Interviews

KillshotThe Big Bounce

Special Feature: The Elmore Leonard Interviews

Between January 2011 and June 2012, Crimeculture has posted substantial extracts from a series of interviews that Professor Charles Rzepka conducted with Elmore Leonard in 2009-10. There were four separate interviews, arranged here in nine parts. Read the Introduction to the Elmore Leonard Interviews.

Parts:  Aug 2009  1     2     3    Sept 2009  4     5     Jan 2010  6     7     June 2010  8     9

Special Feature: Pulp Nostalgia

In  2014 Crimeculture hosted a season of retro pulp nostalgia. Our series featured crime writers, reviewers, critics and publishers. [Read more about My Misspent Youth, The Best Pulp Covers and Bad Girls]

 

Interviews 2010-17

June 2017

Charles J. Rzepka interviews J. A. Jance

Judith A. Jance is the best-selling author of fifty-five crime novels comprising four separate series as of the date of the following interview, which took place at her home in the Bridle Trails section of Bellevue, Washington on the morning of June 4, 2017. Her series of books set in Seattle features the SPD homicide detective J. P. Beaumont, who was the main focus of our discussion…[Read more]

October 2016

Crimeculture interviews Karen Runge

In Karen Runge’s sharp, brutal and beautifully achieved debut short story collection, SEVEN SINS, “Love turns to lust. Crimes escape punishment. The ordinary turns strange. Women take control[Read more]

June 2015

Charles J. Rzepka interviews K. O. [Kjell Ole] Dahl

Riding the new wave of interest in Scandanavian crime fiction that began to build momentum in the early 1990s, K. O. Dahl is known to fans of Nordic Noir for his irascible and grotesque Oslo police detective, Gunnarstranda (like Colin Dexter’s Morse, he seems to have no first name) and Gunnarstranda’s younger, more hip, and more emotionally susceptible sidekick, Frank Frolich …[Read more]

 

March 2012

R. N. Morris and Michael Gregorio in conversation

Gregorio A Visible DarknessMorris Razor Wrapped SilkMichael and Daniela: Did you always think that you would be a writer, Roger, and, if you did, what sort of a writer did you think that you would be?

Roger: Pretty much, yes. Writing stories was always my favourite activity at school. Even the way I played was story-based, making up convoluted scenarios for myself and my friends to act out. Telling stories is one of the ways we make sense of the world…[Read more]

February 2012

Mark Billingham and Paul Johnston in conversation

PJ -You worked in children’s TV and stand up before becoming a crime novelist? What nudge you towards the genre?

MB – I was really not enjoying the work I was doing for TV where scripts tend to be developed by committee. I’d taken my name off several projects before I finally decided I’d had enough…[Read More]

 

Choke HoldDonkey PunchNovember 2011

Christa Faust interviews Ray Banks and Ray Banks interviews Christa Faust

RB: Okay, let’s begin at the beginning. Yours was not the traditional way into the business, was it? I believe you once said that you “kind of fell into it backwards”… [Read More]


Dead SharpSeptember 2011

Len Wanner interviews Stuart MacBride, Paul Johnston and Louise Welsh

“Tartan Noir doesn’t exist. It’s a very convenient umbrella under which to promote crime fiction that is written in Scotland. It’s another “God bless” – this time James Ellroy for coming up with it…” [Read more]

 

Dirty Old TownMore Sinned AgainstMay 2011

Nigel Bird interviews David White and David White interviews Nigel Bird

Getting to grips with the beginning of a story can be very challenging.  I tend to have an idea and then work out who’s involved.   I can’t start writing until the voice comes to me.  Once it’s in my head, I can put it into words and bring things to life – it moulds the characters and then shapes the way the story turns out… [Read more]

 

February 2011

Steve Jovanoski’s Interview with Tony Black

There was the ten years of burning the midnight oil, poring over some unpublished ms or other, and just hoping it was going to pay off. You could say that was a sacrifice of sorts, bloody felt like it… [Read more]

 

Skating Around the LawThe Damage DoneSeptember 2010

Hilary Davidson and Joelle Charbonneau interview one another

My travel-writing career definitely parallels Lily’s, but hers is more glamorous than mine. For various reasons — heartbreak, family problems, admiration for Ava Gardner’s wild life — Lily suddenly pulled up stakes and moved from New York to Spain… [Read more]

 

Late RainJohnny PornoJuly 2010

Charlie Stella and Lynn Kostoff interview one another

Charlie Stella:  You’re more than a genre writer; your prose is as literary as any I’ve ever read.  The stories behind the stories, so to speak, are modern versions of classics.  Corrine Tedros isn’t very different than Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov… [Read more]

 

Bury Me DeepFlorida Gothic StoriesMay 2010

Megan Abbott and Vicki Hendricks interview one another

While you are known as the Queen of Noir, your short story collection, out this month [May], is titled Florida Gothic Stories. It struck me, reading them, that they do owe at least as much to the Southern Gothic tradition of Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers as Cain or Thompson. Do you think in those terms? [Read more]

 

Speak No EvilBad Penny BluesApril 2010

Martyn Waites and Cathi Unsworth interview one another

Circumstances which have now passed into legend. We were both there to film The New Adventures of Robin Hood, an American take on the Robin Hood story that was so bad it made Xena Warrior Princess look Shakespearean by comparison… [Read more]

 

Who is Conrad Hirst?The TouristMarch 2010

Olen Steinhauer and Kevin Wignall interview one another

Olen, after writing your five-book series set in the Eastern Europe of the Cold War you’ve changed direction with “The Tourist”, moving into the present and writing more of an out-and-out thriller. What influenced you to make the change? [Read more]

 

Still BleedingThe LevelsFebruary 2010

Steve Mosby interviews Sean Cregan and Sean Cregan interviews Steve Mosby

Slept through this morning and achieved a modest amount this afternoon to go some way to filling the 20k hole in the middle of the book. And I did laundry. I’m like a writing version of Nigella Lawson, only sexier… [Read more]

 

Wake Up DeadKillerJanuary 2010

Roger Smith interviews Dave Zeltserman and Dave Zeltserman interviews Roger Smith

All three of my bad-ass guys are at different levels unreliable narrators, at least in their perceptions of the world around them. While Jim Thompson showed with A Swell-Looking Babe that you can write an unreliable narrator with 3rd person, I think it would’ve been near impossible to write Killer and Pariah in anything other than 1st person… [Read more]

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