Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Crime fiction writer known for bestselling novels that explore the darkest recesses of human behaviour.
On the island
Eight records
sometimes when you're writing you need something with real energy to get you fired up, and this is one of those tracks that always does it for me. He's got that great line in the middle of the song as well about how fed up he is and I'm just sitting here trying to write this book and we all know that feeling.
The Road and the Miles to Dundee
The Road in the Miles to Dundee was the song that my father always sang… it's a song of generosity and kindness. So it really sums up my my dad to me.
this is a song that shows that when songwriting is at its best it can do just much more than just be a piece of fluff. It's an absolutely heartbreaking song, it's a beautiful song.
Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 in B-flat major, BWV 1051 — AllegroFavourite
English Baroque Soloists (conductor John Eliot Gardiner)
this was one of the first pieces of classical music that I heard that actually something went ping inside my head… And this also I have to say I associate with my first love…
my friend Fiona and I hitchhiked to Paris… I had taken my guitar and I literally did that busking in the metro. She was the pretty one, she went round with the hat, and I did the singing with the guitar. And this song always reminds me of that trip…
Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye
when I was thirteen I got a guitar and this was one of the very first songs I learned to play. So it has a very warm place in my heart.
(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman
this is a song I would have on my desert island to remind me of my wife and my kid… they put on Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder and the Supremes, and they sing along at the top of their voices.
Rab Noakes (from the Blue Nile)
this song, I suppose, incorporates my life now and my life then, so many of the things that have shaped me and made me who I am.
In conversation
Presenter asks
4:23What is it about crime fiction that excites so much snobbery?
I think it's generally ignorance these days. When the genre had its first golden age, uh you'd have to be honest and say most of what was being produced was not of particularly high standard in terms of literature… But the genre has come to embrace such a a broad church. There are now people writing crime fiction who I think can stand shoulder to shoulder with writers of any kind of fiction, and generally I find that people who are dismissive of it are simply dismissive of something they don't know.
Presenter asks
5:00Tell me about the actual process of writing all the things that go together to make the kind of convincing crime novels that you write.
It generally starts with a small idea, something that makes me go, I didn't know that, or something that makes me go, yeah, but what if that happened instead? And from that, I start playing with the idea. And generally, this is a process that will take years. I think probably the longest was a book called A Place of Execution, which was about 20 years in the making from the first idea to being actually ready to write it. So patience is a really important part of the process…
Presenter asks
10:26What do you remember [of the mining community] personally within your family?
The keepsakes
The book
The complete works of Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
I think I'd like to take the complete works of Robert Louis Stevenson, all smashed up into one big volume.
The luxury
solar-powered laptop with new games each month
I would like a computer, a solar powered laptop, fired up with a new game every month. It can only be used for games.
I do remember that sense of community. I was lucky, I suppose, I grew up in a family where we didn't have men who went out and spent their wages on drink. We had one of those solid, decent working class families. And I do remember that great sense of support and solidarity that was there through the good times and the bad times… But there was a strong sense of people doing things together.
Presenter asks
15:37How did you find [Oxford]?
It was a complete culture shock. It was unlike anything I'd ever experienced… everything was different, even the vegetables were different. The accent was different. Nobody understood a word I said… I'd never seen red peppers or green peppers. I'd never seen watercress or celery. First time we went to an Italian restaurant, I looked at this and said, Pasta, what the hell's this? I knew what a pizza was, though. So I ordered a pizza. And this round flat thing came in. I'm like, that's not a pizza. Pizza's half moon shaped and covered in batter.
Presenter asks
19:44How did your mother deal with your sexuality, given that she was of the generation she was?
It was never an issue for either of my parents… My parents just took it in their stride and it was never ever an issue with them.
Presenter asks
29:20We should talk for a moment about the idea of crime as entertainment… there's a view that turning murder, acts of sexual violence into books and TV dramas is tasteless. What do you think of that?
Well, I think we live in a society where these things happen. Do we want to not understand them? Generally it seems to me that one of the best ways to try and understand human beings, to understand the way we live, is to explore it through fiction. And I think that the best of crime fiction is exactly about that… it could be said, I think there's some truth in this, that we get the crimes we deserve as a society. And until we actually start to understand what those crimes are and how they arise, there's not much prospect of putting them right.
“Mostly I feel very lucky because it's the one thing in the world I ever wanted to do and they pay me money for it. So what's not to like?”
“I think all the things that I write about are things that happen in the world. And so I think whatever I'm writing about, whether it's it's love or death, I have to approach it in the same way, to try to be honest, to try to understand the motive springs of this kind of behaviour.”
“Little girls grow up with a sense of the threat of the world. Every single one of us who is a woman over the age of ten years old has walked down a street and heard footsteps behind them and immediately gone flash forward to the movie of the terrible things that are about to happen to us… Women have that imaginative experience of victimhood before they ever encounter it often. And so we're writing about it from the inside.”
“…the one thing I really wanted was to be a writer. Because in the 1960s, in Fife, there were no lesbians. They didn't exist. It wasn't even a word that crossed people's horizon, really. So I had no way of realising what my sexuality was and what that meant for me.”
“My nickname on the record was Killer.”