Readers Place

Susan Hill interview/review

1. Why did you start writing crime novels?

For several reasons. I have always loved reading them. The genre gives me scope to write about contemporary issues, and the psychological and human issues which concern to us all and which interest me not only as a writer but just as a citizen of 21st-century Britain. Also, some crime and especially some murder, is fascinating to explore because it is such a dark, sometimes mysterious area involving people whose minds and motives most of us barely understand. Every murder affects far more people than victim and murderer – many affect not only whole families, but neighbourhoods, cities – even the whole country. Not many people can have been unaffected by the Soham murders, by Harold Shipman – and, looking back; the Moors Murders, by Brady and Hindley, happened fifty years ago and still make headlines. What kind of people are these? How are they tracked down, caught, and dealt with? Are murderers like Fred West, the Yorkshire Ripper, Ian Huntley and others always going to appear a few times in every generation? I`m afraid that murder and the effects of murder and other serious crime, are of absorbing interest.

1. Why have you given Simon Serrailler a medical family background and why are there so many doctors and medical issues in the first two books?

They interest me. I love medicine, and the whole medical world. I find it endlessly interesting – what makes doctors tick, what they do, is as fascinating as what makes criminals and policemen tick. And there are so many issues surrounding medicine now which concern and affect us all – ethical issues, practical issues, even simply organizational issues such as, should GPs have abandoned their patients after 6 p.m. and every weekend, for example? I am interested in the facts and fallacies and controversial issues to do with alternative medical treatment too – so in The Various Haunts of Men I have a woman with cancer refusing orthodox treatment but in a carefully thought-out and intelligent way, and I have a character visiting a New Age quack and another being conned by a so-called psychic surgeon. There are some wicked charlatans about. All this somehow helps to add to the community I am building in Lafferton. I wanted a varied, interesting, changing community growing up around an ancient cathedral, with its Close and its Old Town.

1. How many books will there be?

I don’t know. I have written three, and am well into the fourth. I’m sure there will be more.

1. Will Simon remain in Lafferton for his entire career?

Yes and no! He may take on major police job which gets him away from Lafferton periodically. But I can’t see him going off to live and work permanently in some distant place. He loves his home.

1. Why didn’t you set the series in a real, named British city?

It’s too limiting. And the places I know best have been used in crime series by other writers…Oxford, the Cotswolds, East Anglia for example. I wanted to feel free and the way to do that is by inventing a place. It’s rather fun too.

1. Are you never going back to literary novels and serious short stories?

I hope I will. But short stories don’t come to order – I write very few. I just wait for them to be given to me. And literary fiction – I wrote my best work 35 years or so ago and that was literary fiction – I was lucky to be able to do it, and do it so young. I don’t know if I will write another ‘literary novel’ – awful phrase. They’re like the stories – they’re given, you can’t demand them. But if one ifs offered, I’ll grab it with both hands. But there are a lot of things I want to say, issues I want to tackle, which I can only do, and am loving doing, in the crime novel genre.

For the full interview please see www.susan-hill.com