Interview with the crime writers

Christopher Fowler’s dabbled in many genres, but currently he’s having a ball with his new mystery series featuring octegenarian police detectives Arthur Bryant & John May. The latest, SEVENTY-SEVEN CLOCKS, is set in 1973 and makes use of all sorts of neat arcana, as he explains to the Islington Express:

If the subjects of the final three books are as entertaining as the first three they should be well worth waiting for – and it sounds like they will be.

"I’ve done missing theatres, underground rivers, the mysterious world of guilds. The next one is highwaymen and myth making. Do you know about the London Monster?

"The London Monster operated in Mayfair and Piccadilly and the Strand about 1780, somewhere around there, and he would creep up to ladies and stab them in the bottom with a long thin needle or dagger. Hysteria swept through London and they even started selling copper pants."

He continued: "Since the war we’ve forgotten so much stuff like that because it’s become unfashionable. We’re just celebrity obsessed. We’re far more interested in the price of cocaine or the colour of nail polish a TV star’s wearing so all this fascinating stuff has gone."

Meanwhile, Tess Gerritsen is interviewed by a local-ish paper, the Portsmouth Herald Accent, about writing her bestselling novels and the resistance she faced within her own family:

"I’d always written, I’d been writing stories since I was a child," says Gerritsen. "I wrote little books for my mom and bound them myself with needle and thread. Mostly they were about my pets." Which included eight cats and a dog.

She continued writing all through medical school and residency, recording the stressful, dramatic, often painful things she experienced.

"It was a way of getting out the feelings," she says. When her boys were little, she went back to fiction. "But I didn’t think of it as something you could do as a profession."

Not that her parents ever considered it a suitable profession.

"My father said writing was a nice hobby," Gerritsen says. "Not something you could make money at."

Jacob Gerritsen was none too thrilled with his wife’s new career interest either. He had married a doctor and found himself with a crazed woman who stayed up writing till all hours.

"He thought I had my head in the clouds. He felt I was being irresponsible."

But Gerritsen persevered. Determined to write a novel, she turned to romance.

"I read romance novels all through my residency. They’re a great escape," she says. "And I felt a writer should write what she knows."

Perserverance, indeed.