 Welcome to Pookey Ponders, the podcast where I explore big questions with brilliant people. Today's question is, what drives us to read and write really twisted stories? And I'm in conversation with Mark Edwards. I'm Mark Edwards. I'm an author of Psychological Thrillers. My mission statement is that I write scary books in which frightening things happen to ordinary people. I've written 16 books now, including six that were co-authored with Louise Voss, and the most well-known ones include The Magpies, Folly Home, The Retreat and Here to Stay. And after many years of trying, I became a full-time author about six or seven years ago. And yeah, I've been making a living as an author since 2014. Living the dream. Yes. So, and I'm really excited to talk to you because you are one of my favourite authors, and I read everything you write, but I love your twisted stories, basically. So, I wanted to chat with you about what motivates you to write stuff like that, and why do you think, I mean, a lot of people read what you write, why do we love this stuff? Well, the reason that I write it is because it is the kind of things that I like reading, or the kind of things that I like watching as well, because I'm quite heavily influenced by TV and films as much as I am by books. And when I started out writing, when I was in my early 20s, I didn't really know what kind of writer I wanted to be. I'd sort of grown up reading Stephen King and James Herbert and Dean Coons and all the horror authors, and I liked bits of science fiction and stuff as well. And then in my early 20s, I got into things, authors like Donna Tartt and Brett Easton Ellis and Ian McEwan. So, a bit more literary, but still quite dark and gruesome sometimes. And I found that whatever I wrote, there would usually be a murder or something quite dark could happen quite quickly. And that's just what I've always gravitated towards. And I have tried to write comedy and failed completely. I can slip some dark humor into my books and black humor, but if I set out to write a rom-com, for example, I mean, crime writers always say this, but they'd be a dead body by the end of Chapter 2, and the police would be involved, or someone would be being gaslighted or something. So that's just the way that my imagination works. And what is it that appeals about those kind of stories? I was thinking about this before we started chatting, and I think that when I was 10 or 11 or 12, we got our first video recorder, our first VCR machine, and there was a news agent around the corner where we used to be able to go and rent out horror movies, and I would pretty much let anyone, any kids, go in and take anything. And my mum wasn't bothered. She let me rent The Evil Dead and American Wealth in London and all of these gory, scary films. And I think that I've been trying to recapture the feeling that I got when I watched those ever since. I used to watch Hammerhouse of Horror and things like that on TV as well, and I used to read lots of comics like 2008 D and Eagle and things like that. And yeah, and these days I actually find it much harder to be scared or to be disturbed, almost like I've become slightly numb to it. And I'm always seeking that thrill or that chill that I got when I was a kid. And the same with the books that I read. I remember being so engrossed when I used to read Stephen King when I was a young teenager, like completely transported into the world of the books. And I find although I do still read lots and still love reading, I do find it harder to become completely immersed these days. Why do you think that is? I mean, it's partly to do with distractions, but I think it's also to do with, I suppose this is true of all aspects of getting older, isn't it? That as you, once you've experienced something once or a few times, it's harder and harder to feel the initial kind of the original thrill that you did when you first encountered it. Which sounds quite a gloomy way of kind of looking at things, but I'm always kind of searching for that sweet kind of hit that you get when you're younger. And it's the same, my favourite book is The Secret History by Donna Tartt. And I've just been the last 30 years searching for a book that would affect me, although I would love as much as that book. And so what I'm doing with my own books is that I'm trying to write the kind of books that I would want to read. And I'm trying to make people feel just even if it's just a fraction of the way that I felt when I first read Stephen King on Donna Tartt, or when I first read Elizabeth Haynes into the Darkest Corner, or Moe Haider, or James Delroy, or all these authors that had like a big emotional impact on me when I started out. And there's also, I think, with the kind of twisted and twisty stories. There's also a kind of intellectual challenge as well of constructing these puzzles and trying to kind of fool people or lead people down the wrong path and surprise them. And it's the worst thing you can do is be boring or predictable. So a lot of work and a lot of effort goes into trying to lead people down the wrong kind of dark path. I'm writing a book set in the woods at the moment, so lots of my metaphors would be to do with woods. Okay, well, yeah, it could be worse. You could be in an avatar or something. Go on, I'll go with woods analogies. Yeah, so I think I love horror movies. It's October at the moment, and I am doing a thing where I'm watching a horror movie every night. Some old favourites and some new ones. And it's only the seventh, as we're speaking now, and I feel quite exhausted already. Six or seven nights of horror movies. But yeah, I'm, I would say that only sort of one in three I'm watching impress me or scare me in any way. And I'm finding it harder and harder to find that horror movie that really, that really affects me or makes me jump. Wow. But as you say, maybe because you're so exposed to this kind of all the time. And do you find that in your writing or you having to go to greater length or because your writing has changed quite a lot in the time that I've been reading what you write? I think certainly it's become more, that what you're saying about that kind of intellectual challenge. I think there's a lot more twists and turns now, aren't there? Yeah, they have got more complex. I mean, the early books like The Magpies and Because She Loves Me were quite straightforward. And now, I mean, I've made life harder and harder for myself as I've gone on because the books have got ever more complicated. And so when you get to the editing stage, and you've got this kind of massive tangle of plot with all of these characters and, and so much going on that it's, it's much harder and more challenging to write them. And every time I finish a book, I think, okay, the next one's going to be simple and straightforward. My editor was joking with me last night saying, the next book just put like three people on a train or two characters in an in an elevator and stop trying to write things that are so complex. But yeah, I suppose there's that. I don't know whether I'm, I think that I'm trying not to repeat myself. That's one of the challenges. Not just in the stories and the settings, but also, I mean, all of the tropes that you throw into all these kind of books. And there's only so many times you can have somebody kind of, I don't know, followed along a dark street or to feel like they're being watched or, or they get some kind of spooky message or be stranded somewhere without a mobile phone. There's, there's all of these things that have been done so many times before. And it's, it's really hard to keep coming up with new and original ideas or to, or to put those ideas together in an original way. But luckily kind of, I am literally touching with, as I say this, I am still finding it reasonably easy to come up with new ideas. But it's kind of getting harder to, to make sure that each, but I want each book to be better than, than the last one. I don't ever want to feel like I'm just phoning in until they say. So yeah, it's, it's hard. And so going back to the kind of horror theme, whether I'm becoming slightly more extreme, the book I'm writing now is much, I'm trying to make it as scary as possible, scarier than my last couple anyway. So yeah, I've got lots of masked figures kind of lurking in, in a dark forest and all of this talk of pagan rituals and, and, and sacrifices and, and that kind of folk horror and, and, and yeah, I'm kind of, it's almost like a tribute to Stephen King this book. I'm really kind of going back to the Stephen King books that I loved when I was a teenager and drawing inspiration from those. That's such a contrast to your most recent book though. So you actually just shifted continents and set the last one in the, in the States, didn't you? And, and that sounds like a really different feel. Yeah, well this one, the one I'm writing now, the one in the woods, that's also in America. So it's going to be say Maine, another Stephen King reference there. But yeah, the house guest was set in New York. And I like, I really love writing stories about people, like the kind of fish out of water, people going on a trip somewhere. Yeah. Bad stuff happening to them. So my most popular book still is Follow Your Home, which is about a couple who go to Romania and they do this kind of interfaithing trip that ends, that goes horribly wrong when they get kicked off a train in the middle of Romania. And then I've written a number of more domestic books like Here to Stay, which is mainly just set in a house in London. And so I wanted to go back to those, that theme of having a couple or a, or a family going somewhere abroad and encountering scary things. So that's kind of where the idea for the house guest came from. The couple staying in Airbnb in Brooklyn and then a stranger turns up on the doorstep. That was kind of like an image that I had. And then the story kind of came from that original scene of the woman turning up in the rain, storming in the doorbell and saying that she knows the owners and can she come in. And I did, when I started writing, I didn't even know where that story was going to go. And it took me quite a long time to figure it out. That's really interesting. Because that scene was so vivid, like I can remember literally like hearing the rain and imagining this kind of very wet but draggled person. And you're kind of thinking, wouldn't you, would you let her in? And obviously, because I know it's a book you've written, I'm thinking, this is a good idea. Yeah, I know. And some people say, well, why would they let her in? Well, a, the answer is they wouldn't be a book if they didn't. They're also kind of, I think you have to see the characters, my characters are often quite naive and trusting and they're nice people. And they want to help other people out and they often kind of pay the price for it in some way. I don't know what that says about me, the way that I'm kind of constantly punishing people for doing good deeds. I hope it doesn't actually put people off doing nice things for people. But yeah, there's a kind of common arc in my book. So you'll start with usually a nice kind of guy who's a bit kind of passive and easygoing, who's then put through the ringer and finds and has to make like very difficult decisions and either ends up completely screwed up by everything that they've been through, or they kind of find reserves of strength that they didn't know that they had, or maybe both, maybe both. But yeah, I like the idea of setting my books. I mean, I've kind of got two or three ideas for books in America, including the two that I've written or almost finished writing. But yeah, that's my favourite genre of film as well, and books, is ones where people go on some kind of expedition or trip, whether it's into a forest or into some caves or a desert, the outback, whatever, and then horrible stuff happens to them. Does this make you trepidatious when you go on trips of your own? Let's go on holiday fat no. I mean, when I was younger, that's kind of what my holiday used to be like. I mean, Folly Home was based on a real experience I had of, I think I was 19 or 20, and my then girlfriend and I went interrailing. And we had this whole kind of grand tour of Europe, a whistle stop tour of Europe plan. We were going to be kind of circled around the whole continent, Western Europe anyway. I think this was actually before the Berlin Wall came down. That's how long ago it was. And we, on our second or third day, we got on this train from Paris to Avignon. And we sat down, I think we were only on the train at that half an hour, and then suddenly we were waking up and it was because it was an overnight train. We woke up and it was morning and all of our stuff was gone, like our passports had gone, we had travellers checks as you had at the time, our interrail tickets, our backpacks were still there with all of our clothes in. And apparently, according to like news reports, and I still don't know whether this is an urban myth or whether it really happened, there were gangs of bandits going in France at that time, going around trains getting sleeping, gas into people's compartments and sending them to sleep. Because I never use, I can fly to Australia without falling asleep. I never usually can sleep on public transport. And we just both zonked out, didn't hear anybody come into the compartment. And then we woke up and was like, oh my god, everything's gone. So we were stranded in the south of France with no money and no tickets and no way to get home. And after spending the night at Marseille station, which was a scary, very scary experience, sleeping on the floor there, we're trying to. People kept trying to lure us away, like with the promises of hot food and stuff. We didn't go with them, obviously. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't be here to tell this tale. We had to hitchhike home. It took like two weeks to hitchhike from Marseille to Calais. And then years later, I thought, well, when I was trying to think of ideas for books, because I based the magpies on real nightmare neighbors that I'd had. And I based because she loves me on a real, very jealous girlfriend that I'd had when I was at university. And my editor said to me, well, what are the terrible things that have happened to you that you can you also really because she loves me, I had to detach retina. And I said, there was there's lots of stuff about eyes in that book. And that all came from the horrible experience I had with that. And yes, I thought back to this trip. And I thought, well, I'll move it somewhere much spookier than France and moved it to Transylvania. Of course. You can't get much spookier than that, can you? So you've got quite a lot of your life informing your stories. Have you had, do you have terrible in-laws? No, no, I always get asked that, but I don't. I mean, people say, well, you have to say that, don't you? But it is true. My mother-in-law in particular is very supportive of my career. And it's actually the first person who ever bought one of my books. Oh, wow. Because I know that she bought it like the moment it was published on her Kindle. And she's read them all. And she's always one of my first readers. And my father-in-laws read a few as well. The horrific in-laws were inspired by someone else's horrific in-laws then. Well, they were kind of based on an ex's parents, or their own dad anyway. But I can't really say much, Morgz. I don't want to be. When I was reading that book, it was just around the same time that we just moved in with my mother-in-law. So we've always been neighbors. And we just started all living together around that time. And it just, yeah, it really amused me. Luckily, my mother-in-law is wonderful. And we're all very happy to live together. None of us are planning on moving out, just like, yeah. Well, the thing with here to say was that it was originally going to be him. So for people who don't know what it stays about, it's about this guy who he kind of lives on his own with his cat in this nice house that he's refurbished in South London. He meets a woman. They have a whirlwind romance. Get married really quickly. And the day they get home from the honeymoon, she says, oh, my parents and sister who've been living in France are coming back to the UK and they just need somewhere to stay for a couple of weeks. Can they come and stay with us? And of course he says yes. And then they move in and he can't get rid of them and they turn out to be psychopaths. I mean, it was so much fun to write that book. I mean, I think that's my best book. If I had to have one book that I kind of had buried with me in my grave, it would be that one. Why do you like that one so much? Why do you think that's the best? I really love the characters. I love the bad. I think the baddies are really good. Geoff and Lizzie were so much fun to write and all the siblings, the kids as well as siblings. And I like the fact that it goes to very dark places in the final third. I had my first review in America, so this is an example of the new nihilistic fiction coming out of England. And there's nothing to redeem this book. It's so dark and so bleak with such a bleak view of human nature. I was like, oh my God, that's such a terrible review. They really hated it because they thought it was so bleak and so dark. But actually, the majority of people actually like it because they like the darkness. They like the fact that it... I wanted people to read that book and be screaming at the pages. I wanted to reach in and throttle the villains in it. And I think that I really achieved that with that book. That's what I think anyway. And one of the things I found was I had to binge read it because I was so worried about the cat. And I remember tweeting you like, the cat, the cat! I know, I know. You were one among many because I got so many messages from people saying, I don't know, I'm on page 50 or something. And I can't read on until I know that the cat's going to be okay to be sure me. And I'm like, well, do you really want spoilers? I'm like, yeah, I can't, honestly, I can't read it if the cats can die. So, which is really funny because people don't care about humans being killed. No, that's it. There's plenty of death counts of human beings in your books. But the cat, yeah, I know the cat really got me. And particularly I think because in my mind, it was your beautiful cat. Yeah, Peggy, maybe. Yeah, well, I think I wrote that before we got Peggy. I've got three cats. And I think that anybody who follows me on social media will know how much I love my cats. So, they should be reassured that I'm never going to like hurt a cat in one of my books. So, we can all safely remember. Yeah, or a dog, or a dog. I mean, you do get dead animals turning up in my books, like there's some dead rats in the magpies, but you don't actually see them die. They just kind of, you don't meet them before they die. I love that, though, you're like, I would never harm an animal, but humans, I mean, yeah. Yeah, well, it's one of the gold, I mean, this is one of the things that when crying or horror writers kind of get together, this is one of the things we talk about is the fact that we get so many complaints about animals, swearing, sex, but violence, it's fine. You can do whatever you want to people. So, you get complaints about swearing and sex, really? Oh, loads, yeah. In fact, here to stay, if you probably didn't notice that there's no swearing in that book, because as an experiment, I went through and took out every swear word to see whether it made any difference to the reviews on Amazon. And did it? Actually, it didn't. But I mean, it means there's no bad reviews saying this book is full of F words, please be wary, because you get that a lot, especially in America, you'll get reviews that just reviewing it based on whether it's got swearing and blasphemy as well. So, are you quite differently received generally in America than you are in the UK? Yeah, much more successful in the UK. And I think people get my books more over here, they kind of understand the humour or something, I don't know. It's a really hard market to crack America, not just because it's so vast and there's so many writers, but for a British author, there are a few who've made it like Lisa Jules, really popular over there. I know The Girl on the Train was like a big book, and there's been, there are some British authors who make it, but most don't. And Follow Your Home is by far my biggest seller over there. And I wonder whether that's because it wasn't just set in England. But then the house goes set in New York, has kind of done okay, but it's still been a bigger hit in the UK. So, yeah, it's, I would love to be to sell more books in America. But yeah, I mean, I've got a loyal fan base in America. And I get, when I do my Facebook parties and I do my competitions and so on, I get loads and loads of people from America taking part. But when you consider America's five times as big as the UK, really, you should have five times as many readers in the US if you're as popular over there. So, yeah, but you do get complaints about swearing from England as well. I mean, I know people who, I used to go out with somebody who works in a library and people used to tip X out all the swear words in the library books. Wow. That's really interesting. Yeah. And I find it interesting that that would be the most offensive thing in one of your books. Yeah. I know, there's much worse stuff happening than people swearing, but I do, I do think twice, but I do think it's this F word really necessary. So, how does the writing process work for you? Thanks. It sounds like you've got like quite a few different ideas and you've got more than one thing on the go. And, I mean, yeah, how you know, since you've done it full time, is there a specific pattern that you follow? I'm usually only right working on one thing at a time. I have tried writing two things and my brain just got completely scrambled and I can't hope. So I went down to just to working on one project at a time. And what usually happens is that I will start out with just an opening situation or a premise. And I won't know how it's going to end. And I won't and I'll know a couple of things that are kind of going to happen along the way. Like I'll have a few scenes in my head, like important scenes that I've pictured. And then I will just kind of, it's almost like brain dump. This the first draft, like everything that I can think of, I'll just throw everything in there. Like characters that kind of disappear and storylines that don't really go anywhere. And just every idea that I can come up with in the first draft. So I just ended up with this kind of mess. 90 to 100,000 words of mess. And then I will spend months kind of trying to make sense of it and actually find the story within that. So I'll give you an example. So the book that I'm writing now and this one was particularly difficult because of lockdown and the children being around. So I have just spent the whole of, I went from, I started in February, I think, and I went from like February to July, writing the kind of very, very messy first draft. And I actually, because I was finding it so hard to concentrate and to find the hours in the day to actually get the writing done because of the kids being here. I've got three children. Normally in that time I would get a whole first draft done. Like in three or four months, it takes me to kind of do this big, some people call it a vomit draft where you just get everything down on the page. And I'd only actually got about two-thirds of the way through. And it was just, it was a total mess. I didn't really know where it was going, what was going to happen. It was all over the place. So I rented an Airbnb for five days. And I went away and I just forced myself to kind of sit there all day, like 12 hours a day on my own. You know the dangers of writing retreats though, right? Have you not read the retreat? Well, I thought this one was fine because I was completely on my own and it was in the middle of a town. It wasn't in any creepy woods. And then I rewrote the first two-thirds of that book by completely from scratch. I must have written like 50 or 60,000 words in those five days, just really concentrating hard. And then I got home and then I wrote like the final third. But it was still difficult and quite messy. But then I went through it again and again until I got to the point where like, okay, I'm not too ashamed now to send this to my publisher to look at. So I then send it to my publisher. They, my editor is actually in, I've got two editors. One's in Seattle and one's over here in London. And they read it and then they confer and then they send me their notes. And they had a lot of notes. A lot of notes and a lot of suggestions. And so I'm now over the next month, re-drafting it again. And I'm having to make a lot of changes to do with the plot and the characterization and the atmosphere. And so I'm going through another very intense period now of reworking it. I mean, the kind of, the basic story is there, is it's fine. It's just the way that, to tell you like the clarity of what's going on and the motivations of the bad guys and the, and the relationships between the main characters. And I've got to kind of work on all of that stuff. And like the red herrings and the, and trying to make it more intense. There's, yeah, so there's still, still a lot of work to do. And I have to do it very fast to kind of meet the, the editing and the publication schedule. So it's quite, I mean, each book is, I think, I sometimes think that people imagine that a writer sits down and kind of plans it all out and then just writes it from beginning to end. And then they, the editor just kind of corrects the spelling mistakes. I mean, that's how writing works for nonfiction for me. Your version sounds a lot more complicated. It's really, I mean, there are writers who are plotters who will, who will sit down and plot out the whole book before they write a word. And I just can't do that. I just, I just find that the, the ideas don't come until I'm actually immersed in it. And I'm, and I'm in the character's brains and I'm, and I'm in the story and in the, in the setting. And I know that my prose, my way of doing it is more painful and, and messier and, and maybe a more long-winded way of doing it. Although I don't spend two months plotting it out before I start. Because the idea is just, to me, that would feel quite sterile and, and, and I would, and also I would never write the book. So if I knew exactly what was going to happen, I would have no motivation to write it at all. It would become a very boring. That's really interesting. So you, you kind of, you're enjoying it in the same way that I find your books are terrible for my sleep because I have to keep reading, which is not good because sleep is important about, you know, that urge to turn on and you're feeling the same with the writing. Yeah. I, the fun for me is, is working out the story and, and discovering the story and, and you'll find when I say that I throw all these things in and some of them don't work and have to be removed. But when things do connect up, it's amazing. It's like this magical moment where you've kind of had these quite separate ideas and suddenly you'll think, oh yeah, because of that, this works. And that was, oh my god, that's amazing. It's, it's like, wow, it's like my subconscious mind planned it all out for me. And you'll find as well, the subconscious mind does do a lot in fact. So when I'm asleep, I'll often go, every night I will go to bed with all of these problems wearing through my head and eventually managed to get to sleep and then I'll wake up quite often with the answer. Yeah. Or I'll go on a dog walk or are we doing the washing up or stacking the dishwasher, whatever. That's when all the answers come. Not when you're sitting there, kind of staring at the computer screen, trying to, trying to come up with the answer. It's, I mean, the human mind is quite an amazing thing, the imagination. And sometimes I feel so tired, I'll sit down and think, I just can't do this. I can't do this again. I can't, I can't fix this problem. I just want to give up. And somehow we always kind of overcome it and always, and always come up with the answer, even when you're exhausted and it's like having to climb a mountain again. And you've done it. And that's what it feels like actually sitting down to write a book. It's like having to, you've just, you've just climbed this mountain and come down and it's like, great, well done. Okay, now I'm going to do it again. And every mountain is a little bit higher and the weather conditions are a little bit worse. So yeah, definitely, I always say this to Dave, you authors that it doesn't get any easier. In fact, it gets harder because you'll use up your well. You'll be, you'll be dipping into your well of ideas and experiences. And yeah, it gets harder and harder as time goes on. Nice cheery thought there. It sounds like your relationship with your editors is really important as well. And I think I'd maybe sort of naively assumed that, I don't know, I maybe hadn't really thought about what their, their kind of role in the process is, but it sounds like they're, they're quite invested and quite important. Oh yeah, incredibly so. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, my editor, his name's David, I've worked with him on nearly all of the books. Except there was a couple where he wasn't well so he couldn't do them the retreat and in her shadow was with a different editor, all of the other books. And it's a bit like having a coach, I guess, who's, if you're an athlete, who's driving you on to kind of do your best and do as well as you can. And he will never kind of just let me say, oh, that'll do. It's always like, well, this could be better, this can be better. And sometimes it's like, oh, this is so maddening. You just want him to say, yeah, that's fine now. And he doesn't really come up with, so editors tend to tell you the problems rather than the solutions. So they then send you away with, well, this doesn't work. And I think you need to look at this again, because of whatever. And then you end up with this great kind of puzzle that you're trying to solve. And I mean, I'm literally in the middle of that now. And it is really, really hot. So I'm having to go through every page of the book, looking at all the characters and everything that's going on. And every time you change something, there's like a ripple effect through the book. And then you've got to find all of the things that were affected by the single change that you made. But yeah, the editors are so important. And yeah, I think that, like I said, readers, I think often imagine that the editor is there just to kind of correct your grammar, or to kind of spot mistakes. But it's much, much more than that. It's about, it's about the story. And everything that you find in the book. And then you have copy editors and proofreaders come along later. So there'll be three different stages. So you have what's called the developmental edit, or some people call it a structural edit. That's the one I'm doing now. That's the hard, the big hard one. Then you'll have the copy edit, who look for consistency and use of language and kind of like factual errors or whatever. They'll be like, Oh, would it really be dark at 7am? And when you said this was a Tuesday, now it seems like three days have passed and you're saying it's a Sunday and all these kind of horrendous things. You have to try timelines. Oh my God, I hate timelines so much. I remember when I was writing the retreat, there's a bit where he goes into the woods, and it's meant to be dusk. And I was having to consult calendars and work out exactly when dusk was and then having to change everything that happened that day in the book to make sure that the time was correct. So that he'd be going into the woods at exactly the right time, just in case some eagle-eyed reader somewhere spotted it. And I still let mistakes get through. Like the river flows the wrong way in that book. And I'll give you advice from people saying the river meant to be flowing out to sea, not crossing the other way round. I don't know, I couldn't the wrong way round anywhere. Oh, it's so embarrassing. I also made a mistake, a Lord of the Rings mistake in Folly High, which nobody spotted, something to do with what the Hobbits were up to with the ring. And like it's just a throwaway reference, a metaphor to do with the Soren and Mordor. Oh my God, the angry Enos that I got from Tolkien, fanatic about this mistake. So anyway, the copy editors sometimes miss stuff, but that's what their job is. And then the proof reader goes through and correct any grammatical errors and typos and make sure that you're capitalising your proper nouns. And then I also have to think about American versus British English because my books are published in the same editions in both countries in Canada and Australia. So I have to kind of use language and avoid terms that people aren't going to understand. Otherwise, I will get more emails from people saying, what's a skip? You know, like a thing that you put rubbish in. I can't say rubbish either. No trash. Trash or garbage in a dumpster. Yeah, I mean, God, it's a minefield. Even with my stuff, that can be tricky because if I'm talking about schools, so in the UK, then we often talk about having a pastoral role within a school. But as soon as you do that in America, they're thinking about like pastoral always refers to the church. And, you know, little things. But yeah, nothing like, yeah. Does that make it harder in terms of your flow or do you do your kind of your vomit in how you would speak and then kind of edit? I tend to kind of tidy that up later. And it's you having the American editor is, because he will pick up on all the stuff that I wouldn't have even thought about. I mean, for example, I keep using campsite and he's created them all to camp ground. Just simple things like that. Because British readers will understand what that means, whereas an American reader will be like, what's a campsite? And, and you can also go down with rabbit holes, search as well. So for example, I today, I was having to Google the aid of Aaron Juliet law, so that if you're 15, you're allowed to have relations with somebody five years older than you, but not older than five years. And I was like, that's the law now, but was it in 1999? So there's a section of my books with these teenagers in 99. And so, oh my God, I spent ages and ages trying to find the answers to this question. Or trying to find what films they might have been watching in 99, if they were teenagers and what months they came out. And, and so there's all this stuff that people will will spot if you're not careful. And, and, and the amount of kind of like Googling I have to do around like disposal of bodies and, and how to poison somebody and how to smuggle drugs to an airport and how to. Yeah, I mean, this is another thing that's like a common joke among crime writers is our Google search history is that we must all be on some kind of watch list. Because, yeah, the kind of stuff that you have to research is just is bizarre. When I was googling like age of consent, they I was thinking, oh, this feels really sleazy. I need to know for these, these characters. And, and I would hear to stay it's hard to say without giving spoilers, but I spoke, I spoke to a couple of toxicologists and some of the stuff that Elliot has to do in the last third of that book, I needed to know what you would do if, because he's a scientist, like what would he know about murdering people? Like what, how can he put his scientific skills to use? I love that. I did find myself looking up again. Is that really? Yeah, you, you kind of, so you actually do learn a lot. And I think that people like feeling like they're learning stuff when they're reading as well. I do. I, I, I know that I do. Yeah. Even if it's slightly nonsensical stuff. And there's a reason why Dan Brown is so popular is because people feel like they're learning something when they, when they read his books. Or, I don't know, if you're even Patricia Corman or something, you feel like you're learning lots about forensics and, and pathology. So yeah, you have, I went to the local university here in Wolverhampton, has a crime scene lab. And I went and spoke to the forensic anthropologists there and they showed me there. They've got like this room that's like a mocked up crime scene with blood spatter on the walls. And, and it's really interesting because that's where they train the, the place and the CSIs. So yeah, you, you, it's really, really interesting. And sometimes the research is really annoying because it gets in the way of a good story. Because you want something to happen one way. And it's like, oh, that's, can I, and you have to decide whether you can bend the truth or not. And do you think that you will always write? Always write. I thought you were gonna say always write this kind of, yeah, I hope so. I hope so. I can't ever picture myself retiring. I just, I feel like my imagination, the stories are in me. And I need to get them out to the page. If somebody said, if somebody, if I, if I was so rich, if I was JK Rowling, I never had to write again, never have to work another day. Maybe I wouldn't work quite as hard. I would still do it. I would still, I would still be writing until I got to the point where I felt like I wasn't, the quality control was gone. I think that's the most important thing. As long as I feel like I'm writing good stuff and I've got things to say and I'm entertaining people, then I'll always do it. And I mean, in the moment, I do it for a living. I mean, I have to do it. I've got to the point now where I can't do anything else. I haven't worked in an office for seven or eight years now. I'm probably unemployable. What did you used to do when you, because you used to write and have a job alongside another job? Yeah, well, I mean, in my 20s, I worked in customer services and just admin and just kind of jobs where I didn't have to think about them when I got home and I could put all of my creative energy into writing and trying to be a writer and not really getting anywhere with the writing, but I did, I was really trying. Then in my 30s, I was working in, I worked in Japan for you as an English teacher. And then when I came back, I worked in online marketing, not digital marketing. And in fact, when I was doing those jobs and I was managing people and had lots of responsibility, I kind of pretty much stopped writing for a few years because my job took up all of my time and all of my energy. And then there was a period kind of in around 2011, 2012, when I finally got published and started writing again that I was trying to do both and it was really difficult. I actually only had one or two years where I was where I was published and doing a day job as well. And I'm lucky because actually most writers still have to have day jobs. I'm lucky that I'm successful enough to be able to do it full time. And luckily I'm very good at motivating myself and writing a book at least one every year and meeting my deadlines. And yeah, so I'm going to keep doing it until either A, I can afford not to have to do anymore, or B, I feel like I'm not, I'm not, but it's time to quit. I had my Lee Child, for example, who has just resigned, who just retired, not resigned, retired. Didn't he kind of pass the baton to his brother though or something? Yeah, he's passed it on to his brother and he said this, I listened to an interview with him that I think he's 65 or 66 now and he just felt like he was just tired and he just felt like he felt like he's still on the top of his game now, but he could see at some point in the near future the point was going to come where his heart wasn't in it and he was just going to be phoning it in. So he decided to stop now and maybe that, God, this is quite a depressing thing to talk about. Maybe that day will come. I'm still in my late 40s, so hopefully I'm gone. And your story's left in you. Yeah. I mean, some people are stealing Stephen King's 74 and he's still going really strong, so hopefully I'll still be going into my 70s. I hope so because I look forward to your books every year. Maybe I'll be able to hand on to one of my kids at one point. Are any of them aspiring writers? Yeah, well my daughters, one of my daughters in particular is really into writing. She writes fan fiction at the moment and although they're just kind of turning, getting to a point where they're playing more video games and watching more Netflix and they are reading, which is a bit frustrating, but there's not much I can do about it. But hopefully they'll get... My sons have shown no interest in books whatsoever and they will only read when they're forced to, which is... But they're still only seven and nine. Maybe they'll go into books. You never know. How old would you want them to be before you let them read your books? That's a good question because actually when I'm like my oldest daughter is 14 now and I think she's probably old enough. I mean, she's read Stephen King and she's read The Colour Purple and things like that and she watches horror films. She's watched the Annabelle films and Jaws and stuff like that. So she watches mature or reads mature stuff. I suppose I just feel a little bit cringe about her reading the sex scenes in my books. That's quite a comfortable idea. But you might still feel like that when she's 30. I think that's just a parent. Maybe. And actually the recent books, I wouldn't want her to read The Magpies because that's a bit X-rated, but the more recent books. And that's funny isn't it? I'm more comes with her reading the violence and the nasty stuff than the earth. So yeah, if she wanted to read them then yeah that'd be fine. But she hasn't, they haven't shown neither of my daughters have shown a huge amount of interest in reading my books yet. In fact what I should do is tell them that they're not allowed to and then they'll want to. That's definitely the way forwards with kids isn't it? I would love to close with if you have any kind of advice for anyone listening in who might be an aspiring writer and loads of the people in my network obviously are kind of teachers and educators who might be looking to inspire young people to write or to read. Yeah well I mean the first one is obviously read a lot. If you want to be a writer you've got to read a lot and read the kind of things that you love. Don't read things that you think that people tell you are good for you. I had so many arguments in my English teacher at school about the merits of Stephen King versus, I don't know, E. M. Forster or somebody who I was forced to read and it was so painful. Thomas Hardy. I still have a hatred of all the stuff that I was that they tried to make me read at school. I still can't read Dickens or Hardy or anything like that and yeah so read the stuff that excites you and when you're if you want to be a writer I think the important thing is to again you've got to write stuff that you feel passionate about the stuff that kind of comes from deep within you. Don't think old psychological thrillers are popular so I'll try and write a psychological thriller or any genre and when you do kind of find the kind of stories that you want to tell you need to be, if you want to be published you've got to be very clear about exactly where you fit so you need to know which authors you're like, which kind of books you would sit alongside on the bookshelf. You can't say oh my book's a little bit this or a little bit that or it's a little hybrid of three completely weird disconnected things. You've got to have a kind of a strong commercial idea of where you sit in the market if you want to be able to find an agent and then find the publisher and I think that's what kind of held me back for a long time is that I didn't have that clear vision of exactly what my brand was and people hate talking about themselves as brands but kind of sometimes you do have to think like that to know exactly what kind of books you're writing. If you're just writing for a hobby or for pleasure it doesn't matter but if you want to write as a career then you do have to know that kind of stuff. So yeah that's the kind of thing I always say to aspiring writers is well where do you fit, can you describe your book in a sentence or two and you've got to have that real clarity of vision about yourself and your books.