What Mark Billingham spends his money on

This fantastic piece in the Glasgow Herald breaks down Billingham’s likes (country music, his friends’ crime fiction), vices (not being able to cook or do household work) and pet peeves (his dog ruining his garden.) But he also has a really good point about why reading crime fiction can be complicated for a writer:

[I]nevitably I’m reading books by mates, because crime fiction’s quite a
small world. Then you’ve got that weird thing of reading books by
people you know, which is kind of odd. It changes the way you read. It
gives you a different perspective on the people that wrote them because
some of the stuff is very dark and twisted and you’re thinking “Hang on, I was in the pub
with that bloke last night”. It can be very weird when you read a sex
scene written by somebody you know, for example. Nobody ever thinks
that it’s you when you describe a hideous murder but as soon as you
write a sex scene people think that’s you.

Funny how that happens, yeah…