Panel 9: Foreign Bodies
Quentin Bates | M J McGrath | K T Medina | Daniel Pembrey
Daniel: It was mostly because I was so drawn to Amsterdam as a location.
Melanie: One of the pleasures of reading your work, Daniel, is to see places you recognise, whereas perhaps one of the pleasures in reading mine, Quentin's and Katie's work is in learning about places you don't know. Does that seem right?
Quentin Bates | M J McGrath | K T Medina | Daniel Pembrey
♠♠♠
Selected quotes from live Q&As with readers
Daniel Pembrey: I think you've got to love writing to do it professionally. It's hard to get established and get visibility, though I will say the crime fiction community is very supportive. But to commit to it, you really have to feel like you couldn't do anything else! That's me; I've wanted to do it since I was 5!
Quentin Bates: I don’t have the time to immerse myself for days on end in stuff that might or might not end up as part of a book. So I tend to focus on the research I need to do afterwards, digging out things that I have to get right to fit whatever happens in the book. On the other hand, that can lead down all kinds of interesting alleyways and new ideas…
Katie Anne Medina: My agent, Will Francis at Janklow and Nesbit, who is fab, says that you should/can never second guess what the market wants, so just write what you want to write and if it's great people will want to read it. I think it's the 'build it and they will come' approach!
Melanie McGrath: Like most crime writers, I'm fascinated by human motivation and also by what extreme situations do to the human psyche.
♠♠♠
Notes from round table discussion between authors
On choosing the settings for the authors' books:
Katie: I was drawn to Cambodia because it is such a tragic country - as a whole - and particularly so if you live in a mined area. I went to Cambodia a few years before I decided to write about it.
Melanie: What drew me to the Arctic was partly that there it's a really violent place with high homicide rates and everywhere and nowhere to hide! Many reasons conspire to make the Arctic very violent, not least the landscape itself which is very dangerous.
Quentin: I used Iceland simply because I had lived there of so long and it seemed a waste not to use all that knowledge. I fought against it for a while, but gave in eventually, recognising that I had to use it.
Daniel: It was mostly because I was so drawn to Amsterdam as a location.
Melanie: One of the pleasures of reading your work, Daniel, is to see places you recognise, whereas perhaps one of the pleasures in reading mine, Quentin's and Katie's work is in learning about places you don't know. Does that seem right?
♠♠♠
More about the authors on our website: http://britcrime.com
More about the panels here: http://britcrime.com/panel
More about the panels here: http://britcrime.com/panel
