Panel 7 Highlights

Panel 7: Crime in the City
Michael J Malone | Alex Marwood | Nick Quantrill | Luca Veste
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Selected quotes from live Q&As with readers

Luca Veste: Favourite part of writing... tricky one. Hearing from readers who have enjoyed the books is near the top. Taking an idea that may only be a couple of words and turning that into a fully fledged plot is also close. It's that "What if... ?" question I pose myself at the beginning, then exploring it through writing the book, and seeing how it ends up at the end, which is so fulfilling.

Nick Quantrill: I love the act of writing, it's like putting a puzzle together for me. It's satisfying to understand the logic of it and see it (hopefully) work.

Michael J. Malone: [on writing violence] This might sound strange, but I see it as a kind of dance. So, there is an amount of choreography where this guy does that and then that guy does this. And if you can tap into a certain amount of emotion while doing this "dance" it hopefully makes it mark on the reader.

Alex Marwood: Really, I'm just interested in people at their extremes, and the psychology that drives our good and bad decisions, makes us so bad at understanding the reality of our situations, the devastating effect of crime, not only on the victims, but on the bystanders and the perpetrators. It's just endlessly fascinating to me...

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Notes from round table discussion between authors

The discussion started with setting and location. For Michael that is Glasgow, which he described as a unique blend of character and characters. For Nick, all his novels are very much Hull novels, “The people in them are rooted in the city and its backstory colours their lives.” “Did you know it was the second most bombed city after London in WW2? We still have an amazing Old Town area, though, with narrow cobbled streets. I love the marina area. I'll never be able to afford a yacht (I'm a writer!), but when the sun shines and walk around it to the Fruit Market and the arts places that have set up there, it's glorious.”

For Alex, her novels are more about the city as a construct, rather than London itself. A big city will always have secrets. But Alex loves London, which comes through the pages of The Killer Next Door, the story filters its way through the city, very much alive. For Luca, the city is Liverpool. “It feels like we're constantly reinventing ourselves in Liverpool. Music was so important, then there was the architecture and museums... now it seems we're moving towards business”. “I love the docks in Liverpool. Albert Dock and right along from there. The Liver Buildings and walking along the river. Just incredible. There's also something to be said for the parks we have. Sefton Park is gorgeous in the autumn.”

The panel discussed the blurring of lines between real and fictional places. Alex “I've had internet comments about how the writer "had been" to my fictional place and I'd "got it all wrong”.

We moved on to the writing process and the big “what if?” of the authors' novels. For Luca the big questions was “What if someone was killing people who lied or kept secrets in their relationships... would you survive?”  For Alex and Nick it seems to usually be more of a “how do I?” situation, once they’ve thought of an idea. Idea first, then finding characters' motivation and plot execution. For Michael, each “what if?” is different for each novel, “For Beyond the Rage, it was, what if my main character's mother didn't commit suicide and was in fact, murdered?”.

The authors finished this panel with a quick chat about worst job - pawnbrokers, chip shops and call centres.

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More about the authors on our website: http://britcrime.com
More about the panels here: http://britcrime.com/panel