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
body characters create crime dead disgust easy fear harder key novels number readers understood victim
I'd read one too many crime novels where the victim was just a name: body number one, dead woman number 12. I understood fear, and I wanted to create characters who made readers say, 'Please, don't hurt this guy.' That's the key to suspense. It's easy to disgust a reader. It's much harder to make them care.
collapsed gamble lost market money quite saw shares stocks
I could never gamble on stocks and shares because I saw my father get hurt that way - he lost quite a lot of money when the stock market collapsed in 2001.
character foxes kick-ass
If you're looking for an author who can deliver high-octane thrills every time and a character who is NOT to be messed with, you've found them. Zoë Sharp and Charlie Fox both kick ass.
london
London now has its own John Grisham.
believe adventure unique
Cormoran Strike is an amazing creation and I can't wait for his next outing. Strike is so instantly compelling that it's hard to believe this is a debut novel. I hope there are plenty more Cormoran Strike adventures to come. A beautifully written debut novel introducing one of the most unique and compelling detectives I've come across in years.
winning blood goldfish
Life isn’t fair. Fair is somewhere you go to ride the dodgems and win a goldfish. (from Rush of Blood)
good
A good agent will sometimes need to be a scrapper, and that's the one you want.
adapted good hope muppet tv
All you can hope for when you get a book adapted for TV is that you get a good actor and not some muppet off 'EastEnders.'
All writers I know are readers first and foremost, and that's why you become a writer.
becomes certainly reader
The day a character becomes predictable is the day a writer should think about moving on - because the reader certainly will.
life matter tall
An actor's life is all about rejection. It's you they don't want; it's you who's too tall or too short or too fat. With stand-up, it doesn't matter what you look like.
branch days drive fall finally gone lights obsess realised starbucks touch traffic turn whether
I do have a touch of OCD, and I used to obsess about research. But I'm better than I was. Gone are the days when I would drive to a set of traffic lights to find out if you could turn left. I finally realised it didn't matter. A book will not stand or fall on whether or not there's a branch of Starbucks in Brixton.
fields grew life richer tapestry wild
I'm a city boy. I grew up in a big city, in Birmingham, and I want to write about a city. It's much richer tapestry for me than green fields. Fields and wild life make me feel ill. I don't like - I don't want to write about that stuff.
cares matter moved
I moved from acting to stand-up because castings are just about what you look like. It doesn't matter if you can act or not. In comedy, no one cares what you look like.