Here at Casa Mysterioso, instead of recycled site-owner publicity, we offer interviews with other people in the arts--writers, musicians, actors, entertainers, and sometimes just plain characters. We add new ones all the time, and site visitors are invited to contribute. If we use your interview, we'll pay $35. Query by e-mail.

Interview with Jan Burke
Interview with Jeremiah Healy
Ben and Diane (An Interview with Stephen Booth)
Cold Days and Deadly Nights (An Interview with Steve Hamilton)
Mysteries (An Interview with Irene Marcuse)
The Stone Monkey (An Interview with Jeff Deaver)
The Salaryman's Wife (An Interview with Sujata Massey)
A Kiss Gone Bad (An Interview with Jeff Abbott)
Charlotte Justice (An Interview with Paula Woods)
Blood Money (An Interview with Rochelle Krich)
Letter From New Orleans: (An interview With Andy J. Forest)
The Lady From Charm City (An Interview with Laura Lippman)
Crescent City Views (An Interview with Anne Rice)

Ben and Diane
(An Interview with Stephen Booth)
by Andi Shechter

AS is interviewer Andi Shechter; SB is Stephen Booth.

AS:  I've always been interested in the transition from journalism to fiction.  What are the challenges - assuming there are some - of moving from fact and inquiry to using the imagination?

SB:  Well, in the UK the joke I usually hear is that newspaper journalists write fiction anyway! Actually, I was doing both jobs for a while, and the combination was very liberating. It meant I was able to exercise two distinct sides of my character – worrying about the accuracy of my facts during the day, and then just making it all up in the evening!

A grounding in journalism has been very useful to me in a lot of ways. I enjoy the research I do for the books, because I’m still enthusiastic about ferreting out interesting facts and background information. And it helps if you know how to go about getting what you need. During their training, journalists are brainwashed into believing they have the right to ring up anybody in the world and demand information from them!

 In leaving journalism to write novels full time, the challenges I’ve faced have been more on the organization side. For more than 25 years, I always had another deadline coming up in a few hours’ time – and that focuses the mind wonderfully! But when my deadline is 12 months away (or, even worse, I’m not given a deadline at all), then I find it much harder to focus. Also, I spent many years working in busy newspaper offices as part of a close team, surrounded by colleagues. It has been really difficult to adjust to working entirely on my own, which I find can be very isolating. I miss the people I worked with very much.  

AS:  After you saw my review of  Blood on the Tongue you told me there were the "Diane" people and the "Ben" people - the two often opposing protagonists in your books. Can you tell me if you've figured that out any more?  Who likes Diane Fry and who likes Ben Cooper?  

SB:  I wouldn’t like to categorize them, but I’ve noticed that male readers are often the ones to take Diane’s side. This may be more noticeable because of the fact that the vast majority of my readers are female (at least, judging by the email I get and the attendance at events I go to). I particularly remember a discussion at a bookstore in California, when a male reader stuck up for Diane Fry against a lady who didn’t approve of the way Diane treated Ben. He said something like: “But I know women who are just like that. And you have to understand that Diane is the way she is because of the things that happened to her in the past.” I quite liked that.

But whoever they are, I’m always pleased when a reader sees beyond Diane’s rather abrasive exterior. Personally, I enjoy writing about Diane, because I feel she a lot of depth that I’ve hardly begun to draw out yet - even after four books. She represents a challenge, too - I want to make those readers who dislike Diane at least understand her, even if they can’t actually learn to like her!

AS:  The setting of your work tends to be rather dark and occasionally wild. It's very new, I think, to many of us American readers, who know London, or maybe Cornwall - not what a lot of us think of when we think of England. Is that the attraction of the Peak District?

SB:  Well, it certainly occurred to me that it was an area that hadn’t been written about a lot. Also, one of the attractions of the Peak District for me is that much of it is very appealing on the surface, but underneath there are all kinds of tensions – not to mention dark legends and deeply atmospheric locations. I like to turn over the stones and present a different picture from the one the tourists normally see.

The Peak District also offers great contrasts within a relatively small area. The southern part, which is called the White Peak, is very scenic, with lots of picturesque villages and gently rolling hills. But the more northern part, the Dark Peak (where Blood on the Tongue is set) is much bleaker and rather inhospitable. I think it has its own wild beauty, but it isn’t to everyone’s taste.

AS:   Publishers Weekly chose Blood on the Tongue as one of the best mysteries of 2002, along with books by folks like Marcia Muller, Elizabeth George, Steven Hamilton and Bill Pronzini. Given that this is only your third book and you're fairly new to mystery and to an American audience.  Pretty cool, huh? Talk about how that feels, would you?

SB:  Cool is the word. Like so many things that have happened to me over the last two or three years, it’s very exciting - but also a big surprise! Hearing my name mentioned in the same breath as those of some of my heroes and heroines still takes a bit of getting used to.

AS:  I know that as a child, you wrote science fiction. Any interest in trying that genre again? (asks the s.f. fan in me)

SB:  Actually, I wrote science fiction well into my 20s. I still have a collection of rejection slips for a post-apocalypse novel called The Burning City, which was probably pretty bad! But I think SF has moved on quite a lot since then, and I haven’t kept up with developments in the genre, so it would be a major shift for me now…  

… well okay, if you push me, I suppose there might be a few thousand words of an SF nature lurking on my computer somewhere! Old habits do die hard! But isn’t the trend for mystery writers to turn their hands to children’s fiction these days, rather than SF?

AS:  So is it time for Steve to go off and do the Coben/Crais/Lehane thing?  Time to write a thriller or standalone?

SB: There’s a standalone in a drawer of my filing cabinet, but it won’t come out until the time is right (so don’t even ask me what it’s about!).

I’m still interested in the Ben Cooper and Diane Fry series at the moment. But I’m aware that with any series there comes a point when it’s time to stop, or at least to take a break from it - otherwise there’s a risk of getting stale and losing interest in the characters. That’s a hard judgment to make for any writer, not least because of the pressure from publishers.

AS:  Is it really so rare, or so awful for a 30 year old to leave home in Ben's part of the world?  There seems to be such a fuss when in Blood on the Tongue, he finally gets his own place. In town!  He is an adult, after all.  Is that such a rare thing in the Peak District, adults living alone?

SB:  No, not really! But Ben is part of a very close farming family, where the tradition is to stay together, with three generations often working the farm. What Ben’s family finds difficult to understand is that he’s leaving home to live on his own without having a good reason for it, in their eyes. And Ben has left it a bit late to become independent, after all. Personally, I left home when I was 18 and never looked back!

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