Mark Billingham
Mark Billingham
Mark Philip David Billingham is an English novelist whose series of "Tom Thorne" crime novels are best-sellers in that particular genre. He is also a television screenwriter and has become a familiar face as an actor and comic...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth2 July 1961
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The fact is that most crime novels contain a good many punchlines. They are just rather darker than the ones you might hear in a comedy club.
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I think readers' imaginations are far more powerful than anything you can put on a page and, therefore, can conjure up graphic images for themselves, which I think you just have to nudge them towards.
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Part of the reason why Scandinavian crime has been so popular is the landscape. It is just so strong and alien. Although without taking anything away, you should probably also never discount the fact that blood does look particularly good against snow.
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I think it's very easy to disgust the reader with violence on the page - that's incredibly easy - but it's far harder to make a reader care about a character.
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Like my fictional protagonist Tom Thorne, I love country. My tastes go back a bit further than his do, and I still listen to stuff from the late '70s and early '80s.
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I think there's as much violence, in a way, as a scene with two women having a cup of coffee in a Ruth Rendell novel - in terms of emotional violence and the violence you can inflict with language - as there is in the most graphic kind of serial killer/slasher novel you can think of.
I write slowly and get distracted a lot.
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I think women tend to write about how violence feels, whereas men tend to write about what violence looks like.
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I find traveling anywhere very stressful. If I ever have to go on tour, I tend to find it all a bit too stressful. I am too much of a control freak with traveling, and nothing is ever on time. The one thing I can't stand is being late.
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If something is crucial to the plot, then I'd better be sure I've got my facts straight. Readers of crime novels are smart and savvy, and they'll waste no time letting me know if there's a hole in my plot.
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Having worked as both comedian and crime writer, the one thing I know is that both involve the delivery of a performance.
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I admire writers such as Elmore Leonard who can nail a character in three or four lines of dialogue, so he doesn't need pages of back story or clumsy exposition.
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Whether you do stand-up comedy or write a story, you have a duty to deliver. As a comedian, you walk out on stage, and you have a minute to hook them, or they'll start booing. As a writer, it's very similar. A reader doesn't have time to say, 'I'll give him 50 pages, as it's not very good yet, but I hope it'll get better.'
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Whenever people ask where I get my sick and twisted ideas from, I reply, 'Just open your eyes.'