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
mouth readers tend writer
The problem with being a writer is that some readers tend to think that anything that comes out of a character's mouth is you talking.
anywhere bit freak stand tend time traveling
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.
looks men tend whereas women
I think women tend to write about how violence feels, whereas men tend to write about what violence looks like.
time
I've never read an ebook. Print every time.
bit change created determined grow knows reader
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.
I started performing as a stand-up comedian on my own in the mid-1990s.
began came drive early hours lights morning obsessive sure traffic trivial turn
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.
genre hugely
Crime is the biggest genre in libraries and in bookshops, and it is hugely varied.
naturally sat
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.
cooler dash name pipe preferred rather shortened slightly smoke spade
I've always slightly preferred Spade to Marlowe, probably just because I thought Hammett was cooler than Chandler. He was leftwing, his name shortened to Dash rather than Ray, and he didn't smoke a pipe or like cats.
I was never a fan of cozy mysteries of anything set in the countryside, you know.
far graphic images
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.
audience basement club favourite good grabbed latest money novel shades stage volume whether
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.'
both delivery involve worked
Having worked as both comedian and crime writer, the one thing I know is that both involve the delivery of a performance.