L.J. Sellers is an award-winning journalist who is now a full time novelist with seven books on the market. She writes gritty controversial novels and is the author of the Detective Jackson mystery suspense series.

Her novels have been highly praised by Mystery Scene and Spinetingler Magazines, and all five are on Amazon Kindle’s bestselling police procedural list.

She met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about theocracy and revenge.

Why do you think your novel ‘The Sex Club’ was deemed to be controversial and do you think the reasons reflect on the publishing industry and gender bias?

I wrote The Sex Club during a more conservative administration, and in fact, I wrote the story partially in response to the U.S. government’s decision to spend taxpayer money on abstinence-only sex education. So right off the top, the subject of sex education and access to birth control is controversial, regardless of how the plot developed or how I approached the issue. My first objective, though, was to tell a great story, so I believe my treatment of the subject was subtle and sensitive, although few conservative readers would disagree.

Adding fuel to the fire, the sex club participants and victims are young teenagers, thirteen and fourteen years old. You can imagine how editors and marketers at the major publishers reacted to that element. “I loved the story and read it one sitting, but the victims are so young. The marketing department will never approve it.” Some readers find the ages disturbing as well, and I don’t blame them. Although I didn’t include any sex scenes on the page, some of the conversations were graphic and difficult for me to write. Yet most readers realize the story is realistic and based on actual news events.

The fact that these issues are controversial at all is rooted in the American culture and the dominance of religion, which tends to suppress sexual freedom. As for the publishing industry and gender bias, you’ve made me think. Are male authors allowed more leeway in writing about sex, at least in crime fiction? Maybe. Women can write about sex as long romance is involved, but this story is definitely not romantic, so that may have worked against me. More important, I think the gender bias comes into play with my characters. I focus on the girls in the group because they become the murder victims, and I think it’s difficult for many adults to conceptualize teenage girls as sexual beings. If the young characters/victims had been male instead, publishing houses may not have characterized the book as “controversial” and “hard to sell.”

Fortunately, readers are open-minded as long as the story is compelling. The Sex Club is selling very well as an e-book and has ranked at #3 or #4 on Kindle’s police procedural list for the last five months.

Do you think America is bordering on a theocracy and which political powers are steering it towards a religiously influenced patriarchal fear of female sexuality and the need to control it?

Thanks for throwing me a softball question this time, so I can just breeze through it. Yes, during conservative presidencies or even when conservatives come into power as governors, the US federal and state governments are definitely influenced by religious convictions, and they produce legislation that suppresses sexuality (and reproductive choices) for anyone who is not a married male, and that includes woman, gays, and transgendered people of a kinds. The repression of sexuality, like the repression of certain ideas or ethnic groups, is rooted in fear—fear of change, fear of the unknown, fear of losing control.

Socially conservative politics are a power grab, based on the need to keep people in their places. When women are given socially acceptable choices—to marry or not, to reproduce or not—they often chose “not.” When women choose not to become wives and mothers, it disrupts the conservative family ideal that places men at the head of households. Thus religious conservatives get excited/upset when socially prominent single women like Natalie Portman chose to have a baby without being married. But the important issue, and one I dealt with in my novel, is the conservative agenda to cut funds for teaching sex education to teenagers and to eliminate funding to groups like Planned Parenthood, which provides contraception to young people. The result, as we saw in the U.S., is a rise in teen pregnancies after decades of decline. The irony is that the end result of their polices is more single moms and higher rates of abortion, the very things they oppose. They forget to factor in the human impulsive to engage in sex.

I hope I’m not making this novel sound too political. It’s really a police procedural with a realistic investigation into the death of a young teenage girl. The subplot is a secondary investigation by a Planned Parenthood nurse to track down the members of the sex club and give them information about safe sex practices. Their stories overlap and eventually come together in an explosive ending.

Tell us about your involvement in stand up comedy.

Years ago I decided to write a script based on my novel The Baby Thief. I had so much fun doing it, I wrote four more scripts, three of which were comedies (and two of which almost sold.) During that phase, I took a comedy writing class to sharpen the humor in my stories. The first thing we had to do was write about the most painful experiences in our lives, because that’s the source from which you draw the best personal comedy. So, much of my humor is about growing up in an overweight, alcoholic, dysfunctional family, and I also squeezed some material from my job at the time as an editor of a pharmaceutical magazine.

Over the course of the class, we each wrote a stand-up routine and in the end, performed for a real audience. Public speaking terrifies me and I was horribly nervous. Fortunately, the theater was a few blocks from where I worked, so I went over on my lunch breaks for a few days before the performance and practiced walking out on the stage and saying my opening lines. It was a huge help.

My performance went well, and the audience’s reaction to my material was terrific. The instructor, who runs a comedy workshop, invited me to perform with the workshop whenever I could. So I’ve done a few performances over the years, including a small bit in the talent show at Bouchercon 2009. I keep hoping to get into a space where I have time to write more stand-up material, and someday, I hope to write a humorous crime novel.

Do you think crime fiction needs revenge as one of its themes?

Interesting question. The futuristic thriller I’m writing now deals with this issue in a subtle way. What crime fiction does for readers is to let us vicariously experience not only the triumph of good over evil, but many other forms of justice as well. The real-life events around us can be cruel, unjust, and mysterious. I believe it’s important for our collective mental health to experience justice, order, and revelation through fiction. So yes, revenge is a necessary theme in crime fiction because it’s such a basic human emotion that we all yearn for at times, yet one that social norms prevent us from acting on.

Crime fiction also brings us to terms with the duality within ourselves. We have a capacity for great goodness, yet we are all deeply flawed people, capable of deceit, jealousy, schadenfreude, addiction, selfishness, and the desire for revenge. When crime protagonists show such flaws, we not only relate to them, we also forgive ourselves for the same transgressions. When antagonists behave in those ways, we can vicariously act out our darker fantasies.

Under what circumstances do you think you would be capable of killing someone?

You do like to mix it up! My ex-husband comes to mind of course, and I say that only half jokingly. He not only threatened to kill me many times, but almost succeeded. At times, I thought the only way I would escape/survive was to kill him first. That was long ago, and fortunately, I found another way out. But I empathize with women who kill their abusive husbands, and as a juror, I would never convict them of a crime.

It seems obvious to say I could kill in self-defense, but I could also kill someone to protect my family members. In our sister city of Springfield, we had a case of a father who walked into a fast food restaurant and shot a man who had repeatedly threatened his daughter. The district attorney did not even bring charges against him. Many in the community were outraged, considering it an act of murder, but I had mixed feelings. I certainly sympathized with the father’s fear and motive, even though I may not have chosen that public course of action.

Do you think the best detectives have strong criminal shadows?

That may be a bit of myth perpetuated by the crime fiction community to keep the genre edgy. Some authors use the concept to create dark protagonists who walk a fine line between good and evil and sometimes cross over to catch the clever antagonist. In real life, most criminals are not particularly smart, and it doesn’t take much effort to out think them. In fiction, readers like stories that are complex, with characters who engage in a high-stakes competition. So authors give them clever con men and highly intelligent serial killers.

Yet, I believe the best detectives, both real and fictional, are those who have great imaginations and the ability to visualize many scenarios. Good detectives also have a mental flexibility that allows them to adapt to new evidence and continuously rethink their hypotheses. But admittedly, the detective in my series doesn’t fit the stereotypical mythology. Instead, he’s a good guy with no criminal tendencies, so I’m inclined to believe he’s as effective as protagonists with strong criminal shadows…but I could be wrong. Reading and novel writing are subjective experiences, and we all bring our own perspectives to the story.

Who are your literary influences?

Both my parents read Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe series, and as young teenager, I devoured them too. The New York brownstone with its orchid garden and live-in cook, the private detectives—it was all fascinating and foreign to a young girl in rural Oregon, and my love of crime fiction (and detectives!) began in that series.

In my rural setting, I read everything I could get my hands on, including Phyllis Whitney and short stories by O Henry. In college, I read and enjoyed Ayn Rand, Margaret Atwood, Herman Hess, and Stephen King. But the authors I came to love most were John MacDonald, Ross McDonald, Elmore Leonard, and Lawrence Sanders, who introduced me to police procedurals and is my favorite writer of all time.

My love of police procedurals deepened through Michael Connelly, John Sandford, and Leslie Glass (Detective April Woo). I’m glad to mention Glass’ series, because I’ve obviously read mostly male crime fiction authors. In analyzing why, the one thing that comes to mind is that male authors, in general, write less emotion on the page, and the authors I’ve mentioned don’t focus exclusively on serial killers.

Of course, I’ve also read and enjoyed hundreds of novels that weren’t crime related, but those authors and stories didn’t influence me the way crime fiction did.

Do you think our primary fear is the fear of death and how does that inform your fiction?

The fear of death not only permeates crime fiction, it also seems to be the source of humans’ obsession with religion and afterlife. The fear of dying is actually several distinct apprehensions. The first is our dread of the passing itself. For most people, dying is painful, both physically and emotionally. Car accidents, murders, cancer, heart attack. These are what claim us. Very few people have the luxury of dying peacefully at home of old age. So we fear the inevitable, painful event. But we also fear what comes next, because it’s unknown. Thus we have religion, which creates an afterlife to explain what happens after we die. We also fear the grief we’ll experience if a loved ones dies.

How does this relate to crime fiction? As a writer, I confront my fears by working through them in stories. When my kids were young, Jeffrey Dahmer was in the news and he represented my greatest fear: that a sexual predator would kill one of my children. So I wrote a serial killer novel—which will remain unpublished—that allowed me to work through that fear and vicariously experience triumph and justice over that form of evil, which is not always the case in real life. I believe many readers confront all these fears, particularly the apprehension of being murdered, by reading novels that focus on crime. Crime fiction allows us to vicariously make sense of the heinous events around us, to restore order, and to prevail over those who wish to harm us.

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

To create vivid engaging stories, writers must be able to get inside the minds of their characters and see the world from their perspectives for pages at a time. This requires a certain ability to detach from oneself. In addition, compelling stories usually highlight provocative, emotional, or disturbing subjects. To spend months writing about such issues in an intimate or multifaceted way requires the writer to step back emotionally from the subject and process it objectively. Thus, you might conclude that writers are capable of shutting down a little piece of their heart at times, for the sake of a great story.

In The Sex Club, a 14-year-old girl engages in a sexual relationship with a 40-something male. What are your views on the age of consent?

This is a touchy subject with a lot of gray area, and I have mixed feelings about it. One of the reasons I wrote the novel was my concern for the increased level of sexual activity in young teenagers. In general though, I don’t believe we should incarcerate people for consensual sex. But when does consensual sex cross the line and become predatory? For example, if two 14-year-olds have sex, no one would consider throwing either of them in jail. But if a 15-year-old female has consensual sex with her 18-year-old boyfriend, most US state laws say the male should be sentenced to prison. This seems barbaric.

What about the case of the 14-year-old girl and the 40-year-old man? Should he go to jail, even if she seduced him? Most people would say yes. They would argue that a female that young is not capable of making a rational, mature decision to engage in sexual activity. Is this attitude fair to mature, young girls who have real sexual needs? And is prison really the best socially corrective response for a man who—foolishly and selfishly—chooses to succumb to the advances of a minor? When you throw in the fact that some states allow girls to get married at fifteen (to a man of any age), the whole issue becomes rather contradictory.

I don’t have all the answers, but I believe every case should be judged on its own circumstances, and some state laws need to be tossed out. The American culture also needs to question its long-held belief that teenagers are not capable of making rational decisions about consensual sex.

Thank you L.J. for giving a frank and illuminating interview.

L.J. Sellers is an award-winning journalist and the author of the bestselling Detective Jackson mystery/suspense series. The Sex Club, Secrets to Die For, and Thrilled to Death have been highly praised by Mystery Scene and Spinetingler magazines. Her fourth Jackson story, Passions of the Dead, has just been released. L.J. also has two standalone thrillers, The Baby Thief and The Suicide Effect. When not plotting murders, she enjoys performing standup comedy, cycling, social networking, and attending mystery conferences. She’s also been known to jump out of airplanes.

Find all things L.J. Sellers here:

Her website and blog

The Crime Fiction Collective blog

Julie Lewthwaite writes hard first rate Noir.

She writes with a narrative immediacy that takes you straight to the story and lets it unfold with realism and menace.  Her use of physical detail heightens the sense that the reader is about to see something nasty. Her characters are real and her stories tightly structured.

Her collection of stories ‘Gone Bad’ is out and they read beautifully.

She met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about double lives and political crises.

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Do you believe in ghosts?

Intellectually, no. They’re right up there with magic powers, supreme beings and fairies at the bottom of the garden.

And yet, and yet ….

I love ghost stories. I can remember when I was a kid getting home from the library with an armful of books and sitting at the hearth in the dying light of a winter afternoon, firelight casting crazy shadows on the walls, reading about headless horsemen and grey ladies, chain-dragging ghouls and shroud-clad wraiths. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I had some scary experiences back then. Sudden chills that made my hair stand on end. Feelings of dread, verging on sheer terror. I heard odd noises, found cold spots.

What might be more surprising is that the house had been exorcised, although I didn’t find this out until much later. By tradition the curate of the parish came to tea regularly with my Nana. (It had originally been Nana and Granda’s house and my dad and his brothers and sisters had grown up there.) Anyway, one particular curate, after he’d visited a number of times, asked for permission to conduct an exorcism as he felt very uncomfortable in the house. And apparently he did, although bearing in mind the experiences I had growing up, I would suggest it wasn’t terribly successful. Not just me, either. My dad’s eldest brother wouldn’t go upstairs on his own even as an adult. Something on the quarter landing at the turn of the stairs greatly disturbed him. When I was eleven or twelve, I saw my grandfather in the house. Bearing in mind he died when I was a week old, it was an unexpected encounter.

So, in fairness, I think my answer has to be, ‘No, but ….’

If you were given an unlimited sum of money to commit a crime what would it be and how would it differ from the crimes you write about?

I was tempted at first to just offer David Cameron and Nick Clegg each an obscene amount of money to kill the other. I reckon there’s no doubt they’d take the offer – they’ve pretty much proved beyond all doubt that they can be bought – and since they’d very likely sub-contract the dirty work, odds are they’d both be done away quite cleanly by professionals. How would it differ from the crimes I write about? No innocent people would be hurt.

However, having given the matter some considerable thought, I have a better plan. Since money is no object, I shall arrange to have built a secret underground base in the style of a Bond villain. I can’t decide whether it should be offshore, in a mountain or whatever, but I’m not going to worry about that just now. I might get a cat. I could afford a cat with all that money. Perhaps a black one, or maybe a little ginger fella. (I have a weakness for ginger toms.) I’d also have an army of geeky, techie geniuses at my disposal. Loads of them. Smart as can be. Their job – for which they would be amply rewarded – would be to target the bank accounts of the world’s over-privileged rich, right-wing sympathisers and to empty them. Then we’d move on to bully boys and supremacists and strip them of their wealth, too. Then the religious – especially the likes of TV evangelists who con money out of the gullible. There’d be more people to take money from – we’ve only picked up royal loot, for example, by default so far – but you get the gist.

As to what I would do with all that wealth, that vast, obscene lake of tainted cash, well … some catnip toys for Ginge. Wages for me and the geniuses. And what was left could go to the people who need it. Let’s get people out of poverty. Let’s feed the hungry and treat the sick. And we can have schools and hospitals and libraries … and that’s just for starters. I’m sure there’s loads more we could do.

This differs from the stuff I write about in that – as far as I can see – it’s victimless crime. But reading this over, I wonder if I’m really cut out to be a villain.

Do you think that the tension between an individual’s fantasies and reality is a source of crime and drama?

We all experience the world differently in accordance with our own hopes and fears, likes and dislikes, the things we have learned. One person’s dream is another person’s nightmare. My reality might not be your reality. I think crime and drama happen when the differences between those realities are exposed.

For example, in one of my stories a lonely man hires an escort for the night. When they get up the next morning, in his mind she is now his girlfriend and they will have a future together. In her mind, she has finished work and wants to get home to get on with her life. When she makes it abundantly clear that they don’t share the same reality, he reacts badly and we have crime and drama.

Scope also exists in the disparity between what we have and what we would like to have, and the steps we might take to bridge that gap. For example, if a group of people who each covet the latest electronic gadget see someone else in possession of one, they are likely to react in different ways. One might feel worthless because he can’t afford one, another might feel motivated to get a better paid job so he can buy himself one soon, and yet another might decide he wants one now, punch the guy in the head and take his from him. If the object of desire is human, a wife, a boyfriend, perhaps a baby, then that ratchets up the stakes somewhat. And of course when reality takes over from fantasy, things really get messed up.

Let’s say, having spent three years worshiping her from afar and fantasizing about the idyllic life they might have together, Tommy finally gets up the courage to ask Lisa out. Things go well, they quickly move in together, he has his dream girl, his dream life. He’s ecstatically happy, right? Well, maybe. What if he finds out that she leaves her toenail clippings on the bedroom floor, can’t cook, doesn’t hang her towel up after she showers and spends all evening on Facebook chatting with her mates and ignoring him; is he still ecstatic?

Or to put it another way, in answer to your question, definitely!

Tell us about ‘Gone Bad’.

Gone Bad is a collection of stories that were written over a period of about five years. The earliest are ‘It Could Be You’ and ‘Let’s Dance’. They were also my first published stories, appearing as they did in the now-defunct Bullet magazine back in 2006. The most recent story is ‘Local Hero’ which was sitting half-written on my hard drive and was completed for the collection.

The stories explore common themes: alienation, dysfunction, the desire for instant gratification and an inability to see the consequences of actions taken. This is short fiction with a noir edge, gritty, sweary, northern and nasty, featuring flawed, foul-mouthed, misguided characters. Some people say it’s funny. Clearly those puppies are sick.

All but ‘Local Hero’ have been previously published, some online on sites that no longer exist, others in print, where stories often seem to last no longer than a couple of months. Having just recently woken up to the idea of e-books, I thought pulling them together into a collection would be not only a good idea, but also a great way to dip my toe in the water. It was a pretty steep learning curve, but very rewarding and I’m pleased with the results.

Reviews so far have been positive, for which I’m very grateful, although no doubt it’s just a matter of time before my first one star review appears somewhere!

Do you think people can live a double life without being detected?

For a time, sure. Let me tell you about Harry* …

Some years ago Joel (my now ex) and I met a couple in the bar we drank in. We got chatting and over time we became friends. Candy, the girlie, worked in an office and Harry was a colour sergeant in the marines, on secondment to the TA in some sort of training capacity.

Gerry who ran the pub we all drank in did a lot of charity fundraising. Harry sorted us out with a day on an assault course – a bunch of folk got sponsors and a decent amount of money was made. Quite a lot of the youngsters from the TA were on hand to help and some of them had got sponsors, too. We had a cracking day.

We went along to a Remembrance Day service one time, Harry in his uniform looking smart as paint and taking an active role in what went on, the kids he was training making their parents and him proud.

One time Gerry told me that Harry had been in the pub on the day before his birthday and had been invited to stay after hours. Harry had mentioned more than once that his birthday was no longer a time for celebration, since the date fell so near to a battle in the Falklands war when he lost a lot of comrades. Gerry told me he had been deeply moved when he and Harry had been talking and drinking to see the big man’s eyes fill up at the memory of what had happened. Despite all the great stories he told that had people roaring with laughter, that was a time he wouldn’t normally talk about in any detail and Gerry felt privileged to have been taken into Harry’s confidence.

Harry and Candy had a little boy. Joel and I were Godparents (despite being essentially godless ourselves). Harry, his superior officer, and a couple of other friends were there at the Christening and afterwards at the do, all in uniform, all chatting quite openly about life in the military.

Then one day I got a phone call at work. It was Candy and she wanted to know if she and the kid could come and stay for a few days. She sounded upset. Well, when they got there that evening, I sorted them out with dinner and when the nipper went to bed, the wine came out and we got talking. Candy seemed uncharacteristically quiet, but she had stuff she needed to say and sure enough, a couple of glasses of vino and it all started to come out.

Turned out Harry had never been in the army. Not ever. He was in the TA, but that was a far as it had ever gone. He certainly wasn’t on secondment in a training role from the marines. When he went to work every day, it was to a fairly menial job in an office. Candy had often complained that Harry didn’t earn much and that his mess bills put a hell of a dent in his salary. Joel knew roughly what someone at his rank should be making and it wasn’t peanuts, so we’d always just put that down to Candy having unrealistic expectations.

Turned out that the folk at the Christening were all TA, too, although they were all happy to talk it up as if they were regular army. Seems they’d picked up their uniforms and a bunch of medals, braid and tin second hand.

So, here was a man – Harry – who had misled all his friends for years about who he was and what he did. He also managed to completely take in the woman he lived with, had a child with and was planning to marry. Had he not had an affair, resulting in some phone calls that made Candy suspicious and prompted her in turn to go through his things, he’d have got away with it a sight longer.

His success was partly down to the fact that we had no reason to doubt him, especially since his missus believed him, too, and supported him in everything he said, and partly down to the fact that he completely lived the fantasy, he absolutely believed his lies himself. At the time Joel worked as a civilian at Catterick army camp and dealt with military personnel on a daily basis. He was pretty well versed in custom and protocol and in the ideal spot to check anything out that had a false ring to it. Harry regaled us with stories about his time in active service and never put a foot wrong. But sooner or later, it all had to come crashing down.

Didn’t it?

*The names have been changed in this, but every other detail is the unembellished truth. If anything, I’ve left a load of stuff out of this account. The last I heard – admittedly a long time ago now – Harry was still telling army tales to anyone who would listen, including his son.

To what extent do you think the need for guilt is the motivating factor in crime?

Guilt is an intensely personal thing and I think some of us are predisposed to suffer it to an unnecessary degree. We’re born with ‘original guilt’, if you like. There are those who get a kick out of inducing it in others – my mother was a black belt in guilt-tripping (guilt-tripping me, anyway) and others seem to get a kick out of feeling guilty. (Did someone say ‘religion’?)

A few years back, I was involved in a car accident, after which I spent hours, days, feeling sick with guilt and worry, trying to work out what I had done wrong to cause it. What happened was a guy in a truck ran into the back of my car. He said he hadn’t seen me. Then it turned out he had lied about his name and insurance cover and the matter only got sorted out because the vehicle he was driving was rented and the company took it upon itself to accept responsibility.

Meantime, people said I should put in an insurance claim for injuries suffered. Whiplash, they reckoned, was a nice little earner. The thing was, while I ached from head to toe from the impact, I wasn’t actually injured. I was advised to claim anyway and to pretend. At least two of the people giving me this advice had themselves lied about injuries to gain compensation. As far as they were concerned, it was all part of the game, something that was expected both by insurers and drivers involved in accidents.

I didn’t claim. I felt it was dishonest, fraudulent. I would have felt guilty all over again. I was considered to be a bloody idiot for passing up the chance of a payout.

The people who had made fraudulent claims didn’t consider themselves to be criminals. They thought they were smart, savvy. They honestly didn’t believe they had done anything wrong.

Some years back I did some work with inmates at HMP Durham. I never asked why anyone was in there and they were under no obligation to say, although once we got to know each other a little, they often chose to tell me. I remember having a conversation with a guy who was in because he had run his small business illegally. He hadn’t kept records, declared income, paid tax … in fact, he reckoned tax payers were mugs. I asked what he was going to do when he got out. He told me he planned to start up in business again. I said that he surely would do things properly next time, to avoid going back to prison. Wasn’t it worth paying tax to be able to live as he pleased, go for a pint with his mates, eat dinner with the family? No, apparently it wasn’t. He planned to do exactly the same thing again.

A psychologist at the prison told me that one thing most of the inmates had in common was that they couldn’t foresee the consequences of their actions. They put their own gratification above all else and – even when they did things a ten year old could see would end in tears – were surprised when it all went wrong.

So to answer your question, yes, maybe some do, if guilt fulfils some sort of need. But most don’t. Quite simply, they don’t feel any guilt whatsoever, because they don’t believe they have done anything wrong.

Do you think England is in political crisis and if so when did it start?

I doubt there’s been a time in modern history when at least a proportion of the populace did not consider the country to be in political crisis. A lot of it has to do with whether your preferred party is in power or not. I did a happy dance when Labour won the election in 1997, whereas a then-colleague threw up his hands in horror, retired and moved to Spain.

Having said that, I think we’re all aware that times are pretty tough at the moment. I don’t know anyone who is having an easy time financially. Then again, I don’t know anyone who is especially wealthy. Bearing in mind we are being governed by people who enjoy what, by most people’s standards, amounts to considerable personal wealth (I’m thinking here of Cameron, Clegg and Osborne) one has to wonder what they feel they have in common with the people they represent. I shouldn’t think any of them has ever had to make a choice between paying the rent or buying food. As for dodging the milkman (not my finest hour) and trying to hide from the coalman (not an ex-colleague’s finest hour, especially since he tapped on the window and waved as she was mid-crawl from behind the settee to the living room door) I feel confident in saying those people are strangers to such pastimes.

I do think that decisions are being made now that will have a long-lasting detrimental effect on the country. Okay, so the coalition government have done a u-turn on some of their worst decisions as a direct result of the public outcry they provoked, but there are others that are still going through. Libraries are closing. Charities are losing funding and shutting up shop. Tuition fees are rising. I shouldn’t think that any of these things will make the slightest difference to Cameron, Clegg, Osborne and their families, though. They will impact most strongly upon those people in society least able to speak up and defend themselves.

I’ve been angry more often since the current government came to power than I can remember having been in quite some time. (Best not to get me started on the Big Society.) I fear to think how those people who voted for the Liberal Democrats must feel. If political crisis is measured in terms of what percentage of the population is angry at any one time, I think we have a serious problem. And whilst disaffection with the government existed before last May, it certainly got one hell of a boost following the last election.

Do you think crime fiction is traditionally conservative in its outlook and what ingredients would be necessary to write a socialist crime novel?

Focusing purely on UK fiction here, I think of it as being more class-based, but in broad terms that can perhaps be seen to translate into political differences. It certainly stretches the imagination to think that Jane Marple, Lord Peter Wimsey or Adam Dalgliesh were closet Communists. If we accept those characters as being typical of traditional mainstream crime fiction, then certainly the people feeling collars were toffs, although the people whose collars they felt could be toffs or scum, depending upon the storyline.

I think that as society has changed and class lines have been blurred, fiction has mirrored the transformation and so we have working class coppers and private eyes, who are even allowed on occasion to nick toffs. And of course there’s a wealth of crime fiction in which the authorities have only bit parts – the action belongs to the working class and the underclass. (I’m thinking Ray Banks, Allan Guthrie here.)

That’s the sort of crime fiction I find most exciting. I don’t know that politics enters into it, other than perhaps incidentally. Of course, what this may mean is that there’s an opening for someone to write something with a more overt political agenda. Any takers?

‘Gone Bad’ is told in an intimate almost confessional narrative style at times and it is also hard as nails crime writing. When you write do you feel you are drawing on a masculine side of your psyche or is it merely the shadow of what is perceived as the female psyche?

I was told some years ago that I write like a man. I’m not honestly sure what that means, but it was before I started writing crime fiction; in fact, it was on the strength of some poetry a friend read. I also apparently like ‘boys’ music’ and I’d rather go to a gig than a shoe shop, rather buy a book than a handbag. Maybe when you get beyond the lippie and frocks, my psyche is a bit butch.

Story ideas can be sparked by pretty much anything, but the writing doesn’t generally take off until I hear the voice in my head. That voice might be male, female, young or old, but it’s generally a strong voice and it nags at me until I start writing things down for it. Usually bad things. Whatever form it takes, that voice has to come from me, albeit some part of me that I don’t consciously acknowledge.

Taking into account the fact that women seem to have an appetite for writing and reading violent fiction, perhaps the whole ‘write like a man’ thing is a red herring. I believe that there is a rarely acknowledged darkness in the female psyche, perhaps the mirror of the more commonly recognised roles of carer and nurturer, wife and mother. It can be seen in folklore as the wicked stepmother, the witch in the gingerbread house, and although it seems generally to be considered a rare aberration, it’s there and it’s in all of us. Since women generally conceal that darkness in day to day living, it has to find other outlets and I suspect that may be what guides not only my hand when writing, but the hands of many other female writers, too.

How much research do you do for your stories and how important is it to you to get the details right?

I’ve been known to spend time checking out daft wee details, such as: ‘Was it possible to buy a black Ferrari with an automatic gearbox in 19whatever?’ I can’t remember the year now, but the answer was ‘yes’, so my character was allowed to drive one. (He was off his face at the time, so having an automatic box made things easier for him.)

However, as much as I value authenticity, it should never be allowed to get in the way of the story. I’ve read books that should be subtitled ‘How to …’, where the author has included every last detail about working in a widget factory or whatever it is, and those books were boring. The detailed knowledge that comes from research or experience should support a story, not dominate it.

So while I do research whatever I’m writing and I aim to get things broadly correct, I try not to get too bogged down in it. The kind of research the majority of us is able to conduct on a subject is unlikely to answer every question or supply every detail anyway. If 100 people read a story that features a journalist and 98 enjoy it, that’s a good story. If the two who didn’t enjoy it are journalists and the reason they didn’t is nothing to do with the plot, the characters or the writing style, but because ‘In my experience, the editor wouldn’t have done that’, then that’s just sad. That’s someone taking a deliberate decision not to enjoy something. Mind you, I’ve seen people like that at comedy gigs, staring stony-faced at the stage, dying to have a miserable time so they can moan about it later. Maybe those ‘experts’ who read a novel in full expectation of being able to nitpick over wee details that the majority of people wouldn’t even notice and which wouldn’t affect their enjoyment of the story should go read something else. I certainly wouldn’t read something I didn’t expect to enjoy any more than I would knowingly pick up a novel mired in factual detail.

I’ll give the last word on this one to Christopher Brookmyre: On the whole I am a great believer in the MSU Institute of Research, which stands for Making Shit Up. It’s more a question of just sounding authoritative than actually knowing anything. (Link to full interview here: http://www.brookmyre.co.uk/extras/interviews/writers-block-interview-2003/ )

I think it’s fair to say that attitude hasn’t harmed his career in any way. And if it’s good enough for Christopher Brookmyre ….

Thank you Julie for an engaging and perceptive interview.

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Julie Lewthwaite links:

‘Gone Bad’ kindle edition is available on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.  See also Smashwords for more formats.

Another Day in the Word Factory blog

Gone Bad blog

Heywood Gould is the author of 13 novels and 9 screenplays including ‘Fort Apache the Bronx’, ‘Cocktail’, ‘Rolling Thunder’, ‘The Boys From Brazil’ and ‘Double Bang’.

His new book ‘The Serial Killer’s Daughter’ was released May 1^st and is about a fantasist who gets caught up in the underworld.

He is a highly accomplished author who is also a film director and screenwriter.

He met me at The Slaughterhouse where we talked about detectives and killers.

To what extent do you think revenge is lawless justice?

Revenge is a prehistoric impulse.

Revenge on a large scale is war.

As the human population grew into ever larger groups something had to be done about the chaos of retribution.

Religion was invented.

“Vengeance is mine saith the Lord,” meaning, let God get even for you.

“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” meaning if someone steals your ox don’t throw his children into the campfire.

“Love thy enemy” and “turn the other cheek.”

That never caught on.

Laws anointed the monarch as the official avenger.

Trials, prison, even execution.

Doesn’t satisfy the impulse.

People who call themselves God-fearing and law-abiding take blood-thirsty vengeance when they can.

Culture celebrates the avengers, from Hamlet to Charles Bronson.

Revenge has a nice mathematical symmetry. You do it to me plus I do it back to you=justice.

But justice can mean many things.

Divine justice: Hitler killed forty million. God sees the truth but waits. Hitler was defeated.

Not good enough.

Legal justice: Two evil men invade a Connecticut home rape, strangle and burn a mother and her two daughters.

They are condemned to death.

Big deal. They’ll be on Death Row for years pending appeals.

They won’t suffer the terror and torture they inflicted on their victims.

There is no justice.

Tell us about ‘The Serial Killer’s Daughter’.

I’ll let Peter Vogel the protagonist tell you.

This is so typical of me. I’m not a jock or a stud or a campus player. I’m an English major at a mega UC whose only interests are old movies and dead authors. I haven’t had a fight since I was nine. I’ve never had sex with a really hot woman. In other words I’m an intellectual. I am secretly obsessed with Hannah, a whacko chick in my American Lit. class, fantasizing epic encounters, but barely daring to say “hello.” Then one day she offers me a proposition: she’ll have sex with me if I ghost write term papers for her. I accept and she complies. She sticks around just long enough to make me fall crazy in love then disappears. Six months later she’s back like nothing happened. But then the weirdness starts. My apartment is invaded. Bodies are found in a dumpster. Thugs try to run me off the road. One night she confesses: she’s the daughter of a notorious serial killer, doing life in a super max for eleven murders. Somebody is trying to kill her and I’m the only one who can protect her. But now they’re stalking me, too. On the road, in hotels, everywhere. The cops don’t believe us. They think we’re renegade drug mules being hunted by the cartel. I get so freaked out I kill a dude who’s been tailing us. Now the cops are after us, too. Our only chance is to figure out who’s after us and get them first. And the only person who can help us is this insane, vindictive mass murderer– her dad. I’m running for my life, trying to figure who is trying to kill me before they succeed. But there’s one plus: the sex is getting better all the time.

Do you think the film industry despises writers and if so why?

Writers are outliers in the film business. They don’t fit socially. They don’t know how to act in public. They’re not photogenic and not particularly sexy. Not for nothing the old joke.

Question: What did the blonde actress do when she went to Hollywood?

Answer: She screwed the writer.

Yet a movie needs a script. Can’t get a director, a cast, a studio, a budget without a script. Which means a writer. Which  used to mean a neurotic, unattractive, obstinate individual who refuses to give you the feel-good ending you need for big box office. Who haggles over obscure character traits. Who has a tantrum when someone changes a word and if he/she hasn’t been fired by the time picture shoots has to be banished from the set because he/she is annoying the director and eating all the croissants.

Hollywood has finally solved the problem of the despicable writer by doing sequels and remakes which don’t require an original story. And by allowing actors to make up their own dialogue, which leads to a harmonious set and a long winded movie.

There are exceptions, of course—King’s Speech, Social Network and True Grit this year. They did pretty well, didn’t they? But notice: two producers of King’s Speech did not thank the writer when receiving their Oscar.

Do you think it is possible to write a made for film novel and if so what components does it need to have?

If you write a novel with an eye to making it a film you will leave out the elements that make a novel great—character, complexity, multiple points of view–and, paradoxically, draw the attention of film makers. A good novel can be put down and picked up again, a movie can’t. A novel can go off the path of its narrative (a little bit) to tell a side story or feature subordinate characters; a movie has to speed like a bullet train toward its conclusion. The same audience that will read a novel full of side steps and digressions over a period of days or weeks without losing interest will get bored and downright hostile if a movie meanders.

The best way to get a movie made out of your novel is to establish yourself as a novelist. Pick up any well-written thriller and you can see the film possibilities. But only the books of the popular writers get picked up by Hollywood. A thriller is an expensive proposition so the studios are looking for the “marquee value” that the prominent writers provide.

There are exceptions, but the general rule is: Write a best seller and you’ll get a movie deal.

Do you think the best detectives have strong criminal shadows?

Criminals can hold two different ideas in their minds at the same time.
1. I want to be caught.
2. I’m going to get away with this.
Detectives don’t want to be caught.

Criminals are in rebellion against a social order that is denying them the wealth, fame and unlimited gratification they think they deserve.

Cops are fervent believers in that order, even though they know that it is corrupt, immoral and unfair.

A criminal has an idee fixe. Something inside of him/her finds a crime that fulfills some obscure need. He/she fetishizes this crime, doing it ritualistically the same way every time. Establishing a pattern that eventually leads to his/her apprehension. But not before he/she has destroyed innocent lives.

You can’t know what Detectives have repressed because you never see it. On the surface they operate like reverse statisticians, compiling and ordering information until it leads them to the culprit. They have erased emotion because it doesn’t help them do their jobs. Conventional morality is a given, although they like to bend the rules. They are occasionally repelled by the repellent creatures they deal with and will work long hours to make a case against them.

Criminals are romantic narcissists and only like to talk about themselves.

Cops are cynical opportunists, who have a dark view of humanity. But they tell great stories and are more fun to hang out with.

Who are your literary influences?

1. The Bible, which I read every day before I start writing for its engrossing narrative told in simple, vivid language.
2. Shakespeare to remind me that you don’t have to be a Jew, a Moor, a woman, young, old, a king, a murderer, a cripple, a thankless child, a woman scorned etc. to understand and empathize. That the trappings may change, but people remain essentially the same and if you get them right your work can last for centuries
3.Georges Simenon to learn how to turn the environment of your story into an important character. Simenon makes the arena come alive, whether it be Paris, New York, Connecticut, Africa, small towns in Holland and Belgium. With repertorial economy he makes you feel the place.
4. S.J. Perelman to see how laugh out loud funny prose can be.
5. James Joyce because all modern literature is a commentary on Ulysses.
6. The 19th. Century novelists–Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Flaubert, etc. to steal from.
7. Hemingway’s “The Old Man And the Sea” because it’s the best portrayal of the ordeal every writer endures.
8. Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby stories to remind me of what happens when you’re not welcome in Tinsel Town anymore.

Has any one event influenced your writing and if so why?

When I was fourteen I was fired for stealing money from a legal service where I worked as a messenger. I knew the culprit was the dispatcher, an eighteen year old zit picking degenerate horse player. He looked me right in the eye in front of the bosses and lied. I went home in tears. Everything I had been told by my mother and my teachers was wrong: the world was unfair and unjust. People could not be trusted. You could never know what someone was really thinking. The helpless indignation of outraged innocence has haunted me ever since.

Do you think the media are involved in the mainstream manipulation of what we perceive and if so to what extent does fiction differ from so called factual writing?

The media are totally politicized. You can’t get a straight who what when where story anymore. Fiction is actually a better guide to the zeitgeist. It doesn’t attempt to manipulate behind a guise of objectivity. Fiction is a lie that lets you see the truth, as Picasso said about art. Journalism these days is the lie pretending to be the truth.

Do you think women killers are motivated by different drives than men?

Some women kill abusive males. Some kill their children and themselves as the supreme gesture of spite. Some kill a pregnant woman for her child. Freud said women didn’t feel guilt because they never had an Oedipal fixation on their mothers. But he had his own problems, wondering: “Women, what do they want?” And, by some accounts, stopping all sexual relations with his wife at the age of 37. Aside from a few gender-specific instances women seem to kill for the same reasons of greed, jealousy, hatred and fear as men.

We have seen many examples of authoritarianism since the Second World War which you in wrote about in your excellent screenplay ‘The Boys From Brazil’. Wilhelm Reich wrote in ‘The Mass Psychology Of Fascism’  ‘Always ready to accommodate himself to authority, the lower middle-class man develops a cleavage between his economic situation and his ideology.’ Do you think he was right? And if so to what extent do you think that the deferral by the insecure of their authority to those they see as powerful and the sacrifice of or the submission to ideology is behind many of the problems we face today?

Wilhelm Reich was so right so often that they finally threw him in jail. (Anybody got a used orgone box they don’t need.)

The “Tea Party” movement is a perfect illustration of Reich’s thesis. Workers and small business people are clamoring to kiss the boots of the oppressor who is grinding them into the mud– the oligarchical Capitalist.  This is cognitive dissonance in its purest form. Every plank of the Tea Party platform is inimical to the economical interests of its drafters. People who cannot survive without Social Security and Medicare want to destroy them. They want to lower the taxes of billionaires while seeing theirs creep up in the form of fees, property assessments, new charges for government provided services, etc. They want to protect the corporations that are gutting their pensions, manipulating prices and wages and slowly driving the small entrepreneur out of business. They can’t afford private sanitation, security and education, but have embarked on a Holy War against the public employees who provide them–many of whom count themselves Tea Party members. Talk about lemmings, about Kool-Aid, about running dogs, about millions jumping on the funeral pyre of their own class.

The wealthy liberal left is the most cynical class in history. It  lives with an unbridgeable gap between its ideology and its interests. George Soros and David Koch provide a false dialectic. The only real difference between them is their taste in ballet. Wealthy liberals claim to support ideologies of environmentalism, equality, diversity while secretly undermining them. In Obama they have found a better front man than Clinton. So good, in fact, that they will make sure he has no serious opposition.

Thank you Heywood for giving a real and insightful interview.

Heywood Gould links:

Official website

‘The Serial Killer’s Daughter’ is available from the publisher, Nightbird Publishing, and Amazon.com.