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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A reader's own imagination is a far more powerful form of CGI than anything any movie can provide because it's unique. In your own imagination, you can enter all sorts of worlds, and they are unique to you because no other reader will interpret a book the same way.
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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.
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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.
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In America, they have specialist mystery book stores with whole sections devoted to cat mysteries, golf mysteries, quilting mysteries. It's a hugely broad genre from the darkest noir to tales of a 19th-century vet who solves crimes, thanks to his talking cat.
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I wanted to write at school - to write funny stories which the teacher might ask me to read out to the class. It's all basically about showing off.
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It never ceases to amaze me that readers who are willing to suspend their disbelief when it comes to the motivation of a vicious serial killer get high and mighty because I have put a coffee shop where there isn't one. Er... it's a novel. I made one up. I'm allowed to make stuff up. I'd go as far as to suggest that I make stuff up for a living.
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What I usually do is hoard money - I accumulate as much as possible in the fear of not having enough to pay tax.
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Crime is the biggest genre in libraries and in bookshops, and it is hugely varied.
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Crime fiction has always been what I wanted to read, so when I sat down to write my first book, it was naturally the way that I was going to go.
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While the subject matter of my novels could not be further removed from the stuff I used to trot out at the Comedy Store, the delivery of the material employs many of the same techniques.
I started performing as a stand-up comedian on my own in the mid-1990s.
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I used to be something of an obsessive when it came to research. When I first began writing the Thorne novels, I would drive to a set of traffic lights in the early hours of the morning to make sure you could turn left. I thought it was important to get even the most trivial details right.
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I've never read an ebook. Print every time.
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I've often said the reader knows every bit as much about Thorne as I do. When I created him for 'Sleepyhead,' I was determined he should be a character who would develop, book by book, change and grow as we all do, and who - crucially - would be unpredictable.