novel that was about 1,500 pages long with a cast of characters like something out of a Russian novel. I thought that what might be more interesting would be to remove the Joel story and then create an entire novel just about this little boy, so that’s what I did."

George is no stranger to working with children, having taught English for 14 years in Southern California. She’s also familiar with the Kensington area of London, where she’s had a flat since 1995. But it took a variety of influences to capture the Anglo-Caribbean patois of the streets.

"I have always watched a great deal of British television, so that was helpful. Also, having read a couple of novels where that was used also helped. The work of Courttia Newland, a young British writer, was extremely helpful to me, because his entire book, The Scholar, is written this way. I was able to examine that and see how he was structuring language," she says.

By now, George is comfortable being known as the most famous British writer who is not British—she was born in Ohio and raised in what is now California’s Silicon Valley. Still, new fans are often shocked to hear her American accent.

"Stylistically, I have always written more like a British or European writer than an American writer," she says. "Setting the books in England gives me much more leeway to do that, I think."

George became an Anglophile at an early age during the British invasion.

"It was right at the time that almost everything associated with pop culture in the United States was British in origin. There was the Beatles and all the groups that followed them, and Mary Quant from London was defining fashion, and motion pictures were introducing us to Michael Caine and Terence Stamp and the Redgraves. My cultural awareness was really informed by things British, so I had a natural interest and inclination toward that part of the world and it just never died."

Although her next novel will return to the Lynley series, George is open to attempting another stand-alone if the opportunity presents itself. "If I did a book similar to this, I would probably choose something tangentially related to another novel, and write that character’s story," she says.

Would this "British" writer ever set a novel in the U.S.?

"I wouldn’t shy away from it if I felt that I had a compelling story to tell in a location that really worked for me," George says. "Location is crucial to my books. I’ve been careful to go to places to make sure that I am going to feel that mystical or visceral connection that allows me to say yes, this is it, this is the place I’m going to write about."

A native of Washington State, Jay MacDonald now makes his home in sunny Austin, Texas.

The town of Fallbrook is tucked into the fertile rolling hills north of San Diego, where temperate climate and rich soil combine to form the perfect growing medium for the region’s avocado, citrus and commercial nursery industries. Incongruously, the roar of Army artillery practice from nearby Camp Pendleton routinely punctuates the peacefulness of this otherwise pastoral setting.

Such unlikely contrasts appeal to T. Jefferson Parker, the town’s resident author, whose 14 thrillers have so rarely left the state that one wonders if they’ve been ordered not to by some suspicious investigating officer. The truth is, Jeff Parker (the "T" is silent) is one native Angeleno who finds all the story ideas he can handle in his own hometown.

Witness his latest thriller, Storm Runners, at once a revenge plot, redemption tale and love story that features the very sort of outrageous contrasts that tempt and tease readers before ultimately reeling them in.

Here’s the back story: Matt Stromsoe and Mike Tavarez are buddies at Santa Ana High, the former a drum major, the latter a marching band member. They part ways at graduation—Stromsoe becomes a San Diego sheriff’s deputy, Tavarez heads east to Harvard, then becomes a chieftain in the Mexican mafia. When Stromsoe directs a manhunt that captures Tavarez but accidentally kills his girlfriend, the kingpin retaliates with a car bomb meant for Matt that instead kills his wife and son. Severely disabled in the blast, Matt descends into self-pity and drink.

Two years later, a buddy pulls Matt back from the brink and offers him a job with his private security firm. Matt’s first assignment: protect Frankie Hatfield, a television meteorologist who is being stalked by a crazed fan. The closer Matt grows to Frankie, the more he suspects that her off-hours tinkering with a formula her eccentric ancestor Charles Hatfield used to make rain may be putting her life in danger.

Farfetched? Actually, Storm Runners is based on true events. As they say: only in California.

"Charles Hatfield is a real guy. Isn’t that amazing?" Parker says. "I’ve known about him for a while. The next village over, Bonsall, is where Hatfield had his secret lab. It’s real easy for me to sit here from a few miles away and go, wow, what if it’s still there, buried down in some old oak trees and grown over with wild cucumber?"

Could the garage scientist actually make it rain?

"Yeah! He was great at it!" Parker says. " The story in the book where he floods San Diego and then has to flee town because they want to hang him instead of pay him, that’s a true story right out of the history books. Of course, for every stupendous rainmaking success that Charles had, he would have a resounding failure also, so the rational scientific community never considered him as anything more than fraudulently lucky. But if you look at his successes, they really were spectacular."

OK, perhaps we’ll accept a beautiful modern-day rainmaker. But a Harvard-educated drug lord?

"The Harvard guy is real, too," Parker chuckles. "Nobody would believe that; I wouldn’t even write that character if, in fact, there hadn’t been a guy doing that right around the corner from where I grew up. He went to Harvard and robbed liquor stores on weekends. Sometimes when you get a little nugget of history or fact underneath you, you feel emboldened to exaggerate it or make it bigger."

Parker often sprinkles deft, defining touches throughout his breakneck tales that keep the characters grounded. In Storm Runners, it’s the Painted Lady butterfly (Vanessa cardui), one of which makes a lovely touchdown on a dead man’s shoe.

"Those are a real phenomenon here, and they’re spectacular and beautiful. It just seemed like a natural thing for the story because I wanted to portray Stromsoe’s re-entry into the world as a return to Eden, almost an idyllic place where it’s fragrant and peaceful. It’s a real starting-over story, and putting in butterflies just seemed a nice touch."

Growing up in suburban Tustin, Parker always had a taste for truths that were stranger than fiction, and nurtured it, after graduating in English from the University of California-Irvine, by signing on as a newspaper reporter in Orange County.

" I was a boyhood admirer of the Guinness Book of World Records, those weird things like the bearded woman and the fattest man," he admits. "I love those obscure facts that are so outlandish you really can’t believe them, but you have to."

After immersing himself in classic L.A. noir fiction, from Raymond Chandler to James Ellroy, Parker set out to reinvent the genre from the sunny, suburban perspective of the O.C. The result was his 1985 debut hit, Laguna Heat.

" I very purposefully tried to avoid all things that had gone before," he says. "It wasn’t a dark, moody, drinking L.A. noir story at all; it was set in Laguna Beach, for crying out loud, with eucalyptus trees and paintings and artists and beautiful waves. Even at that age, I knew you couldn’t put the gumshoe in the phone booth; it just doesn’t work anymore."

Along with a handful of West Coast contemporaries, including Don Winslow and Kem Nunn, Parker continues to refine and redefine what L.A. crime fiction can be.

"I like and respect the mystery genre very much, but I think sometimes you can find yourself handcuffed by convention a little bit if you don’t try to stretch those boundaries, and sometimes break them," he says.

"My last book, The Fallen, is completely noir-free; it’s bright and optimistic and the main character has not an ounce of darkness in him. And I think that’s a legitimate way to look at the world and a legitimate way to write a novel. If at some point during the writing of the book it becomes clear to me that I’m going to have to ignore certain conventions, I’m going to do it, because the book is more important than the genre."

Jay MacDonald writes from Austin, Texas.

Even after 12 installments, readers can’t get enough of Janet Evanovich’s best-selling Stephanie Plum novels. Starting with 1994’s One for the Money, the series injected a healthy dose of humor into the mystery genre and turned the smart-alecky but tough New Jersey bounty hunter into one of fiction’s most memorable characters. Putting her likeable heroine into outrageous situations with hilarious sidekicks (not to mention two sexy love interests) proved to be a winning formula for Evanovich, who is also the author of a NASCAR-themed series set in Miami and three other co-written series. On June 19, Evanovich serves up Lean Mean Thirteen, which finds Stephanie a suspect in the disappearance of her ex-husband, Dickie. We asked Evanovich a few questions about the new book, her work and what really motivates her to write.

Stephanie has bad luck with cars. Have you ever had a car of your own burst into flames? Do any cars bite the big one in the new book?
I’ve never had a car burst into flames, but my daughter has at one time or another driven most of Stephanie’s cars. She doesn’t so much destroy them, as they die their own natural death. Of course cars bite the big one in Thirteen! Will

Stephanie ever choose between the two men in her life? And do fans seem to want her with Ranger or Morelli?
The fans run 50/50 in the Morelli versus Ranger debate. Many don’t want to choose, and I can’t say I blame them. Eventually Stephanie will choose, but not until the end of the series.

Stephanie wouldn’t be caught dead: a) with flat bangs b) at the mall without makeup c) eating pizza without beer d) leaving the house unarmed e) all of the above
A, B and C. Stephanie leaves the house unarmed all the time, not counting her can of hairspray.

Like James Patterson, you take a very practical, businesslike approach to your writing you’ve even referred to your work as carrying the Evanovich brand. Do you get impatient with writers who talk about muses, writer’s block and the like?
I have muses. They just come in the form of birthday cake and the occasional tankard of beer.

Though you write the Plum series solo, you work on three other series with co-authors. What’s it like writing with someone else?
The co-authored books add variety to my life. I don’t look for a co-author who can clone me, but rather someone who can live with the Evanovich promise (easy to read, entertaining, feel good, happy ending).

Do you do any research for your writing?
I do a lot of research when I’m starting a new series. For instance, I had to attend a lot of NASCAR races for the Metro series. Sort of self-serving since I’m a NASCAR addict.

Your tours draw huge crowds. What’s the craziest thing that’s ever happened to you at a book signing?
That’s hard to say. Crazy is pretty much the norm.

How do you unwind?
Unwind? I’m afraid if I ever unwound I wouldn’t be able to wind again.

Any plans for a Stephanie Plum perfume or line of lingerie?
A perfume that smells like pineapple upside-down cake. I like that idea!

What books are you taking with you on vacation this year?
Vacation???!!! There’s no time for vacationing this year. After Thirteen comes out I have to get ready for the No Chance (co-authored with Stephen Cannell) tour and then my daughter is getting married (hallelujah!) and early next year Plum Lucky (St. Patrick’s Day holiday novella) comes out. The year is packed.

Over the 14 years since she introduced readers to her fictional alter-ego, bounty-hunter Stephanie Plum, Janet Evanovich has gone from obscure romance novelist to international superstar, a writer whose professional concerns include the logistics of keeping 5,000 snapshot-hungry fans moving through a line and preventing her hand from swelling up during marathon autograph signings.

Meanwhile, Stephanie’s life, it is fair to say, has changed less dramatically. "She’s a little bit better bounty hunter and I think she has a better idea of who she is," says Evanovich, speaking by phone from her winter home in Naples, Florida (she migrates north to New Hampshire in the late spring). "She knows that she’s indecisive. She knows she’s in love with two men. She knows that she doesn’t have the world’s best job and she isn’t really great at it."

Out this month, the latest in the series of Plum mysteries, Fearless Fourteen, finds Stephanie still working for her cousin Vinnie, this time in a case involving a $9 million bank robbery committed by a relative of her sometimes-boyfriend Morelli. Working hard to survive in a world filled with gun-toting criminals and eccentric losers, she seems to have little in common with her famous creator. Still, former Jersey girl Evanovich insists, "There is a lot of me in Stephanie." 

Take, for instance, their shared weakness for birthday cake. As Fearless opens, Stephanie confesses, "I used to have a birthday cake in the freezer for emergencies, but I ate it. Truth is, I would dearly love to be a domestic goddess, but the birthday cake keeps getting eaten."

On the day of our interview, Evanovich has just celebrated her 65th birthday, an occasion that was to have included a champagne cruise with her family on their 22-foot Grady-White boat. But by the time they hit the water, Evanovich was too nauseous from an over-consumption of cake to face the bubbly. And she wasn’t using her big day as an excuse. "I’ve been known to go to the supermarket and kind of cruise for abandoned birthday cakes," she says, noting that you can get them for half-off.

Evanovich says she’s found that career success has had surprisingly little to do with her personal life. "I’m still the wife and the mother," says Evanovich, whose husband, son, daughter and son-in-law all play various roles in her career. "I’m still the creative person that I always was. On the outside, what that money has done is made it easier for me to be that person, because I can have someone come into my house to clean twice a week. Or because I can live anywhere I want."

She adds that celebrity didn’t help her avoid gaining 30 pounds while writing Fearless. She ate her way through the novel and has her heroine do the same. Though, despite the many references to junk food spread throughout the book, Stephanie doesn’t gain weight. She doesn’t age either, another advantage of fiction over real life.

With the book behind her, Evanovich says, "I am now in full weight-loss mode. I’m on Atkins. The birthday cake just finished me off." She’s about to embark on a book tour that will include media appearances and meeting thousands of readers in person. But she says that’s not why she wants to shed the pounds. "If I went on the ‘Today’ show and I weighed 170, I don’t think anybody would really care," she says. "For myself personally I don’t feel good at that weight."

Like Stephanie, Evanovich can be refreshingly frank about her vulnerabilities. "Five years ago, I had a facelift. I didn’t have that facelift because I wanted to look good on the ‘Today’ show," she says. "I had it because every time I looked in the mirror, I had no relationship with that woman. I wake up every morning and I think I’m 32."

Evanovich’s work goes beyond the Plum mysteries, of course. There are the Alex Barnaby NASCAR novels, the co-authored romantic suspense novels and the nonfiction book, How I Write. In addition, romances she wrote years ago are in the process of being re-released.

Still, the sexy, struggling bounty hunter remains her signature character. And Evanovich plans to keep her on the job for a long time. "I really have no intention of stopping. And I don’t have to. Why? Because I’m only 32."

Among crime novelists past and present, Elmore Leonard is a prime number, a talent so simple and elemental that it refuses to be divided by comparison to others. Whether he’s hanging with mobsters in Miami Beach, dreamers in Detroit or hustlers in Hollywood, his every dark comedy really takes place in Leonard Land, a closed universe populated by lovable cons, ex-cons and soon-to-be-cons whose dialogue is so spot-on that you hear it rather than read it. The one character you’ll never find in Leonard Land is the author himself. Leonard works hard to stay out of the frame and allow his characters to take over, moving and grooving to their own unpredictable beat.

“When I start a book, I never know how it’s going to end. I never know what’s going to happen,” Leonard admits. “I don’t have a computer. I write in longhand and then I put it on a typewriter, then I rewrite that, and rewrite it and rewrite it. It takes about four pages to get one clean page. I just start writing and keep going.”

The one thing Leonard won’t tolerate is fancy prose. As he states in his 10 Rules of Writing: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

At 83, with 30 novels to his credit in a career that spans more than half a century, Leonard remains up to his splendid tricks. In his latest, Road Dogs, he takes characters from three previous novels and combines them into a whole that is greater—and funnier—than the sum of its parts. Road Dogs also serves as something of a Leonard Land retrospective, with shout-outs to everyone from the hanging judge in Maximum Bob to Miami Beach bookie Harry Arno in Pronto to the otherworldly possibilities of Touch.

The “road dogs” in question are Jack Foley, the charming bank robber played to perfection by George Clooney in the film version of Out of Sight, and his prison wingman Cundo Rey, the millionaire Cuban hustler/go-go dancing Cat Prince from LaBrava. Both are facing years behind bars in Florida’s Glades Correctional until Cundo secures the services of a hot young female attorney. She manages to spring Jack first, with Cundo’s release to follow in two weeks.

Since Cundo paid Jack’s $30,000 legal fees, Foley agrees to crash at one of his oceanfront homes in Venice, California, and keep an eye on Dawn Navarro, the professional psychic from Riding the Rap, who has been Cundo’s lady in waiting for seven years. It takes little effort for Dawn to seduce Jack, but he’s cautious when she attempts to enlist him in a scheme to steal Cundo’s off-the-books fortune. The plot starts perking when Cundo arrives home a day early, throwing the dynamics between the three into the spin cycle.

Leonard has occasionally revisited characters in the past, including Raylin Givens (Rum Punch) and Harry Arno (Pronto) in Riding the Rap and Chili Palmer (Get Shorty) in Be Cool.

“I had no reservations bringing back these three characters. I felt that I hadn’t done quite enough with them,” he says. “I was anxious to use them because I know them. They have personalities of their own and I could make them talk, that’s the main thing.”

But he hit a small snag when it came to Cundo Rey. “I wanted to use him, so I had to open LaBrava to see what happened to him and I went, oh God, he’s dead!” Leonard chuckles. “He’s not pronounced dead, but Joe LaBrava shoots him in the chest three times. So I just have the emergency squad pick him up and say, ‘Hey, he’s still breathing!’ That took care of that.”

Then there was the Clooney factor. Since the success of Steven Soderbergh’s film version of Out of Sight, it’s become virtually impossible to separate Foley from Clooney—not that Leonard minds. “I loved the casting. In fact, I wondered, can I do another Foley picturing Clooney? And I had no problem,” he says.

It may prove a bigger obstacle should a film version of Road Dogs come up for discussion, as it almost certainly will. “Universal owns those characters now, so we either have to sell this to them or get an agreement that allows us to go somewhere else. And they don’t want to do that; they don’t like things to slip out of their hands,” the author says.

Leonard got his start, and perhaps his fascination for fringe dwellers, in the 1950s, writing Westerns on the side while holding down a “real” job in advertising. When the market for Westerns dried up, he switched to crime. “I would read John D. MacDonald’s stories in Cosmopolitan and different places and think, that’s what I should be doing,” he recalls. His early attempts fell somewhere between the giants of the genre.

“The book that changed my style somewhat was The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George Higgins. I think that’s the best crime book ever written. It’s about bank robbers and the guy who supplies clean guns for every job,” Leonard says. “What I learned is, I was already using a lot of dialogue, moving the story with dialogue, but I wasn’t getting into scenes as quickly. I was setting up scenes and then getting the characters talking, instead of getting them talking first. [Afterward] editors would complain, ‘I don’t know what’s going on here, these two people are talking,’ and I would say, just stay with it, you’ll find out where they are.”

Leonard’s books have become increasingly verbal ever since. Where other crime writers mourned the coming of the cell phone as the loss of a suspense tool (“Where’s a pay phone?!”), Leonard loved it. His characters in Road Dog may spend more time yakking on their mobiles than actually speaking face-to-face.

Leonard and his wife Christine, longtime residents of the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills, have five children and nine grandchildren. Though he’s still in top form, he’s inevitably asked if he plans to retire anytime soon.

“No, there is nothing else I want to do,” he says. “I have no reason to quit. I’d be bored.”

Jay MacDonald writes from Austin, Texas.

Unless you were living under a rock this past Oscar season, you’ve undoubtedly heard the buzz about Slumdog Millionaire. But what you might not know is that Danny Boyle’s beloved film was actually the adaptation of a successful novel, Q&A, from Indian diplomat turned author Vikas Swarup.

Swarup’s new novel, focused on the murder of a high society Indian playboy with a knack for getting out of trouble, is not your typical murder mystery. Instead, Six Suspects intricately weaves the stories of six different people (the six suspects of the murder in question) against a fascinating backdrop of modern India.

Swarup, who comes from a family of lawyers, currently serves as India’s Deputy High Commissioner in South Africa. Adept at juggling his diplomatic career with his writing career, he answered questions from BookPage after completing work on Indian’s recent parliamentiary elections.

Six Suspects narrates the lives of six people—seven, if you count journalist Arun Advani’s columns. What was it like writing from so many different perspectives?
It was quite difficult. The difficulty stemmed not so much from the second book syndrome as from my choice of narrative structure. Writing about the interior lives of six different characters is much more complex than writing about the interior life of one character as in Q&A. I had to experiment with voice, with technique and at the same time ensure that my story remained coherent within the confines of the schematic space signposted by the section headings—Murder, Suspects, Motives, Evidence . . .

In the same vein, you cover such a vast range of characters, occupations and complex legal and social situations. How did you do your research?
I was trying to give the readers a glimpse of modern India through six different eyes. So you had to have a diverse range of characters covering a wide social spectrum. Research meant poring over books dealing with the Onge tribe in the Andaman Islands, learning about the modus operandi of mobile phone thieves, discussions with police officers on firearms, and a crash course in Texan English! The Internet was certainly a big help.

Did any of your characters surprise you as the narration progressed? Or did you plot out exactly who did what and when before you started writing?
I think several did. For instance, when I first started writing the diary of the Bollywood actress I thought of her as a vain, flippant celebrity who couldn’t see below the surface. I had initially conceived of her diary entries as being in the vein of chick-lit. But she surprised me with her erudition and emotional depth. She starts out as a clichéd sex symbol but by the end the reader has started feeling sympathetic towards her. The plot also mutated as the book went along.  

This may be an impossible question for a writer, but do you have a favorite character in Six Suspects?
I think it is the stone-age tribesman Eketi. The choice of Eketi as a character was inspired by a report I had read of how during the 2004 tsunami the primitive tribes of the Andaman had remained safe using their powers of medicine and magic. I was interested in the interplay between two totally diverse cultures; what would happen when a primitive tribesman is confronted by the glittering lights of the modern world. Although I did a lot of research, eventually I had to get under the skin of the character and that proved to be quite difficult. How do you know how a stone-age tribesman behaves, what he thinks?

Despite your career as an Indian diplomat, you’ve been remarkably frank in depicting your home country in your fiction. Do you have any concerns about giving the rest of the world such an honest slice of Indian life?
Well, first of all, what I write is fiction. I do not wear my diplomat’s hat when I write fiction and my government allows me that freedom. As a writer, I have complete liberty to express myself in a literary work as long as it is clear that the views expressed do not represent the views of my government or mine in my official capacity. I also don’t feel defensive about what I write because at core I am extremely optimistic about India and that comes through in my novels, as well.

Tell us about your writing process. When and where do you do your best work?
Because I have a full-time day job, I do not have the luxury of writing whenever I want to. Besides, I can only write when I have a clear horizon ahead of me and no interruptions. So I write early in the mornings and on weekends only. 

Has the success of Slumdog Millionaire had any effect on the way you approach your work as a writer?
When your first novel becomes such a huge success, the pressure on the second novel is much more. But I always ask myself the question, do I have a story to tell? As it turned out, I didn’t have just one story to tell, I had six, hence Six Suspects. The success of the first book has made me somewhat more self-conscious as a writer. But the good thing is, I still see myself primarily as a storyteller.

Six Suspects has already been optioned for film. Do you expect to be any more involved in this adaptation than you were in the making of Slumdog?
Six Suspects is a more ambitious book than Q&A. The characters are very diverse, the resolution is much more complex. So certainly I would take a much closer look at how it is translated onto the screen. In fact, I am myself curious to see how John Hodge (he has just been commissioned as the screenplay writer) adapts it. Whodunits are notoriously difficult to film. You can disguise the murderer in the novel, but how do you disguise it in a film, where everything is in your face?

What do you like to read for pleasure? Any recent favorites?
I have read many authors and many books over the years, from Albert Camus to Irving Wallace. I have been a big fan of the thriller genre, but I have enjoyed contemporary literary works as well, such as Coetzee’s Disgrace, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and the novels of Haruki Murakami.

What can we expect from you next? Do you have plans for a third novel? If so, can you tell us anything about it?
As long as I feel I have stories to tell, I will write. I have already begun my third novel. For a change, it is set outside India.
 

The name Nevada Barr may sound like the perfect moniker for a spirited heroine or a Vegas showgirl, but Ms. Barr's legions of fans know she's the author of an intelligent, suspenseful mystery series set in various national parks. A former actress and National Park Service ranger, Barr didn't use her own name when she created her alter ego Anna Pigeon, but she readily admits she was the model for the sassy sleuth.

It seems New York Times best-selling author Elizabeth George can do it all. She’s written 23 books, many of them novels of psychological suspense featuring Scotland Yard and the now-iconic Inspector Lynley, and she’s won the Anthony Award, the Agatha Award and France’s Le Grand Prix de Literature Policiere for her first novel, The Great Deliverance. Her latest Lynley novel, This Body of Death, is on sale this month.

George took time out of her busy touring schedule to answer a few questions from BookPage.

Is there a specific writing exercise you find particularly helpful in getting your creative juices flowing?
For many years now, I have kept a Journal of a Novel for each book that I write. I do this in advance of my writing each day. Each day I also begin by reading a day in the novel’s Journal of a Novel to remind myself that anything I’m going through now is something I’ve gone through and survived before.

You’ve been publishing for well over 20 years now—how would you say your approach to writing has changed over the years?
After my third novel, I had developed an approach that really worked for me, involving an enormous amount of advance work prior to sitting down to begin the rough draft. This approach allowed me to turn in finished manuscripts that were close to perfect in the eyes of my editors, thus obviating the necessity for revisions. Because of this, I’ve not amended that approach since the creation of my third novel.

You’ve spoken about how you believe the division between crime/mystery fiction and literature is superfluous and superficial, but do you believe that there are specific talents that are called into play when creating a mystery series that is often overlooked by those who dismiss the genre?
My guess is that anyone who dismisses the genre hasn’t spent a lot of time reading within it. Anyone who’s read Mystic River by Dennis Lehane, Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, A Dark Adapted Eye by Ruth Rendell or any one of a number of authors on a list that could go on and on knows that crime writers call upon strengths in the area of characterization, plotting and narrative that are often unmatched by anyone else writing.

You teach a five-day writing seminar annually in California, yet you consider yourself to be self-taught. In your mind, is writing an art that can be taught? What do think are the ultimate goals of these types of courses?
Actually, to clarify your question, I have not taught my writing seminar in California for a number of years. However, a few years ago I put all of my lectures and all of the examples that I used in this course into a book on writing called Write Away, which is now actually used in creative writing classes in various programs in the United States. I’ve never claimed that any art form can be taught, nor do I make this claim in Write Away, nor did I ever attempt to teach an art form. What I taught was the craft of novel writing, which is entirely different from the art. Art is how the artist interprets the craft itself. If you have no foundation in craft, you have nothing to interpret.

Do you find that British fans of the Inspector Lynley series respond differently to your work than North American readers?
No. They respond identically.

Often times, mystery writers who have long-standing series wind up feeling tired and limited by their characters. For instance, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes out of frustration, and Dame Agatha Christie found Hercule Poirot insufferable near the end of his run. Do you ever feel this could happen for you with Lynley?
Both Conan Doyle and Christie froze their characters in time, place and circumstance, forcing themselves to deal continually with an unchanging character in unchanging times. I didn’t do that, and it was a deliberate choice on my part so that I would not tire of the characters.

Many authors claim that when they write, they start with few preconceived notions and just see where the characters take them. It seems that with mysteries, this would be problematic since precision and careful planning is critical to success. Do you ever find yourself writing yourself into a corner, or surprised by your characters, or do you view yourself as a puppet-master, always in control behind the scenes?
Writing a crime novel by letting oneself see where the characters will go is an exercise in creating a plot with holes through which a Mack truck could drive. What I know in advance is the arc of the main plot: the killer, the victim, the motive, the means and the opportunity. What I don’t know is what will constitute the subplots. What I also don’t know is how the detectives will solve the case. When I create the characters, I begin to learn from them what the subplots will be in that they tell me how they relate to each other and to the story as a whole. I don’t create a plot and force my characters through it. Characters who are well drawn and executed are going to be true to themselves and not necessarily true to what a writer “wants” them to be and to do.

For authors, books are like children and they’re not meant to have favorites, but which of your books are you proudest of? Least satisfied?
I’m proudest of Missing Joseph. As largely a meditation on motherhood set inside a crime novel, it was a huge stretch for me since I myself have no children. The book ended just as I wanted it to end, and numerous readers told me that they felt devastated by the ending, which was how I wanted them to feel since that was how Lynley felt. So I was quite pleased that my stretch paid off. I am least please with a short story I wrote called “The Evidence Exposed,” which was originally published in Volume II of Sisters in Crime. Even when I reworked it and rewrote it for my short story collection called I, Richard, I was not entirely happy with it.

RELATED CONTENT

Interview with Elizabeth George about What Came Before He Shot Her

Readers who have already met some of the indelible characters in Irish author Tana French’s earlier thrillers, In the Woods and The Likeness, greeted the news of her third novel with excitement, perhaps hoping to see some familiar faces.

Although neither Rob Ryan nor Cassie Maddox—protagonists of the first two books—appears in Faithful Place, the story does revolve around a character introduced in the previous novel: Frank Mackey, a cop on Dublin’s Undercover Squad, who turned up as Cassie’s former boss in The Likeness.

“I have this feeling that mystery fiction, almost more than any other genre, is really rooted in the society where it is set.”

French didn’t always intend to write about Frank next, but while working on The Likeness, she found herself becoming interested in him. “He had a very odd moral sense,” she says during a phone call to her home in Dublin. “And I was kind of interested in how you would turn into that kind of person, and then what would happen if you really got pushed to the far edge of that question: Will you do anything to yourself and to the people you love best to get your man?”

Frank is certainly pushed to the edge of reason in Faithful Place when, against his better judgment, he returns to the family he left more than 20 years earlier. In December 1985, he was 19 years old, desperate to escape his miserable home life and madly in love with Rosie Daly. He and Rosie made plans to run away to Britain together, but on the night that they were supposed to meet at Number 16, Faithful Place—the abandoned building at the top of their street—Rosie never showed up. Frank left anyway, heartbroken but determined never to go home again. He eventually joined the Dublin police force and married smart, sharp Olivia, with whom he now has a daughter, Holly, and an uneasy post-divorce relationship.

But when Rosie’s suitcase turns up 22 years later, hidden behind a wall at Number 16, Frank has no choice but to wade back into the mess of his family and his old neighborhood if he wants to find out what happened to her. Complicating matters is the fact that there’s no love lost between the neighborhood—the Liberties, one of the oldest parts of Dublin—and the police. Frank’s family sees no reason why they should trust him, and the neighbors would rather keep their secrets than expose them to the light of an official investigation.

French isn’t from the Liberties, but her husband is, which helped her to feel that she could write about it with some degree of accuracy. “I don’t pretend that I understand it from outside,” she says. “I think you would probably have to be born and brought up there and come from four generations there to really get the hang of the Liberties. But I had good insight, and I had a real insider vetting it for me to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid.”

The Liberties is an area rich with its own culture and history, French explains. “The same families have lived there for hundreds of years. Now recently it has started changing—it got kind of yuppified over the last 20 years. But you still get families who show up in the 1911 census, who have been there for hundreds and hundreds of years. It was never a rich area—right up into my husband’s day, it was tenement flats with outside toilets, but with a very strong community ethic which it still has, and with the nosiness that comes with people being very jammed together.”

The close, almost suffocating atmosphere of the Liberties is mirrored in Frank’s family, who still exert the same pressure on him as on the day he left. “Families are fascinating, the way they interact, and the way your family can get to you with a speed and an efficiency that no one else in the world can quite do,” French says. “That’s what I was interested in: the huge intense power of family, and what would happen if you came back into the zone of that power after having resisted it for so long. Because I think even if you do leave your family for 20 years, like Frank does, it’s not that the pull of that magnet ever goes away. It’s just that you get far enough that it weakens. And when you come back within its reach, it’s going to snap you straight back in.”

Frank’s family is full of the memorable characters that French writes so well, from naïve and upwardly mobile Kevin to “dark and wiry and restless” Shay, who still lives upstairs from their parents and has never forgiven Frank for escaping his fair share of their alcoholic father’s abuse. Frank’s younger sister Jackie is the only one he’s kept in contact with over the years—but it turns out she’s been keeping a secret from him.

Trained as an actress at Trinity College, French has had years of experience on the stage, which helps her to create these fully fleshed-out characters and to inhabit so completely the mind of her narrator. “I write like an actor,” she says of her first-person narrative style. “If you write third person, you have to be able to see things from everybody’s viewpoint equally and simultaneously, whereas writing first person, it’s a lot more like playing one character in a play, in that you see all the action through the filter of this character’s perceptions and preconceptions and needs and biases.

“I think the fact that I start from character, not from plot, is also a very actor thing. I start out with a premise and the narrator, and I just hope to God there’s a plot in there somewhere that I’ll figure out as I go along.”

Clearly French has done well in that regard. Her first novel, In the Woods, debuted to tremendous acclaim in 2007, winning such major awards as the Edgar, Anthony and Macavity, and both that book and 2008’s The Likeness landed on the New York Times bestseller list.

Faithful Place, with its haunting plot and gorgeous prose, should be poised for similar success. Some of the book’s best passages are flashbacks to 1985, when Ireland was in the grip of a major recession. French vividly brings the period to life, contrasting it with Ireland’s later economic boom, which was nearing its end in December 2007. She very deliberately set the book in this time just before the crash, which has hit Ireland particularly hard. “We were riding so high on the wave of the economic boom that it shaped the entire national consciousness, and this crash is doing the same thing,” she says.

In one memorable scene, Frank must explain to nine-year-old Holly that his family is poor—an idea she finds shameful, having grown up thinking of poor people as stupid and lazy. One of French’s goals in

Faithful Place is to set the record straight: “I think that a big part of what happened in the economic boom was that it began to be seen as somehow irresponsible to be poor, no matter why; you were not contributing to the economy, you were a lesser person for not having a lot of money. And conversely, having a load of status symbols somehow implied that you were a more worthy person. And I thought that was something that Frank would probably feel very passionately about; in this very fraught relationship between his past and his present, that would be one of the things that he’d want to salvage from the past, the idea that your bank account isn’t necessarily a measure of your moral worth.”

Although French’s family was living abroad during much of the 1980s recession, she still remembers what it was like to spend those summers in Ireland. “Anybody who’s old enough to remember it is shaped by it, by the kind of thing that Frank describes. There’s a generation who [grew up] during the economic boom times [to whom] ‘broke’ meant you could only go on one holiday this year, whereas ‘broke,’ when we were teenagers, meant I can’t meet up for coffee because I don’t have the bus fare to get into town.”

French’s deftness with both character and setting make the world of Faithful Place pulse with life. It’s no accident that her novels all take place in Dublin, where—despite an itinerant childhood—she has lived since she was 17. “Dublin is the only place I really know, the only place I can call home, where I know the little things, like what connotations a certain accent has, and what’s a shortcut from A to B. I have this feeling that mystery fiction, almost more than any other genre, is really rooted in the society where it’s set, because crimes are shaped by the society they come out of. You have to have a strong sense of the underlying tensions within a society in order to set the kind of stuff I’m interested in writing there.”

As for her characters, readers of Faithful Place will enjoy guessing which one will become the protagonist of French’s fourth book, which she is writing now. “The reason I skip from narrator to narrator is usually because it’s hard to come up with more than one story that’s that crucial to any one person’s life. There aren’t that many turning points in any given person’s life, and I kind of don’t want to write about anything that’s less than crucial.”

Though she has yet to repeat a narrator, she says she would like to write about Frank and his family again: “I hope there’s a book there someday! It’s funny, I still haven’t reached the point where I can take this for granted. A part of me is still going, oh God, I hope I don’t just drop everything and smash it.” With Faithful Place, which may be French’s best novel yet, she has nothing to fear. 

These days it seems there’s a club for everything and everyone, but perhaps the coolest association you’ve never heard about is the International Thriller Writers (ITW). First founded in 2004, ITW is now made up of the best writers whose main aim is to get the pulses of their readers thumping. BookPage spoke with David Morrell and Hank Wagner, the co-editors of Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads, a compendium of essays by today’s top thriller authors on the books every fan of the genre needs to read. Together, Morrell and Wagner discuss the origin of their book, sexism in the genre and how thrillers have changed over time.

How did the book come into being? Did you approach each author who contributed essays with a particular title, or did each author bring their own favorites to the table?
Hank Wagner: The book came out of David asking several [ITW] members for their “Top Twenty” thrillers of all time. When he called me, I suggested expanding the list, because 20 titles wouldn’t cover the topic properly. When we decided on 100, it occurred to me we should do a book similar to others I had enjoyed over the years, namely Horror: 100 Best Books, and similar tomes on the science fiction, mystery and fantasy genres. David liked the idea, and presented it to the ITW board, who embraced it.

Armed with suggestions from ITW members and friends, we crafted the final list, which we then presented to members of the ITW, suggesting to those interested that they submit their top three choices to write about. We then tried to accommodate everyone as best we could in handing out assignments. Of course, some essays screamed to be written by a particular author—the essay on From Russia, With Love written by Raymond Benson, for instance. Raymond is an expert on the character, and has written several Bond novels himself.

Your book covers thrillers from 1500 B.C. to present-day novels—how would you say thrillers have changed (or stayed the same) over this huge period of time?
Wagner: Thrillers have stayed the same in that their basic goal—to give readers a thrill, to create a feeling or sensation of excitement—has remained constant. How individual thrillers accomplish that goal has evolved over the decades. In former times, the appearance of a monster, or a ghost, or a man being stranded on an island was enough to do that. Now the stakes have risen; it’s usually about a race against time or, literally, about the impending end of the world. The amazing thing is that ITW members keep coming up with new ways to engage increasingly demanding audiences.

Were there any titles you would have liked to see included that didn’t make the cut?
Wagner: This is precisely why we called the book 100 Must-Reads, rather than 100 Best Books. Of course there are books we, or some of the other contributors, would have liked to have squeezed in; we all love the genre, and we’re all passionate about books. There were several long, sometimes heated discussions about this book or that: Is it really a thriller? Did we cover that ground through another title? Was a particular book truly unique or groundbreaking? Right to the end, we’d often slap our foreheads in disgust, lamenting, “How could we have forgotten such and such a book?” In the end, we think we came up with a list that’s truly representative of the genre, demonstrating its breadth and potential. Still, it only presents the keys to a vast kingdom; we’re confident that readers can use this tome as a springboard to further reading in the genre. Think about it: We list 100 great books and stories right off the bat; many of the authors who penned the essays are successful novelists, with numerous works to their credit; and finally, the essays themselves mention dozens of titles as reference. All we can say is, “Bon appetit!”

Often there can be a kind of snobbism in the literary world, with certain readers turning their noses up at particular genres. Do you think this affects the thriller genre?
Wagner: Certainly not in terms of sales, based on recent scans of the bookracks and the bestseller lists. Most of the alleged snobbism turns up in reviews, but readers are a bright bunch—they can and do make up their own minds about what they want to read. Personally, David and I are always on the prowl for a good and interesting read, and find things to like about each book we pick up, whether it be the use of language or a creative plot, clever cultural references or just well constructed set pieces/scenes. If you are lucky, the book you are currently reading does all these things well.

Do you think thrillers are easily translated to film, or is there something special about the thriller in book form that gets lost in the conversion?
Wagner: It depends on the property, and the individual creators, whether a book translates well into film. It’s the eternal debate: What’s better, the book or the movie? Both forms try to accomplish different things; both have their own advantages and limitations.

What makes a great thriller?
David Morrell: The genre’s name is self-defining. A thriller must be thrilling. A mystery may or may not be a thriller depending on how much breathless emotion it has, as opposed to cerebral calculation. Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None is on our list because it’s as breathless and scary as it is puzzling. Of course, what’s thrilling to one generation might not be thrilling to the next. Similarly, one generation’s idea of fast pace might be different from a later generation’s. In fact, that’s one of the points in Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads—that this type of fiction evolved, and that it’s entertaining to chart the evolution. In 1860, Wilkie Collins was credited with inventing ”the novel of sensation” in The Woman in White. Contemporary readers found the book shocking, but today we appreciate it more for its place in literary history. Once we pretend we’re in 1860, the book becomes shocking again. So much depends on perspective.

On another level, a thriller becomes great when it carries a feeling of reality and truth. That’s one reason John le Carré’s work is admired. He not only delivers intrigue, but he also teaches us about our world.

Do you think that male and female thriller authors approach the genre differently?
Morrell: Twelve of the books on our list are by women. They include Mary Shelley, Baroness Orczy, Marie Belloc Lowndes, Daphne Du Maurier, Agatha Christie, Helen MacInnes, Very Caspary, Patricia Highsmith, Katherine Neville, Sandra Brown and Gayle Lynds. Why isn’t the ratio more balanced? Because, until recently, publishers didn’t encourage (or sometimes even allow) female authors to work in the genre. Frankenstein was published anonymously and was well-received. As soon as it became known that the author was a woman, critics found fault. Writing Frankenstein wasn’t a ladylike thing to do. Fortunately, things have changed. A lot of that is due to Gayle Lynds, co-founder of International Thriller Writers. Gayle used to be a newspaper reporter and had a security clearance when she later worked for a think tank. But when she submitted her early espionage novels, editors and critics stupidly complained that a female author couldn’t possibly know about the world of espionage. Gayle’s career helped to change these attitudes and opened the way for a lot of current women thriller authors.

With hundreds of years of thrillers behind us, how can thrillers continue to be relevant and fresh?
Morrell: At their best, thrillers not only entertain. Ideally they also reflect the society in which they are set, analyzing our fears and how we perceive the world. Author/law enforcement officer James O. Born wrote an essay about Joseph Wambaugh’s The Choirboys (1975) in which he points out that Wambaugh’s novels were the first honest insider dramatizations of police work. They were set against the major social changes of the 1970s. Wambaugh made a huge difference in how we look at law enforcement personnel. As long as thriller authors teach us about our world, they’ll be relevant.

Do you remember the first thriller you ever read?
Morrell: It seems tame now, but Nancy Drew and The Hidden Staircase really made an impression on me when I was a boy. By comparison, I don’t think the Hardy Boys novels were as exciting. After that came several Tarzan novels and The Lone Wolf and The Saint. But as an adult and an apprentice writer looking for a direction, I was most impressed by Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, a 1939 novel about a British big-game hunter who stalks Hitler on the eve of WWII. Household’s outdoor action scenes, with their mystical evocation of nature and the primordial relationship between hunter and hunted, showed me a path that I continue to explore more than 50 years later.

Wagner: The first thriller I ever read (also the first novel I ever read, also the first novel I ever bought with my own money) was Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The fifth-grade me couldn’t put it down; I read it obsessively during class, hiding it in my lap, near the opening of my desk. That was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with books. I quickly moved on to Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, The Shadow and Doc Savage, and countless comic books.

If you had to choose, who are your favorite thriller writers? All-time favorites.
Morrell: Geoffrey Household will always be important to me. Rogue Male is on the list, and I was delighted to write the essay about it. My Penn State master’s thesis was on Hemingway’s style, and parts of his work—sections of To Have and Have Not and For Whom the Bell Tolls, for example—demonstrate a high caliber of action writing that continue to influence my writing. I also learned a lot from James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, which is on our list. And Dracula. People who know various movie versions don’t really know the story. Stoker displays a remarkably sophisticated technique, and his chase scenes are exemplary. Take away the vampire element, and you have one of the first novels about a serial killer.

Wagner: If I had to choose one, I’d go with William Goldman. I was lucky enough to do an essay on his classic novel Marathon Man for 100 Must-Reads. It was a joy to reread that book; he really caught lightning in a bottle there, and it still holds up. Magic is another classic. Other top choices would include Stephen King, Peter Straub, John D. MacDonald and a fellow named . . . David Morrell!

The Hypnotist, the debut thriller from author Lars Kepler, is proof that there is plenty of room for even more great Swedish crime writers. Our July Whodunit? column declares it “the mystery buzz-book of summer 2011,” with multiple grisly murders and a haunting dip into the mind of the sole survivor.

Some readers may not be aware that Lars Kepler is actually a pen name for Swedish couple Alexander Ahndoril and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril. The Ahndoril duo talk about their alter ego and share some insight on being not just one, but two writers.

Describe your book in one sentence.
A hypnotist can find hidden truths in your subconscious, but some truths ought to stay in the dark forever – they are too dangerous to reveal.

What inspired the two of you to write together as a team?
We’ve been married for a long time and we just love watching movies together, especially thrillers. One day we started to discuss if it was possible to transfer that exciting feeling into a book. We are writers in our own right, but we have not been able to write together. Every attempt has ended in great quarrels. That’s the reason why we had to create a totally new writer and the truth is that since we became Lars Kepler we haven’t had a single fight – just a wonderful and creative time.

How would you describe Lars Kepler as an author?
He is obsessed with unsolved crimes, mysteries, cold cases, crime scene investigations, forensic medicine and police tactics. Lars Kepler takes part of the Scandinavian tradition, but tries to add a high, cinematic tempo. He thinks that crime fiction is an optimistic genre because when you close the book the mysteries are solved, the perpetrators stopped and order is restored.

What is the best writing advice you’ve received?
The only way to write is to write and keep on writing. It will not be perfect immediately, but just give it time and continue to write and rewrite. Don’t stop before you get scared yourself, before you’re crying yourself, before your heart beats faster.

Of all the characters you’ve ever written, which is your favorite?
Rich and complex characters is probably the most important task you have as a writer of crime fiction, because no matter how interesting plot you may create the story will not be exiting if you don’t care about the characters. We really love our Detective Inspector. He’s so stubborn and lovely but he fights with his painful past. In the first two books Joona Linna is something of a mystery, but in the third you will learn all about his past and in the forth novel his mystery is the main plot. But besides of him, in The Hypnotist, maybe the terribly annoying and deeply disturbed Eva Blau is our favorite.

What kind of hypnotism research did you do for your book?
Alexander’s brother is a professional hypnotist and writes books on the subject – so we had a perfect source very close to us. Alexander has even been hypnotized himself.

What does Lars Kepler have in store for us next?
The second book is about a special kind of contracts. A Paganini contract. Do not ever sign such a contract, because you can’t break it even with your own death. The story begins one summer night. The dead body of a woman is found on board an abandoned pleasure boat drifting around in the Stockholm archipelago. Her lungs are filled with brackish water, but there are no traces of this water on her clothes or other parts of her body. She has drowned on board a floating boat.