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From barrister to novelist, what made you leap careers?

I had a crisis of identity when the Peter Jackson films of The Lord of the Rings appeared on the horizon at the end of the 1990s. I found that I wanted to make something in my own right so that I wouldn’t be looking in the mirror every morning and seeing just the grandson of J.R.R. Tolkien. I hadn’t done any fiction writing at all before I started – not even a short story – and I think now that this was because I felt overshadowed by my grandfather. However, I had kept a daily diary during the 1990s and I think in retrospect that this must have been because I was unconsciously preparing myself to be a writer. I started off writing courtroom dramas because I wanted to write about an area of life that I knew first hand, but both The King of Diamonds and my next book are more police procedural than courtroom drama so I guess I’m gaining in confidence!
As you wrote The King of Diamonds did a character change or grow in ways you did not anticipate?

Murder mysteries and stream of consciousness writing are incompatible at least for me! I spend as much time plotting my books as actually writing them, and I know pretty clearly from the outset what is going to happen to my characters along the way. However, I also know that too much planning will make the story lifeless as I tell it, and so I try to make my synopsis concise and plot-orientated so that the characters have room to grow and develop within the novel. The plot is the skeleton and the writing is the flesh, but of course it’s easier said than done to strike the right balance between the two.

Who were your writing influences?

I like 19^th century novels for their atmosphere. The English manor houses that feature in my novels owe a big debt to classic books like Jane Eyre and The Woman in White. Cinema is also a big influence – for instance the opening scene in The Inheritance when the three British soldiers are walking toward the isolated French chateau with evil intent was inspired by the scene in the film, Witness when the three killers brazenly approach the Amish community where Harrison Ford’s character is hiding with their guns slung over their shoulders. And then specific books have helped – for instance David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars was very helpful to me with working out how to combine flashback and courtroom drama in a novel.

What is your next project?

I am writing a book featuring the same detective, Inspector Trave, who starred in my last two books. However, this time I have taken the setting back twenty years to the time of the London Blitz in 1940. In the new book a murder of an old man in a London flat turns out to be connected to a German plot to assassinate Winston Churchill, and so the stakes are even higher for Trave than ever before, particularly as his superiors refuse to see the murder as anything more than a domestic occurrence.

What are you reading now?

I am reading books that help me with the new novel. In particular I have been studying books on the Blitz and the social history of the 1940s to give me a feel for a time that was so very different from our own. And I have also been reading about espionage practices during the Second World War which were less sophisticated but just as dangerous as they are today.

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