Mark Billingham and the Case of the Curious Kiwis

In my ever-present quest to find crime stories in the most obscure newspapers possible, this new interview of Billingham by the New Zealand Herald probably qualifies, at least for this week. Fairly standard stuff, of course, but as befits a stand-up comic, there are some amusing gems contained herein:

Of course, every writer will say yep, they’re
delighted, thrilled to bits, can’t wait to come to New Zealand to meet
their fans and flog a few books. Mark Billingham seems to mean it.

He
gets to do quite a bit of this gadding about these days. Actually, he
says, gadding about — which are my words — takes up around three months
of every year. This is the price to pay for being a writer with
publishers in about 30 countries, he thinks. But what’s not to like?
“Well, it’s fantastic,” says the Birmingham-raised thriller writer, who
has the Midlands burr and a bit of the lad in his voice. “You know,
they fly you around the world, put you up in nice hotels and you talk
about your book … It’s hardly living in a ditch, is it?”

Still,
you imagine that for many writers the circuit of lunches and festivals
and signings in book shops must be something of an ordeal. “Some
people,” says Billingham, “are just shy, and writers are just very
solitary by nature a lot of the time. And some people, you put a mike
in their hand and stick them in front of an audience and they hate it.”

Pity the poor writer — perhaps particularly the poor crime
writer — who happens to also be a shrinking violet. No such chance with
Billingham who must be a publisher’s dream come true. He says: “It was
almost the second question when the publisher wanted my first book. The
first thing they wanted to know was: what was the next one going to be
like? Is it a series? And the second question was: Are you happy to
promote it?”

And he said: “Yeah, you try stopping me.”

Then there are the wacky, US-centric fan letters he gets:

Funny thing, the way
people do want to read about murder and sickos and sad, lonely
detectives with potty mouths, except in the US where they devour
murder, sickos and lonely detectives but object to the bad language.

Billingham
gets letters from American readers who "tell me I’m going to go to hell
because my characters swear too much. It’s weird. They’ll happily read
about murder and all manner of perversion and evil and yet if you swear
at the same time, that’s unacceptable, and I find that very strange."

The
strange fans, the ones who write letters about going to hell or to tell
Billingham that "the enjoyment of an otherwise good book was spoiled by
the fact that that particular train doesn’t stop at that particular
station on a Saturday morning" are part of the rewards of being the
thriller writer.

Although the one thing that confuses me somewhat is this persistent notion that there is hardly any alcohol at crime writing shindigs. Have I just been going to different ones?