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.

Louise Penny’s newest thriller A Trick of the Light is our top Whodunit pick for September. The next adventure of Chief Inspector Gamache brings him back to Quebec to investigate a murder within the art scene.

Our reviewer said, “Penny’s characters are, to a one, rich and multifaceted, her plotting is intricately laced with backstory and her depiction of modern-day Quebec is spot on.” Read the rest of the review in the September 2011 Whodunit column.

Penny shared a little insight into Quebec and Chief Inspector Gamache, plus some valuable writing advice, in an interview with BookPage.

Describe your book in one sentence.
The book is about perceptions and duality, the difference between what we say and what we think, the look on our faces and the thoughts in our heads, how the same piece of art can be considered a masterpiece and a disaster, and how a glimmer of hope could simply be a trick of the light.

What do you consider to be the mark of an excellent murder mystery?
When the characters become people, and you care deeply about them. As a result, the main mystery becomes not who committed the crime, or how it was done, but why.

If you could take any one characteristic of CI Gamache for yourself, what would it be? 
Gamache stands up for what he believes in, he has the courage of his convictions. I have convictions, but I often lack courage, and sit in silence while mean things are said about others. It’s a part of myself I don’t admire and constantly try to change, and a trait I intentionally put into Armand Gamache. He’s the ‘better angel’ of my nature.

Why did you choose to set the CI Gamache novels in Quebec?
I love Quebec. It’s where I choose to live and for me location is a very strong character. Emily Dickinson described novels as frigates, that can take us to other places. I’d love for people to pick up one of my books as though it’s a passage to Quebec. To discover this amazing area, with the French language and cuisine and culture. Where the French and English intermarry and live as neighbours, but are not always at ease with each other. A place of rich history and deep passions. I wanted there to be absolutely no doubt, when people get on the frigate, that the destination is Quebec, and that is it an extraordinary place.

What is the best writing advice you’ve received?
When I was struggling with my second book, wrestling with near paralyzing fear, I went to a therapist. I could see that either writer’s block would settle in, or, perhaps worse, I’d write a book simply to please others. I’d play it safe, and lose my own voice. I could see that happening and it was turning writing into a desperately frightening and disappointing chore. The therapist listened to me then said, ‘The wrong person’s writing the book.’ Now, to be honest, that wasn’t immediately helpful.  Then she explained that my ‘critic’ was writing the book. I needed to thank the ‘critic’ and show her the door. Don’t lock it, because I’ll need her later, for the revisions. But I need my creative self to write the first draft. And if in that first draft I spend a day writing ten pages about a chair leg, then do it and don’t worry. Just move on. All the crap will be taken out by the ‘critic’ in the subsequent drafts.

This was hugely freeing because implied in that advice was that I’d never get it right in the first time – and that isn’t what the initial pass is for. It’s to explore, to take chances, to get out of my comfort and do something really scary or stupid. To give myself permission to just ‘try.’ And know there’s a safety net in the form of second, third, fourth drafts. So now my first drafts can be soft and smelly, but somewhere in there is a gem. And I spend the rest of the drafts shaping and polishing and digging deeper, and, I hope, finding the brilliance.

If you weren’t a writer, how would you earn a living?
Well, I was a journalist for many years, though perhaps not the best one. I’m genuinely interested in hearing people talk about their lives, but I’m not a political animal and I tend to be slightly credulous. Not cynical enough. If writing wasn’t an option and I had it to do over again I’d love to work in a museum. Ideally the British Museum. Or the Natural History museum in London. I spend hours there every time we visit.

What are you reading now?
An Agatha Christie! I love Christie and have been hugely inspired by her. Though I’ve tried to build on what Christie did, and not simply imitate. But I’m deeply grateful for their company throughout my life, especially the difficult and trying times.

Stuart Dill is more at home hobnobbing with country music stars than he is slogging through the lower depths of humanity where conspiracies are hatched and killers roam. But he’s succeeded in overcoming that cultural limitation via his first crime novel, Murder On Music Row.

For the uninitiated, Music Row is Nashville’s equivalent to New York’s Tin Pan Alley. Here songs are written and recorded that will eventually be sung around the world. And here careers soar and plummet with astounding velocity. While outwardly serene, this talent-laden piece of real estate is honeycombed with explosive pockets of ambition, ego and jealousy, all factors that make it an ideal locale for murder (even though they rarely occur there in real life).

There are four distinct layers to Dill’s story. The top one deals with the fortunes of superstar Ripley Graham, a mercurial artist who’s on the verge of delivering what is certain to be a best-selling album for his record label. The label is in the process of being acquired by an international conglomerate and needs the much-anticipated album to clinch the deal. Everything falls apart, however, when a sniper’s bullet fells Graham’s manager, Simon Stills, while Graham is shooting a music video on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. With Stills critically injured, his ambitious young intern, Judd Nix, finds himself drawn into the intrigue just as he’s beginning to learn how the convoluted music business operates.

That brings the reader to the second layer. In the process of telling its story, Murder On Music Row also offers one of the most lucid but least “teachy” explanations of how popular music is created and marketed. No surprise here, since Dill’s been in the music business for 26 years and currently manages such high-profile acts as Billy Ray Cyrus, Jo Dee Messina and Laura Bell Bundy. There’s virtually no aspect of the industry he hasn’t touched.

Then there’s the historical layer in which Dill describes how Nashville became a commercial music center. The fourth and final layer is the one that implicitly invites those who are familiar with Music Row to speculate who the real life figures are that Dill partially bases his fictional characters on. Graham, for example, is more than a little flavored with the folksy flamboyance of Garth Brooks.

So Dill has much to talk about when BookPage comes calling at his office on 16th Avenue South, the storied central thoroughfare of Music Row. His crisp white dress shirt tucked neatly into pressed khakis, the blond, curly-haired Dill leans back in his chair and recalls the long and circuitous route that ultimately brought his book to publication.

“I wrote the first page in the late 90s,” he says. “I think a paragraph stayed in the final draft. I wrote most of the book from 10 o’clock at night to 2 o’clock in the morning. I would go home exhausted and tired and see a little bit of the news and then start playing with this. The original idea was what would it look like to have an intern get thrown into the crosshairs—and literally the crossfire—of the politics of the music business with a manager and an artist. It may have been [John] Grisham who said that the formula [for writing fiction] is not that complicated. You take an ordinary person, put him in an extraordinary situation and see if he can get out. So that formula had been in my head for 10 years. But I wanted it to be relevant. It’s fiction, but at the same I wanted the backdrop to be very realistic. I wanted the settings to be real and part of it to be very current. I think there were 14 revisions [of the manuscript] over time. With the last one, I decided we were going to base it in 2011. So I spent January and February [of 2011] doing that."

The story is sufficiently current to include references to the disastrous Nashville flood of May 2010 and to the October 2010 induction of “The Voice” coach Blake Shelton into the Grand Ole Opry.

“I wanted to pepper the book with some real history,” Dill continues. “At the same time, I really did want to talk about the fact that the music industry has changed more in the last 10 years than it has since the beginning of commercial music. It’s at a crisis, and that’s part of the narrative. It pleases me to no end that someone who knows the business here would enjoy the book. That’s all I really want. I thought I could probably throw a piece of fiction out there that would be entertaining for someone that’s not in the business. The more challenging and more frightening part of it all was whether I could write a book that my peers would read and feel like it was worthy. So many times, we get caught up in the New York or L.A. syndrome of somebody making a movie or a book [about country music], and we know that’s not what it’s really like.”

Dill balances his serious intentions with some wickedly deft humor. In an early chapter, his main character, Judd, pores over a guest list for one of Ripley’s lavish costume parties. Readers with only the slightest awareness of country music will recognize many of the names, from Tim McGraw and Faith Hill to Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman. For industry insiders, though, the fun comes in noticing the names that aren’t there—and perhaps in agonizing over why their own names are missing. Naturally, most of Dill’s real clients are on the exclusive list. Elsewhere, Dill writes hilarious and personality-consistent remarks that supposedly issue from the mouths of comedian Jeff Foxworthy and late-night behemoth Jay Leno. He sought permission from neither man for his imagined routines, but they will find nothing to complain about.

Not all of the action takes place in Nashville. Since the requirements of his job have taken him around the world, Dill leads the reader through the streets and into the suites of such other music centers as New York, Los Angeles and London.

“Those are all real places,” he says. “When I began writing the book, I started out with these places [I’d been to] in mind. Then, as I wrote, I started thinking, ‘Did I get that right?’ The Electric Lighting Station in London, where I have the worldwide headquarters of [fictional] Galaxy Records, was where I took a meeting when I was managing Freddy Fender. It was the first time I was in that building, and I was just charmed by it. I didn’t know where it was then. I just got in a cab and went there. Fast forward to almost 10 years later. I’m with Jo Dee Messina in London, and we’re staying at the Royal Garden Hotel. I’m walking down a street and look to my left and there’s that building—just two blocks away. I had no idea that’s where it was. I was excited to find it. In New York at the Carnegie Hall Tower [where other scenes are set], I went up there when the chairman of EMI [Music] worldwide had an office there.”

That Dill made his protagonist an intern was no accident. “I was an intern in the 1111 Building [on Music Row] 26 years ago,” he says. “That’s where I started. So there’s a little bit of romanticism in there for sure. There’s a sense of naivete [in an intern’s perspective] that helps in the telling of the story.”

Dill’s prominence in the music business didn’t give him any leverage in getting his book published. But it did garner him some invaluable advice. “I took it to a couple of agents,” he says. “I was fortunate in that these were friends of mine. So I was lucky in having relationships where I could get real feedback. It wasn’t just a blind submission that got stuck in a pile. Because they were friends, there was probably some obligation [to read the manuscript]. It wasn’t enough obligation to accept it but enough to tell me the truth.”

In the end, Dill served as his own literary agent, acting on a suggestion from his friend, the writer Frye Gaillard. “Frye is from my hometown of Mobile, Alabama, and teaches at the University of South Alabama. He was probably the first guy who said that this was no longer a training exercise, that it was publishable. He called me back and said, ‘You need to take this to Blair.’” Dill’s contacts at John F. Blair, Publisher asked for one additional rewrite of his book before they agreed to publish it.

In 2000, Alan Jackson and George Strait released a record called “Murder On Music Row” that indicted the country music industry for straying too far from its traditional rural roots. It wasn’t a new charge, but it gained a lot of publicity because of the singers’ stature. By this time, Dill had already begun writing his book. “I had different versions of the title [by then],” he says, “but once the song came out, I thought, ‘That’s got to be the title.’”

Although Murder On Music Row is Dill’s first published piece of fiction, he’s determined it won’t be his last. “I do have another idea that I’ve been outlining for awhile that I’m excited about,” he says. “I haven’t done much on it yet. It’s the same idea of playing off the music industry as the backdrop. I like the idea now of using real song titles [for my book titles], even though they don’t necessarily have anything to do with what the songs are about. My working title on this one is ‘Angel From Montgomery.’”

Nashville journalist Edward Morris is the former country music editor of Billboard and currently a senior writer for the Viacom website CMT.com. His books on country music include Garth Brooks: Platinum Cowboy and At Carter Stanley's Grave: Musings on Country Music & Musicians.

German novelist Zoran Drvenkar’s thriller Sorry just might be the “Mystery of the Year,” according to our October 2011 Whodunit column. After winning the Friedrich-Glauser Prize in 2010, it has now been released in English. The unique premise is “dark, demented, radical and grotesquely humorous.”

In a Q&A with BookPage, Drvenkar shared a few of his favorite books and imparted some words on being a writer.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Four friends open an agency that sells excuses to corporations who don’t know how to handle mistakes. The four friends get kind of surprised when a murderer books them.

What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Charles Bukowski said that not being able to write because of the circumstances getting in the way of your life is a lousy excuse and that you can write unter any conditions, even when a cat crawls up your back and six kids scream in the background.

What was the proudest moment of your career so far?
The proudest moment is happening every time, when I finish a book. I sit there and I can’t believe it and smile stupidly and proud and with no real understanding how I did it.

Name one book you think everyone should read.
There are more than 400 books I think everyone should read, but I will narrow it down to four: The Half Brother by Lars Saaybe Christensen, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis and Terror by Dan Simmons.

What’s your favorite movie based on a book?
Fight Club.

As an author of children’s books, film, plays and novels, what is your favorite type of writing?
I like to jump in between genres. I don’t like to be predictable, and where is the fun in writing if you don’t use everything possible writing can offer you?

Bad habit you have no intention of breaking?
Being myself.

Back in March, BookPage chatted with internationally best-selling author Ian Rankin about The Complaints, our March 2011 Mystery of the Month and the first in a new series starring Edinburgh cop Malcolm Fox, who investigates corrupt police officers.

The Impossible Dead, the second book in Rankin’s riveting new series, is featured in the December 2011 Whodunit column and is “[f]illed with fascinating backstory, compelling characters and some sly social commentary.” Rankin graciously chatted with BookPage once again–this time about cops, villains and his unique writing process.

Describe your book in one sentence.
A murder in the present seems to connect to a mysterious death a quarter of a century back, and Inspector Malcolm Fox is determined to see justice done, whatever the cost.

Would you make a good cop?
I would make a terrible cop. I don’t work well as part of a team, and don’t take well to being told what to do by those in positions senior to mine. (I know this from past experience.) So I would have to be a maverick, and the real-life police have little patience with those.

If you could change places with any of your characters for a day, who would you choose and why?
I’d probably change places with Cafferty. He is the villain in many of the Rebus novels, the mobster who controls Edinburgh. Being inside his head would let me discover precisely why he became the man he did. Plus there’d be that vicarious thrill of being a man who is feared, a man held in awe by his minions.

What book are you embarrassed NOT to have read?
So many. I was having this very discussion last night. I studied U.S. Literature for two years at Edinburgh University, yet have never read Catcher in the Rye. That’s just one example.

What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
I wrote my first detective novel (Knots and Crosses) while still a student at Edinburgh University. I had plans to become a professor of English, and was hesitant about writing in a populist genre. But the Writer-in-Residence put me right by pointing towards authors such as John Buchan. He knew that thrillers, mysteries and novels of psychological suspense can still be regarded as literature.

What is one bad habit you have no intention of breaking?
I’m not sure it’s a bad habit as such–it might not work for others but it works for me. Here it is: when I commence a book I have very little idea where the story will take me. I almost never know who the villain is, or how my detective will end up solving the mystery. The first draft is an exploration. I’m playing detective, getting to know the characters and how they might connect to each other. But that means one day I may find myself reaching the end of a novel still not knowing whodunit!

What are you working on now?
I am in full ‘mulling’ phase–getting vague ideas for a new book without putting very much on paper. I hope to start writing it in January or February 2012.

Also in BookPage:
Read our 7 questions interview with Rankin for The Complaints, the prequel to The Impossible Dead.

What happens when one of contemporary crime fiction's most celebrated authors takes on one of the most beloved classics of all time? Find out in Death Comes to Pemberley, wherein celebrated writer P.D. James lays a mystery at the Darcys' doorstep. We asked the British author a few questions about her latest project—and whether there might be more adventures in Austen in store.

Was it difficult to write about murder while preserving an Austen-esque narrative tone?
After finishing my last detective novel, The Private Patient, I had at the back of my mind the idea of combining my two lifelong enthusiasms, for writing detective fiction and for the novels of Jane Austen, by writing a sequel to Pride and Prejudice which would examine the success of the Darcy’s marriage and also be a credible mystery.  I am so steeped in the language of Jane Austen that it was not difficult to reproduce her narrative tone, although in my novel this is less apparent in the second part when I am dealing with violent events, which she, of course, never included in her work.

How did working with another author's already established characters differ from creating your own characters?
For me the creation of character is the chief satisfaction of writing a novel, and I have never previously either used or wanted to use the character of another writer.  The main difference with Death Comes to Pemberley is that I was developing my own understanding of Jane Austen’s characters and providing some explanation for events in the original novel which I found perplexing, including the reason why Darcy placed a shy 15-year-old sister, Georgiana, who had lost her mother, in the sole care of a woman like Mrs Younge.

What do you think that crime novels and novels about social mores like Austen’s have in common?
The crime novel should to some extent be a novel about social mores and we often learn more from crime fiction about the age and mores in which it is set then we do from more prestigious literature.  For example, if we really want to know what it was like to work in an office in London between the two world wars, we read Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers, which tells us more than many social histories would.

Have you read any of the other sequels to Jane Austen’s novels or watched any of the film adaptations? If so, do you have a favorite?
I have not ready any sequels to Jane Austen’s novels.  I have watched film and television adaptations of her books and my favourite is the BBC’s serialization of Pride and Prejudice, which I thought was brilliantly done.

Who do you think would make a better husband: Darcy or Bingley?
Darcy for Elizabeth, Bingley for Jane.

Why do you think Austen’s novels have such resonance with readers today? What do you most admire about her work?
Her style, her wit, her humour, her humanity, her ability to create character and to bring to life a small community of generally civilized people in rural England in the early 19th century.

Would you consider writing other Austen sequels? Might death come to Emma's Highbury or Sense and Sensibility's Barton Cottage?
No. Writing Death Comes to Pemberley gave me great pleasure which, it seems, many readers are sharing, but I have no intention of writing a further sequel, either to another of Austen’s books or to any other novel.