Nick Quantrill interview: The Late Greats

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*** FREE ON KINDLE MARCH 20th-25th ***

Nick Quantrill is a crime writer from Hull. His Joe Geraghty novels are published by Caffeine Nights. His short stories have appeared in volumes 8 and 9 of “The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime.”

Can you sum up your book in no more than 25 words? 

Joe Geraghty is employed to look after a reforming band. It goes wrong. It’s a story about friendship and what really constitutes success in life.

Can you provide a YouTube link to a song you'd like to be the title track to the movie adaptation of your book?

That’s an easy one! “The Late Greats” is a song by Wilco, who are one of my favourites. It’s about an imaginary band, so it tied in nicely to the backdrop of the book.

What are you reading now?

I’ve just finished “The Impossible Dead” by Ian Rankin. The premise for the book is great, but the conclusion seemed a bit off the money for me, which is unusual for Rankin. Next up is “Murder Mile” by Tony Black. DI Brennan is an excellent character. A little snappier than most fictional police officers, shall we say?

What do you do when you're not writing?

I gave up the day job to look after my daughter, so that’s exactly how I spend my time. She’s a handful. It was a decision taken to benefit all of the family, and it’s working out well, if being more demanding than I ever thought possible. Other than that, I’m a pass-holder at Hull City. That keeps the anger levels nicely topped up.

How much time do you dedicate to writing? How much time would you like to spend writing?

As much as possible, really. I get child care help a couple of days a week from my mum and my wife obviously does her share when she’s not working. I do something every day, at least a couple of hours a night. Weekends and school holidays I do more. I suspect even if I had a free run at writing, I’d still think I wasn’t spending enough time working at it.

What kind of promotion has most effect?

I don’t think you can really look beyond the mainstream media. I always see a noticeable bounce in sales when I’ve been on the local radio or appeared in the newspaper. The obvious trick is to try and spread that wider and further afield, which is no easy task for a writer with a small press. Online, where it’s a slightly more level playing field, I wouldn’t really be able to draw any firm conclusions. Personally, I’d rather write a guest blog post or something similar, rather than just sling Amazon links up for my books. I think the more engaging you are, the more willing people are to take a look at your work (hopefully). The key is maybe not to get too fixated with outcomes.

What kind of promotion doesn't work?

Where to start…relentless spamming (boring), emailing Kindle files attached to generic emails asking for a review (that person will remain nameless…), tit for tat review swapping (looks obviously false)…I don’t think anyone has yet found a magic formula, but I think it comes down to your own personal boundaries. Just try and be a decent person first and foremost and remember that your main job is to write.

What are your long-term ambitions?

I suspect like everyone who writes, I’d love to make a living from it. I’ve had a taste of freedom away from the 9-to-5, and I’m in no desperate rush to go back to it. Obviously, making a living from writing is no easy task. It’d be great if my novels sustained me, but more realistically, I’m working with arts professionals in different fields and I’m looking to develop what I can offer organisations as an individual. If I can get up in the morning and look forward to the day, that’ll do for me.

Which author should be much better known?

I keep going back to him, but I do think Ray Banks is a class apart. His work so far is such an evocative telling of contemporary Britain, and as I’ve said before, I’m sure he might just have a story in him that goes massive, maybe even the next “Trainspotting”. I hope so.

Do you have any other projects on the go?

I certainly do. I’m hard at work on the third Joe Geraghty novel, which has the working title, “The Crooked Beat”. There’s a Kindle-only novella, “Bang Bang (You’re Dead)” coming later this year via Byker Books and I’m involved in a screenplay project with a group of Yorkshire writers, including David Peace. I’m thinking about the next novel, which will probably be a little bit different and I’ve got an idea to develop for another novella. Plenty to be going on with!

Steven Torres interview: The Concrete Maze



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Steven Torres was born in the Bronx, spent part of his childhood in Puerto Rico and has authored six previously published novels. He teaches English in Connecticut where he lives with wife and daughter.

Can you sum up The Concrete Maze in no more than 25 words?

Jasmine Ramos, 13, goes missing from a skating rink in the Bronx, and her father, Luis, will do anything (to anyone) to get her back.

What was your motivation for writing it?

Many things, but part of it is that I was involved in the periphery of a similar real life story when I was a teenager. I had long wanted to say something about the Bronx in the early 1990s when New York City suffered through a half dozen murders daily. To the outsider, New York probably looked like a cesspool, and it would have been except for one fact – people suffered. I mean, if there were two thousand murders and nobody cared, that would have been a cesspool. But people cared. Desperately. I wanted to show that. Luis Ramos searches the streets of a city that could be incredibly cruel for his daughter. Compelling and true. I don’t know that a writer needs more than that as motivation.

How long did it take you to write?

The book was started while I was spending three weeks of January in Puerto Rico. I wrote about the first fifteen thousand words between trips to see family and to the beach. Then I set the book aside for about a year and wrote the other sixty thousand words during a spring semester. I can’t for the life of me remember what other writing projects I carried out in the time between starting the book and taking it up the second time. There wasn’t any problem with the book itself. It had been going swimmingly; I just ran out of vacation time, started the semester of teaching, worked on other stuff for the rest of the year and never returned to THE CONCRETE MAZE again until the next winter break. Then I picked it up again without missing a beat – like I’d just stepped away to fetch a soda from the fridge. Probably the best writing experience of my life.

Sent early mock-up copies to all the best hardboiled noir type authors I could think of – Ken Bruen, James Sallis, Megan Abbott, Sara Gran, Russel McLean, Al Guthrie and the list goes on. Everyone had kind words, and I knew I’d done something good.

What are your strengths and weaknesses as a writer?

I write action and dialogue well. Those are my strengths. I am also getting better at the architecture of a novel – juggling character and narrative arcs so that one becomes the other seamlessly. Oh, and I’m usually pretty good at proof-reading my work.

Hmmm, weaknesses? Is this where I put down “too much humility”? I’m not sure it’s a weakness, but I have been trying to write a full-on thriller for several years now and so far it has been dud after dud. There is something about the architecture of the thriller that I’m not getting. Not sure what. They say a thriller is just putting two trains on a collision course – preferably one carrying a load of orphans and nuns and the other carrying a doomsday device – but I guess I’m just not working the formula right.

What crime book are you most looking forward to reading?

Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran. I think she did something extraordinary with her novel Dope, and I’d love to know if she managed the feat again.

What makes you keep reading a book?

There are a variety of things that can keep me reading – compelling characters, tightly woven plot – but perhaps the one that gets the least attention is an attention to language. The individual words that get selected and the phrasing of sentences. Economy in language. I just read a couple Edgar Allan Poe stories and the man was an absolute master of this economy. You might think 19th century writers tended toward being verbose – they got paid by the word – but not Poe. He was a mean one. Read “The Tell-Tale Heart” or “The Cask of Amontillado,” and there’s not a word wasted. Everything is doing something. Perhaps harder to sustain in a novel length work, but where you find this, you treasure it.

Of course, I don’t mean that every sentence has to be clipped. Megan Abbott has a luscious prose style – long sentences, poetic passages – but never a word that didn’t need to be there. Ken Bruen may not have the same overall style – tending toward shorter sentence, sometimes the entire sentence is just a heavily weighted word – but every word earns its keep. Write this way, and I’ll read.

Ever tried your hand at screenwriting?

I have. It’s wicked difficult for me. I think it’s that I haven’t read nearly as many scripts as I have novels. Novel and short story writing seem like much better fits for me as a writer, but I think that’s practice. My first screenplay – great concept, sci-fi, space opera, but the execution needs a lot of work. I’ve done bits and pieces of other stories, but I’ve got a story in mind for a relatively quiet movie, and I’m collaborating on a Nazi mad scientist story. We’ll see where that goes.

It is a curious process – writing without getting into the character’s minds or even very much description. It stretches the writing muscles though I’m not sure how much of those skills can be brought back into the novel-world.

Do you read outside of the crime genre?

Absolutely. As an English professor, I really don’t have a choice. I could just teach the same stories, poems, and plays each semester, but that would be dull to me and I have no doubt that boredom would be picked up on by my students. I try to add new works to the syllabus each semester. Just read a short play by Terence McNally called “Andre’s Mother.” It’s not new, but I’d never heard of it before. Ten minutes on the stage, but devastating.

Not to say that non-crime is better than crime. Some of the best stories out there are about crime and punishment including, of course, Crime and Punishment. The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” they’re all crime stories.

Doug Johnstone interview: Hit & Run

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Can you sum up Hit & Run in no more than 25 words?

‘You hit. You run. But what if you have to go back?’ It’s J.G. Ballard’s Crash meets Shallow Grave. Set in Edinburgh.

Do you bear the reader in mind when you're writing? If so, how does that affect the way you write?

You have be your own ideal reader, don’t you? Otherwise, what the hell is the point? I began writing fiction primarily because I didn’t recognise the world around me in the books I was reading. And that made me furious. It seemed like my experience wasn’t worthy of literature, which is bullshit. In the end, I always write something that I would want to read. The irony of that is, it’s really hard to read your own work without being hugely critical of it – all you can see are the mistakes and shit bits.

Provide a YouTube link to a song you'd like to be the title track to the movie adaptation of your book.

Boards of Canada: 'Dayvan Cowboy'

Why anyone would want anyone else to do the soundtrack for their movie is beyond me. The first time I ever heard them I felt physically sick with emotion, like they were tapping into something I recognised, but on a subconscious or purely gut level. Genius.

If you were able to co-write a novel with any author of your choosing, who would it be?

Raymond Carver. Although I get the feeling he was never a writer to collaborate on anything, very single-minded and driven. Imagine trying to harness that weird black magic he had, his ability to say so much with so few words, and work it into a novelistic plot, that would be something, huh? He claimed he never had the patience for writing or reading novels. I’d like to have had the chance to change his mind about that.

Put these in order of importance: language, character, plot, money.

Does anyone ever put money anywhere but last when they answer that? If they do, they’re dicks. For me it’s probably character, plot, language, money. Having said that, I agree with that thing Stephen King said, about how no one ever asks him about his use of language. Just because a book is easy to read and uses simple language, does NOT mean the writer didn’t sweat over every single word in there. At the start of his poem ‘The Blue Stones’, Carver quotes Flaubert: “If I call stones blue it is because blue is the precise word, believe me.” That quote says it all.

What do you do when you're not writing?

When I’m not writing fiction I’m hustling for journalism work or teaching work, when I’m not doing that I’m being a househusband, doing the school run, the nursery run, cooking the tea, cleaning the house, separating the squabbling kids, when I’m not doing that I’m trying to make music, when I’m not doing that I’m trying to find time to chill out with my wife, when I’m not doing that I’m drinking whisky and playing guitar and watching shit films and tweeting about it to wind down.

What are your ambitions for the next year?

To still be alive and writing by the end of it.

Which author should be much better known?

Willy Vlautin.

What question would you most like to be asked in an interview? What's the answer to it?

Which author would you most like to bare-knuckle box with? There are too many to choose from. Doris Lessing, maybe? Not because I don’t like her writing, I just reckon I’d have a pretty good chance of getting a result against the 92-year-old Nobel Prize winner. Although I bet she was a scrapper in her day. The real answer is Martin Amis. Because I want to punch him.

How do you feel about reviews?

I feel like I’m gliding through the fucking Matrix, and all the lowlife quisling fucks cannae touch me. Not really, but I have got pretty Zen about them in recent years. I genuinely don’t give a shit either way. I’m quite surprised at myself about that, I have to admit. I read each one once, then throw them up on my website for others to look at. I gave up reading newspapers a few years ago, and the increase in my mental health was huge. It’s just people’s opinions, after all, and like my granny used to say: ‘Opinions are like arseholes, everybody’s got one.’