with Alex Marwood
We are delighted to welcome novelist Alex Marwood to Omnimystery News today.
Alex's new psychological thriller is The Wicked Girls (Penguin Books; July 2013 trade paperback and ebook formats), and we recently had the opportunity to ask her a few questions about the book.
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Omnimystery News: How do you decide as an author whether to write a stand-alone or a series novel?
Alex Marwood: It's really just a matter of personal taste, isn't it? As a consumer, I've never been a great fan of recurring characters, either in books or films, with the odd honourable exception. If I could come up with a character as compelling as Dexter, say, or Saga Nordstrom in the brilliant Scandiwegian serial The Bridge, I might think again. Even writers whose work I really admire rarely suck me in with series: I have, for instance, read every one of Ruth Rendell's Barbara Vine psychological standalones, many of them more than once, but have barely touched her Wexford series. As a writer (I have had four other books published in the UK under my real name, before The Wicked Girls), I guess I want to explore my characters so thoroughly from the beginning that I will have fairly much worn myself out by the end. I like the challenge of having to create a whole new universe from scratch every time. Well, perhaps "like" is the wrong verb. I can work myself into frenzies of tension at the outset of every book, while the universe is forming in my head, but it's what feels natural to me.
OMN: Tell us something about the book that isn't mentioned in the publisher's synopsis.
AM: Though many people have assumed that The Wicked Girls is based on a notorious British murder case, the start-point in my head was actually the brilliant 1994 movie Heavenly Creatures, and its pay-off line that, as a condition of their parole, the two girls were never allowed to meet again. Ever since I saw it, the what-ifs have been going round and round my head.
OMN: Re-write the synopsis as a tweet.
AM: If you killed someone as a child, could you ever recover?
OMN: We often hear that you should write what you know. Would you agree?
AM: It's a very oversimplified rule, the way it's most often quoted. I remember a woman at a party turning rather pale when someone told her I was a crime writer. Turned out she was interpreting the "write what you know" rule rather too literally and, because I'd never been in the police, assumed that I must come from the other side. But it's a good and useful rule. There are few people who can't access a memory of being seriously frightened, even if the fear was groundless, of being confused, of being sad, and it's amazing how one can recreate those emotions in one's mind's eye at will. My starting point for a lot of situations I set up in books is "how would I feel/what would I do if …"
OMN: Describe your writing process.
AM: Crime seems to need a lot more precise preparation than the other books I've written before. With those, I'd start with an idea, find some people to put in the situation and let them run with the decision-making, with the odd pause to work out how the heck I was going to get myself out of a corner. Which sounds very greenery-yallery, but it generally worked. With crime and its crowded dramatis personae, every detail — plot, character, place — all matters intensely. Crime readers aren't stupid and they can see a plot hole from miles off. I've felt cheated at the end of a number of books and don't want to inflict that on my readers, so now I've taken to doing a mass of plotting before I go anywhere near the computer. I have a big magnetic whiteboard, and by the time I start writing it will be covered in maps, drawings of houses, lists of characters and their ages and multicoloured arrows. I'll then scrawl plot points on scraps of paper and fix them to the board with fridge magnets, so I can move them around. I'm not saying the plot is fixed in stone before I start writing — I still find that characters surprise me by making their own decisions — but it really helps me keep track.
OMN: How important is the setting to your storyline?
AM: I'm very British, in my writing. Although my antecedents are pure Celtic Fringes, I grew up in Oxford and have been a dedicated Londoner for more years than I can quite believe. I am fairly obsessed with my country — its class system, its strange mix of tolerance and intolerance, its layer upon layer of not-always-edifying history, the way we take living in houses that are hundreds of years old for granted, our ever-changing language — and I try to set my books in places that are typically British, but range beyond the picture the outside world has of us. The Wicked Girls is set in Whitmouth, a run-down seaside resort on the south coast: a place that was hugely fashionable in the Georgian and Victorian eras but which has become something of a dumping-ground now that everyone takes their holidays in places with more reliable weather. There are lots of towns like it on our coastlines, a population of the homeless, the jobless, asylum seekers and old people hidden in among the low-rent holidaymakers and hen parties, elegant eighteenth-century facades buried beneath great swathes of neon. The book I'm currently writing, The Killer Next Door, is set in a rooming house in an anonymous south London suburb that the tourists never reach. It's off the underground network, so, to those who don't live there, it basically doesn't exist.
OMN: What kinds of books did you read when you were young?
AM: I was a complete gannet. I read everything. I was lucky, in that I was one of those kids with an adult library card and rather vague parents. My school, certainly, disapproved of the sorts of things I would choose to read — I've always been keen on horror, thrillers and dystopic fantasy — but I think they were a wonderful source of imaginative growth, for me. I did major in English Literature at university, though, so I got a good grounding all round by the time I reached adulthood.
OMN: What authors would you say have had the most influence on your writing today?
AM: Stephen King. Daphne du Maurier. James Herbert. Agatha Christie.
Stephen King. Kurt Vonnegut. Barbara Vine. Stephen King. George Eliot. Isaac Asimov. Stephen King. Patricia Highsmith. E Nesbit. Oh, and Stephen King.
Current authors I really admire include Laura Lippman, Megan Abbott, Alison Gaylin, Jeff Lindsay, Belinda Bauer, Gillian Flynn. Oh, and Stephen King.
OMN: What is the best advice you've received as an author? And, if you care to share it, the harshest criticism.
AM: When I was considering a change of name a brilliant agent I went and talked to said "you have to remember that it's not the individual books and how they've done that count: at the end of your life, it's the body of your work." This taught me a huge amount about just keeping on keeping on, and not allowing myself to get too elated or depressed about any one event.
As to the harshest: I once bumped into an old schoolfriend I hadn't seen in a while. "Oh, yes," she said, "I'm afraid I haven't read any of your books. Having a degree in the subject, I always feel I have something of a duty to read the good stuff."
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Alex Marwood is the pseudonym of a successful journalist who has worked extensively across the British press. Alex lives in South London and is working on her next novel.
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The Wicked Girls
Alex Marwood
A Psychological Thriller
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