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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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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When you think of a great twist or a red herring or a way of misdirecting the reader, it is good, but you know that they are just tricks at the end of the day, and the way to keep interest is to write characters that people care about.
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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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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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Whether your audience is in a sweaty basement club or nestled in a favourite armchair, good money has been paid, and attention has got to be grabbed if you are not to be heckled off the stage or find your novel discarded in favour of the latest volume of 'Fifty Shades of Whatever.'
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I bought an insurance policy covering the inheritance tax my kids will have to pay when we die, which I thought was a good bit of forward thinking. And I always know I'm going to have enough for tax because I make sure I keep it back in my business account.
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A good agent will sometimes need to be a scrapper, and that's the one you want.
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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.'
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Whenever people ask where I get my sick and twisted ideas from, I reply, 'Just open your eyes.'
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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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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 was never a fan of cozy mysteries of anything set in the countryside, you know.
I write slowly and get distracted a lot.