Mary Louise Kelly is an American broadcaster and author. She is currently a guest host for National Public radio’s news and talk programs including Morning Edition. Until 2011 Kelly was National Public Radio’s senior Pentagon correspondent, reporting on defense and foreign policy issues. She also reported on the Office of the Director of national Intelligence and other spy agencies. Her first novel, Anonymous Sources is to be published by Simon & Schuster in 2013. Mary Louise met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about terrorism and Ecehelon.

Tell us about Anonymous Sources.

Anonymous Sources is the story of a very clever, moderately pretty, unrepentantly snarky reporter named Alexandra James. She is sent to investigate what happened to the unfortunate Thom Carlyle, who has plunged to his death from the top of a bell tower in Harvard Square. Alex figures out pretty fast that he was pushed. The challenge is figuring out why. Alex gets up to quite a lot of mischief chasing clues from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Cambridge, England and then on to London and Washington. But after her phone is tapped… her laptop disappears… and an assassin dispatched to kill her only narrowly misses, Alex realizes that she has stumbled onto a very, very big story indeed.

How would you define terrorism?

Such an interesting question. It’s a loaded word. I remember reporting from Belfast in the 1990s, and my editors at the BBC discouraged me from ever using it. They had learned hard lessons from covering Northern Ireland, as well as apartheid in South Africa. As the expression goes, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

That all went out the window after 9/11. I was working at NPR by then, and I think we mentioned “terrorism” or “terrorists” on air approximately every three seconds. When I started covering the spy beat for NPR in 2003, I actually looked up the formal definition of terrorism and tacked it on a post-it note above my desk. That definition — that terrorism is “a war crime committed in peace time, the random killing of civilians for political ends” — still holds, kind of. But how do you define “peace time” in an era where the U.S. has declared a global, seemingly never-ending war on terror? And how do you categorize an event like the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood? An act of terrorism, or an act of insanity? (Not that the two are mutually exclusive.) And then what about cyber-terrorism, in which havoc may be wreaked but no one actually dies?

In Anonymous Sources, the bad guys are unequivocally terrorists, nothing freedom fighter about ’em. That’s the nice thing about fiction. You can make it more black-and-white than real life.

As a correspondent how do you balance the public demand for drama with facts, and how does this translate into your fictions?

I’ve never thought of it in those terms. The news business is driven by facts, and you have to double-source them and get them right. But reporters make decisions every day about WHICH stories to tell, and how to tell them in a compelling way. At NPR, producers talk about “eat your broccoli” stories — the worthy but dull ones. Think of the dutiful, daily news pieces detailing dry Senate hearings, or White House press briefings. If you listen, though, the best correspondents and hosts make even these come alive. They zoom in on one great piece of tape or one interesting person on the sidelines of an event, and they run with it.

The trick in radio is to keep people listening all the way to the end of your piece. You have to hook them with your lede and then keep them in suspense. If you’re lucky, you achieve what we call a “driveway moment”: when an NPR listener is so engrossed that they stay in their car to keep listening, even after they’ve arrived home. (I always felt I had a slight edge covering the spy beat, compared with my colleagues stuck reporting on, say, agriculture subsidies or E.U. debt reduction.) I don’t know what the term is for the thriller-writing equivalent of a driveway moment. But years of practice at trying to keep the audience in suspense has come in very, very handy in writing fiction!

When dealing with coverage based on an anonymous leak, how do you know the extent of whether the leak is on or off message?

Well, the key thing is that the leaker is not anonymous to me. When I agree to grant a source anonymity in a story (say, because they are risking their job to talk to me), I still know who they are and have a relationship with them. Covering the intelligence beat, you learn that just because something is classified does not mean it is true, and just because someone has top-secret security clearance does not necessarily mean they know what they’re talking about. One of the questions I’ve learned to ask, when someone tells me something interesting is, “How do you know that?” The answer is often telling. Once during an interview I asked an Army officer how he knew something, and he confessed, “Actually, I heard it on NPR.” I yelled back: “But that was me talking!” You see how reporters and their sources can potentially get into vicious cycles of bad information!

What do you think the role of Echelon in maintaining world peace is, and what are the dangers of a false positive in apprehending a perceived threat?

I haven’t done a lot of first-hand reporting on Echelon, so I’ll refrain from weighing in. (Echelon, for those who may not know, being the signals intelligence network shared by the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.) I will say that the NSA – the American sigint agency – is one of the toughest nuts for reporters to crack. By comparison, the CIA is downright open and forthcoming. In my years covering the intelligence beat, I only got to visit NSA headquarters at Fort Meade three or four times. There is a joke that being a spokesperson at NSA is the best gig in town, because they never say anything, ever. (Really. They won’t even give you a “no comment” when you call — they are trained to respond, “I can neither confirm not deny.”) With a few notable exceptions – such as James Bamford and Siobhan Gorman — very few journalists succeed at penetrating the NSA bureaucracy.

Bamford, who has written some seminal works on intelligence, points out that the NSA tried to sue him in 1982 after he wrote The Puzzle Palace. In 2001 he published Body of Secrets and the book party was thrown at Fort Meade. The change of attitude was partly due to the new Director, Michael V. Hayden. How do you view Hayden’s policies and how do they reflect a change of outlook in the US?

General Hayden is exceptionally skilled at dealing with the media. Both at the NSA and later at the CIA, he returned phone calls. Within the severe constraints on what he was able to say — and recognizing that he had an interest in defending the Agencies’ records — he helped journalists make their stories more accurate and more nuanced. I would also submit that he has fine taste in thrillers (he gave ANONYMOUS SOURCES a great early review.)

But I don’t know that his policies reflect a change of outlook. The access that reporters are granted always depends both on the individual in charge, and on the political climate. There’s an inherent tension between the government’s desire to keep secrets and the media’s desire to ferret them out. You can probably guess which side I come down on. If you look at the major national security stories that journalists have broken over the last decade — the CIA’s network of secret prisons, for example, or the NSA’s domestic surveillance activities — I would argue the public interest has been better served by having them come to light.

Do you think that cyber war is as real a threat as terrorism, and to what extent does intelligence depend on the services of hackers and how does that blur the line between law and order?

The cyber threat is terrifying. And don’t just take my word for it, take it from the Director of National Intelligence. This spring when DNI Jim Clapper delivered his annual assessment of the top security threats facing the U.S., he ranked the number one threat as a devastating cyberattack. Terrorism has dropped a notch or two on the official list.

Accordingly, the U.S. is believed to be spending billions on offensive cyber weapons. There have been successes: just ask the Iranian nuclear scientists at Natanz whose centrifuges suddenly started spinning out of control. But with new technology comes new legal and ethical questions, including the ramifications of a U.S. attack on the infrastructure of a country with which we are not at war. And of course, there’s the fear that comes with any new weapon in the arsenal: that it may one day be turned back on the U.S. The consensus view in Washington right now appears to be that all of the options for handling the Iranian nuclear problem are lousy… and that cyber weapons, while controversial, at least have a shot at slowing Iran’s drive for a bomb.

How important and how dangerous is information in Anonymous Sources?

The story that Alex James stumbles across in ANONYMOUS SOURCES is a whopper. Like most reporters, though, she doesn’t know that at first. All she has is a gnawing sense that things are not as they appear. Alex describes how she gets sources to talk to her:
“The simple questions work best. Pick one, ask it over and over, don’t let them dodge it, and you’d be amazed at what people will tell you. With more sophisticated sources, you have to earn their trust. Call them on a routine story, get it right, call them back the next day for feedback. Pay your dues. The best stories grow out of a tiny detail that someone lets drop, a crumb that doesn’t initially seem significant. But then you consider it alongside another crumb that a different source might have dropped weeks back. I gather these morsels patiently, hoard them, until I begin to make out a path that I can follow.”

That pretty much sums up my approach to investigative reporting. Of course, I enjoy an advantage over Alex, which is that my sources have never tried to kill me as I went about my reporting. At least, not to my knowledge!

What advice would you give yourself as a young woman?

Hmm. Don’t quit your job before you have the next one lined up. Learn to drive stick shift. Learn to cook a proper steak. Learn to drink single-malt whisky. Marry the Scotsman who introduces you to it. (I succeeded on that last point.)

What else is on the cards for you this year?

I’m gearing up for book tour in June. I am genuinely excited in the way that perhaps only a rookie author can be. My friends who have actually done book tours warn me that they are exhausting. They also keep forwarding me the classic take in The Onion on debut author book events: “Author Promotion Book Gives It Her All Whether It’s Just 3 People Or A Crowd of 9 People”…

Meanwhile, I’m writing a second book — this next one is more of a psychological suspense thriller, although I can’t promise that spies won’t show up.

And in September I’m moving to Italy for a year. Our family spent four months there in 2011, and we have the opportunity to go back for a school year. My plan is to write full-time while we’re there, but the relentless Italian sunshine makes it tough. For writing productivity purposes, it would be better if we were heading to Scandinavia.

Thank you Mary Louise for an informative and great interview.

Links:

‘Anonymous Sources’ can be had in hardcover format at Amazon US and UK, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, Books-A-Million, and Politics & Prose

Get a digital copy at Amazon US and Barnes & Noble

Colby Marshall is a ballroom dancer, choreographer and novelist. She is actively involved in local theatres as a choreographer and occasionally indulges her prima donna side by taking the stage as an actress. Her debut thriller is Chain of Command. Colby met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about secrets and assassinations.

How do you coordinate choreography with writing?

Coordinating choreography with writing is much like mixing sugar and potassium chlorate: when I’m doing both jobs at once, shit goes everywhere. Luckily, being the master of chaos that I am, I find I can keep the smoldering debris to a minimum as long as the fire doesn’t reach my wall full of post-it notes, which, if burned, would mean the end of any semblance of organization.

Do you think secrets shape our characters?

All of my characters have secrets. Some are bigger than others, of course, but I do think secrets shape characters through the actions and reactions they cause. In the publishing and writing worlds, it seems there are so many debates about what’s better: character driven or plot driven. In the thriller genre, so much of the story is wrapped up in the plot, but to me, plot driven and character driven stories aren’t mutually exclusive. I think plotlines–like secrets–catapult characters into different directions within the plot just like plotlines develop the characters. You cannot have one without the other. Well, then again, I suppose you can, but the story would be very short and dull.

Who are your literary influences?

The earliest influence on my writing came from R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series, which steered my love of reading toward the scary and made me think hey, I want to write things like this one day. Another favorite was the Nancy Drew series–in particular, the Nancy Drew Files in which Nancy Drew progressed from being a young sleuth to being a young sleuth surrounded by dead people. From there I devoured Mary Higgins Clark tales, which were a gateway drug to Lisa Gardner, Thomas Harris, and James Patterson. Lisa Gardner’s work inspired me to research my novels to the point of migraine to make sure every detail was perfect. Thomas Harris is responsible for my love of demented plot twists, and James Patterson’s short, clipped, action-packed chapters are to blame for the waste of ink caused by having to print that triple digit on the chapter numbers.

Tell us about Chain Of Command.

Chain of Command is a thriller about a reporter who discovers that the simultaneous assassinations of the president and vice president may have been a conspiracy to rocket the very first woman–the Speaker of the House–into the presidency. I started writing it years ago when the country last had a female Speaker of the House of Representatives. I realized it was the closest a female had come to the position of Commander in Chief in our country. Many other countries have had female leaders, which got me to wondering in a fictional world, what would happen if someone wanted us to catch up with those other nations so badly they were willing to kill for it. That’s where Chain of Command began.

What frightens you?

Dentists. Surgical procedures, I can handle. I’ve actually gone under the knife more than once for various health reasons, such as needing to have my appendix removed, but I’d rather have my appendix taken out four more times than go to the dentist for anything. This is a totally irrational fear to most people, as I’ve never had a bad or painful experience with a dentist. That said, I despise the taste of metal to the point that I dislike even touching metal since I tend to taste that flavor upon feeling the texture (yeah, I know. I’m odd). Therefore, the thought of someone intentionally jabbing metal instruments into my mouth makes me twitch.

Grahame Greene said writers have a piece of ice in their hearts. What do you make of his observation?

I wish I had a little more ice in my heart. Writing is an emotional business, and you can’t help but get hurt and rejected at some point in your career. Maybe if I was a little icier, I wouldn’t take it to heart when that happens. Then again, I’ve developed a much thicker skin over the years, so perhaps I’m like the Grinch and my heart is shrinking down sizes after all!

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m currently editing the next book in the McKenzie McClendon series, which is about a surgeon providing infants for the black market baby trade. McKenzie needs an angle on this story to keep her job—and her home. When her high school sweet heart tips her off that his wife may have been one of the victims, she launches a frantic search to find the killer and her ex’s son. I’m also working on a new series about a forensic psychiatrist with grapheme-color synesthesia—a form of synesthesia in which an individual’s perception of numbers and letters is associated with the experience of colors. One half of a vicious team of killers is caught, and she uses her unique gift to hunt down the mastermind still at large.

Is there a particular event that has changed your life and influenced your writing?

I can genuinely say I have one huge “yes” answer to this question, and that event is that I knew a sociopath in real life. At the time I met this person, of course, I didn’t know that this was what they were, but over time and after I’d become involved personally in a friendship with this person, I learned that virtually everything I knew about them was untrue. I found out along with others about this person’s deception, manipulation, and lack of conscience. I tried with all my might to find another explanation for the behaviours that would’ve been easier for me to reconcile, like mental illness, but I was finally forced to come to terms with the fact that this person wasn’t the person I thought I knew. Rather, this person was a chameleon well-versed in worming their way into others’ lives in order to con and deceive financially and emotionally without remorse. While being involved with such an individual certainly wasn’t the highlight of my life, I can say it provided me with an interesting “character study” that would forever shape how I would be able to write villains. Having personal insight into how psychopaths operate on a day to day basis is a disturbing but valuable knowledge in the thriller-writing business.

What do you make of the E book revolution?

I have mixed feelings about e-books. On the one hand, I think I will always love to read in printed format, personally. It’s either because I’m an evil scoundrel who likes to hear trees scream as they suffer a painful death, or it’s because I don’t have the attention span to read something on a device with the capability of accessing a dozen social media sites with only a click or two. As for e-books for others, I think they can be a great thing, but I don’t want to see them take over at the detriment of the printed book. I personally think it would be awesome for a free e-book to come with every hard copy of a book sold in order to keep print in vogue, but then again, I’m no expert on the economics of mass media distribution. For all I know, that would cause the universe to implode.

What advice would you give yourself as a younger woman?

My advice to myself as a younger woman would be not to plan so much, because plans can always go awry. If you’re open to anything, anything is open to come your way. I’ve found throughout my life so far that every time I try to plan big events like career and family, the event furthest from what is on my agenda will be the soonest to occur. When I gave up on figuring everything out was when I actually started to. I still don’t have life streamlined by any means, but I’m definitely on a better path toward it now.

CLOSING HERE.

Links:

For all things Colby Marshall, visit her website

A copy of Chain of Command can be had at B&N, Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Stairway Press (get free shipping), or Kobo

Read the synopsis books and an excerpt  and watch the book trailer.

And look for Colby’s newest novel, The Trade, due to be released 11 June, 2013. Read the synopsis and an excerpt here.

Quentin Bates had a career as a seaman and trained to be a ship’s officer. He writes gritty crime fiction, much of it set in Iceland. His new novel Chilled to the Bone is about the investigation into the death of a wealthy out-of-towner in Reykjavik. Quentin met me at The Slaughterhouse were we talked about ships and murder.

Tell us about Chilled To The Bone.

The scene is Reykjavík in the middle of winter, that uncomfortable time of year when New Year has been and gone, but before the first post-Christmas visa bill of the year has hit the doormat.

A wealthy out-of-towner is found tied to a bed in one of the city’s smarter hotels and although there’s little indication of foul play, sergeant Gunnhildur and her team are expected to investigate. Digging deeper to find who was paid to tie a customer up so professionally, she finds that things aren’t nearly as straightforward as they seem and is disconcerted to find that someone else is a step ahead of her investigation.

Her investigation is overshadowed by her receiving the shock of her life, making it less easy to concentrate on the job in hand, while also being given a few extra tasks to keep her team busy, such as keeping an eye on a local hoodlum recently returned to Iceland after a spell in prison overseas and with scores to settle.

I don’t want to give away too much… But she does get something of a hard time of it in Chilled to the Bone.

How does the interim influence your writing?

I’m not sure there is an interim. It’s a constant process. I have a writing day job as well as writing books, so the keyboard fingers are getting on for half an inch shorter than they once were. There’s rarely a time when there aren’t words either being mulled over or else cranked out, deleted, rewritten, tweaked and so on.

Books overlap by quite a margin, especially as my books (so far) are a series and the progression of events and characters straddles the gaps between one book and the next. I haven’t finished one yet without having started another first, even if it’s only knocking out rough ideas that will hopefully take shape later.

So in that sense there’s precious little interim, although the pace varies from a crawl and plenty of thought processes going on behind the scenes to flat-out writing when I have a solid idea of where it’s all going.

Who are your literary influence?

I grew up in a house full of books and the appreciation of a story well told comes from delving into Maugham, Kipling and Hardy at an age when I should have still been deep in Biggles. Then came Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Burgess and the incomparably magnificent Saki.

As for crime, I was filching Sjöwall & Wahlöö and Simenon from my mum’s bookshelves in my teens when translated foreign crime fiction was still pretty niche. The years I lived in Iceland were difficult ones in some ways as English books could be hard to come by, so I ended up reading a lot of stuff I didn’t much like, plus taking the plunge and reading (slowly, at first) Icelandic books. Icelandic literature can be heavy going, but it also meant that I was reading some Nordic crime stuff long before it appeared in English. Was that an influence? I can’t be sure. But some of it, while good stuff, also made me think hard about what I didn’t want to my own work to look like.

I really like Matti Joensuu, Dominique Manotti, Len Deighton, Gunnar Stålesen, Anthony Price, Yasmina Khadra. Speaking of whom, I would love to read more crime fiction set in the Arab world, but it hardly seems to exist.

These days I try to avoid reading stuff that might exert too much influence, hence not too much Nordic crime, especially not anything from Iceland while I’m trying to concentrate on the first draft of a book. I’m as likely to pluck something I’ve never heard of from a shelf as to search out a name I can recognise. But now we’ve left influences behind and shifted into reading habits – although there’s bound to be an insoluble link between the two, however deep it may lie.

What advice would you give to yourself as a young man?

Stop farting about and get on with it.

Tell us something about yourself people do not know.

I had a career as a seaman, and trained to be a ship’s officer. But I never got over the seasickness. A very few people never suffer from it and most get over it after a while. In my roughly ten years working on trawlers, I never managed to conquer it. It was always there at the beginning of every trip, especially sailing into rough weather, although it didn’t really make a lot of difference as those first couple of watches would always be a trial.

Catamarans were the worst and a patch of bad weather in a catamaran would guarantee a painful few hours, probably because a catamaran’s motion is very different to a single-hulled boat with that odd figure-of-eight twist in a following sea.

I tried everything. Leaving on an empty stomach, leaving on a full stomach, seabands, ear patches, self-hypnosis, meditation, proper (expensive) hypnosis sessions. Motion sickness drugs were no good, as I had to work cranes and winches, and keep a watch. Chewing crystallised ginger helped, as it suppresses nausea to an extent, although you still feel dozy and uncomfortable.

But it took a long time to get salt water out of my system and I’m still not entirely sure that I have. The bustle around the fish dock, the smell of seaweed, diesel and oilskins, and the mutter of an engine down below brings it all back in a flash, and I could go back tomorrow, seasick or not.

What do you make of the E Book revolution?

I’m not sure it is a revolution yet, although things are definitely changing. The appearance of e-books was always a matter of time once the internet had come into being and I’m a little surprised it has taken so long to gather pace. I really don’t know what to make of it. I’m not comfortable with the fact that it seems to be dominated by a single entity, although that could only be expected to happen as well if one takes into account the gulf of difference between the way Amazon does things and the way traditional publishers operate.

It’s disturbing that e-books are either ridiculously expensive or else cost less than a mug of watery tea. That’s something that I guess will stabilise in time, although with a single behemoth dominating the e-books industry it’s difficult to predict what the outcome will be. Obviously, I don’t want books to be as cheap as chips, as I need a few quid in the kitty so I have elbow room to write the next one – but neither would I want books to be so ruinously pricy as to be out of the range of the average reader.

I do like the return of the novella that the e-book has ushered in. I’ve even written one and found it an interesting experience to write at that length; restrictive in some ways and rather liberating in others.

On the whole, I welcome advent of e-books. I hear people tutting about the vast amount of self-published dross that’s available. So what? Is it hurting anyone? I use a Kindle and like it far more than I had expected to. It has helped me find some fine reads that I’d probably not have otherwise found. Not that I read any fewer paper books than before. The Kindle gets used in places and at times when I’d probably not have picked up a paperback for half an hour.

How important is Reykjavik as a setting in Chilled To The Bone?

Somewhat to my chagrin, Reykjavík is central to it. When I was writing the first book, Frozen Out, one of the things I wanted to do was have a story that wasn’t set entirely in Reykjavík. I’d seen so many other Icelandic crime stories packaged as set in Iceland and with a picture of a snowbound farmhouse on the cover that then turned out to be urban Reykjavík noir that I was determined to not be shackled to the city.

However, in the two subsequent books, Cold Comfort and Chilled to the Bone, I’ve found myself inexorably drawn to Reykjavík and to be frank, my publishers are happier to have it that way. There’s no doubt there’s more of a buzz around an urban environment and there are a lot more interestingly unpleasant characters and locations to draw on.

I’d certainly like to venture beyond the city limits again. I know the rural areas of Iceland much better than I know Reykjavík, a place I have been scathing about in the past – but as my years in Iceland were spent in the far west and in the north, that’s probably the element of rural Icelander in my background coming through.

Reykjavík is an interesting backdrop as it is such a melting pot. Behind the shiny bits the tourists see there is a population that is made up overwhelmingly of recent arrivals, the city has grown enormously in size over a couple of generations at the expense of the now sparsely populated rural regions. On top of that is an even newer population of immigrants, mainly from Asia and Eastern Europe. So there are lots of interesting culture clashes going on as new meets old, lots of new districts, areas where immigrants band together, a thread of underlying racism and disquiet; and then there’s the vicious, incestuous Icelandic politics on top of that, all in a city smaller than Croydon.

Graham Greene wrote, ‘There is a splinter ice in the heart of a writer.’ What do you make of his observation?

He was quite right. There has to be an element of cold, dispassionate observation and that shard of ice seems to grow. One notices incidents, settings, overheard remarks and to begin with feels that it would be terribly wrong to twist them to our purposes. After a while, one falls on them with a cackle of glee and can’t wait to scribble them down on the back of an envelope for future reference.

I have a few bits and pieces stored away at the back of the mental filing cabinet that a few years ago I would never have dreamed of making use of, but now it’s more a case of how and when to shoehorn them into place somewhere.

While Graham Greene was quite right about the splinter of ice, I’m still wondering if George Orwell hit the nail on the head when he wrote that : ‘All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the bottom of their motives lies a mystery.’

I assume that both of them were essentially writing about themselves and those of their contemporaries they knew, so while there’s undoubtedly a grain of truth in both, maybe those comments say more about Greene and Orwell than about the rest of us.

What are you working on now?

I should probably be beavering away at the next Gunnhildur story, and there’s work in progress. The problem is that bad guys are so much more interesting to write. I’m roughly a third into what will, I hope, be the next book. This involves a criminal who makes a serious error of judgement to find himself deeply in the soup. But my rotund heroine, fond though I am of her, has hardly made an appearance yet.

There’s another one on the back burner that may become an e-book, if all goes well with it. Or it may become a full-length book and I could find that the hapless criminal will make a better novella.

Apart from that, I’m tinkering with something rather different, and it remains to be seen if it will come to much. This has a Nordic setting, in what is, as far as I’m aware, a Nordic setting that nobody has used so far. There aren’t many of them left now that there are so many Nordic detectives about and I’m hoping that nobody else has beaten me to it. No, I’m not saying what the mystery location is. Not yet, at any rate.

How do you feel about sex and violence?

Human life as a whole seems to revolve very largely around these two; not that it makes them any easier to write about. Unfortunately, they sell well, so I really ought to be packing a good bit more of both into the pages. However, being English, middle-aged and middle-class makes it remarkably easy to not write about sex and violence. I have to keep reminding myself that a little of both needs to be sprinkled across a manuscript.

The violence is actually easier, but I like it to be short and sharp. That’s the way real fisticuffs is, not that I have vast experience of this, but square-jawed chaps repeatedly socking each other on the chin happens in a boxing ring, not in reality.

As for the sex, well, there’s a lot to be said for those three dots that tell the reader to exercise a little imagination… This is not least because horizontal jogging is so difficult to write in a way that’s not either laughable or downright pornographic, and I have no wish to be either.

So, violence; short and sharp, used sparingly like hot chillies, but with a bite. Sex; paint a picture of what’s going on, then draw a discreet veil and retire discreetly to let the reader figure it out in his or her own mind.

Thank you Quentin for an informative and perceptive interview.

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Links:

‘Chilled to the Bone’ can be had at Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Kobo in various formats: paperback, hardcover, digital and audio.

Read the synopsis of and an excerpt from ‘Chilled to the Bone’ here.

Find Quentin Bates at his website, on Facebook and Twitter.