I do think there is a streak of indolence in a lot of writers, plotting and planning and thinking that you`re going to one day write a book. And, of course, when you`re young, the future seems to stretch on forever. I was in my mid-30s and very busy trying to make a career in the (National) Health Service to support a sick husband and two small girls. I was working full-time and in the evenings going to classes to get a professional qualification in hospital administration. I realized the years were slipping by and that the time might come when I`d be saying to my grandchildren that I always wanted to be a writer. There was never going to be a time when it was convenient to start a book.
So I began on the first novel, getting up early in the morning to write. It took a long time to write ”Cover Her Face,” which it seems to me now, rereading it, to be a very orthodox English whodunit, set in a country house, you know. It`s quite an old novel now. But many of my readers seem to like it very much, perhaps because we enjoy the English country-house murder, this closed society of people in the village.
I was the eldest of three children. My father was an income tax official who had fought in the First World War–he was a machine gunner–and survived. I was born in Oxford, where he was working in the tax office. Then we moved when I was very young to the Welsh border, a very beautiful little town called Ludlow. And then again when I was 11, we moved to Cambridge. I was educated at the Cambridge High School for Girls. I left when I was 16. I didn`t go to university, which I would very much like to have done. In those days it was very expensive in England.
I was 19 when World War II broke out, and I married my husband when I was 20. He was then a medical student and he had a private income. We were living in London during quite a lot of the bombing. When he qualified, he went off to the Royal Army Medical Corps. He went overseas. He came back mentally ill.
Until Christmas of 1979, when I was 59, I did a full-time job as well as write. This suited me as a writer because I never wanted to feel that I had to write to earn a living. I never wanted to feel that I must get on with the next book or I wouldn`t be able to pay the mortgage. Most of my friends are professional writers who gave up safe jobs in order to be full-time writers. I admire this very much, but I don`t think I ever had quite the courage. I always felt I wanted the safe check at the end of the month and that the writing was something rather apart. The writing was the jam on the bread.
Reading Dorothy L. Sayers` books was very much an influence on me in my girlhood. She possibly was partly responsible for my writing detective fiction. I`ve no doubt I would have been a novelist without Dorothy L. Sayers, because I knew from an early age that I wanted to be one. I often wonder if I would have been a mystery writer if it hadn`t been for Dorothy L. Sayers. Possibly not.
As a woman writer, I feel having a working life provided all sorts of experience that I wouldn`t have got if I had just been living at home. It was an education for me as a writer. My career started in the National Health Service. At one time I was responsible for the committee that was concerned with nurse training, and that was very useful when I wrote ”Shroud for a Nightingale.” I eventually administered five psychiatric outpatient units, and that gave me a lot of knowledge for a book set in a psychiatric outpatient clinic, ”A Mind to Murder.”
Then after my husband died, in 1964, I took an examination and went into the British civil service, the Home Office. There I was in the police department, so I got valuable experience because I met policemen and I was responsible for the administration of the forensic science service so I got to know forensic scientists and forensic pathologists.
I`ve not used any of my domestic experience or the tragedy of my husband`s illness in books at all. Certainly not directly.
It ought to make a difference that I don`t have a full-time job now. But the writing actually has gone more slowly since I retired than it did before. I think it`s partly because when you`re doing a full-time job, your friends and your family know that they can`t expect to see very much of you. I love to see my children and grandchildren and my friends. I`m also a magistrate, so I sit in court about three days a month. Up until last month I was chairman of the Society of Authors. That kept me fairly busy.
It had been four years since I last published a novel. There was one year when I didn`t do very much. I spent three years writing and half of that was spent in research. I have to plot the book in great detail before I begin writing. I have to know almost precisely where I`m going: who`s going to be killed, when, where, why and how; what room; who the suspects are going to be; what the motives are; what clues I`m going to provide; what the setting will be; how I`m going to deal with that last difficult chapter.
”A Taste for Death” is an important book to me. It was surprising how much I cared about it. Whenever I`m writing a book, I care desperately to do the very best I can, but once they`re done, I don`t agonize very much over what the critics or anybody thought.
But I do see with this that its success seems to have meant a great deal to me. These things are all very complicated, aren`t they? Perhaps it had to do with the fact that it has been quite a long time since I`ve done one and I`m now 66. Maybe part of my mind was thinking: ”Well, aren`t people wondering whether you can still do it?” I dedicated it to my children and my husband. I suppose I wanted it to be worthy of them. It`s certainly my longest. If we`re thinking purely of the detective stories, I think certainly it is the best.
I wrote one called ”Innocent Blood,” which is a crime novel rather than a detective story, and I have a great regard for that. I wouldn`t like to have to judge between that and the new one.
One critic didn`t like ”A Taste for Death” because he thought that I dealt with things that had no place in the detective novel, but I never felt that. I feel that you can write a mystery, you can use the conventions of the mystery–and I do use the conventions in this book–and you can also use something true about men and women and the society in which we live today.
There seems to be a great resurgence of interest in mysteries both in America and in Britain. The obvious reason is that you do get the story. Something is going to happen in the mystery. In a lot of very highly regarded novels, nothing very much does happen. You`ve got a strong narrative interest and you`ve got the puzzle. You get vicarious excitement and danger. But also it`s in some odd way a rather reassuring genre.
The moral basis is so absolute–which is that murder is wrong. Even the most evil man–and the victim usually is pretty unlikable–has got a right to live until the last moment. It`s not for another human being to take his life away. And in an age when gratuitous murder is quite common–it can happen to us in any airport lounge–this is very comforting.
In an age of pessimism, society may feel that no matter how much good will, how much resources are put into a problem, it seems incapable of being solved. It`s rather comforting to have books where there is a problem and at the end you know it`s going to be solved.
The difference between a modern mystery novel, at least the kind that I write, and the nice, cozy mysteries of the `30s is that though you will get your solution, it does`t mean that everything forever after is going to right. It doesn`t mean that order is necessarily restored. In my books you get the solution, but every life touched by this crime is changed.
The majority of men write a rather different kind of book. Women don`t generally write the sort of wisecracking, sardonic private eye type of mystery, striding down mean streets kicking down doors. We`re not usually writers of fast-action thrillers. We don`t have the experience and the knowledge. Of course, I suppose a lot of the men writers don`t have the experience or knowledge either, but they seem to fill in the gap.
Women are much more concerned with character and setting, with the people rather than with strong weaponry. You get far more psychological clues, and these are the most interesting of all. I dare say there are exceptions. We have a great eye for detail, so I think you get more domestic clues, much more detail about the ordinary life of characters and their relationships with each other.
Women, if they do have male professional detectives, have rather gentlemanly male professional detectives, don`t they? They`re very seldom violent. You could argue that my books are very violent in their description of a corpse, and indeed they are because I feel that murder is a very horrible, dreadful crime and the reader needs to feel the horror.
