Author interview - Erin Kelly

R - Hi Erin, welcome to the Crime Warp. I'd like to start with your new book, the Burning Air. This is the third book in quite a short period – did you always think that your books would be this popular?
EK - It’s my third book in four years as I took maternity leave between The Poison Tree and The Sick Rose. I won’t deny that writing books back-to-back is challenging but as long as there’s a demand for them, I’ll keep doing it!

R - The poison tree has been turned into a TV series. How do you feel about the book being turned into a film? Do you have any apprehension about how your work might be changed?

EK - Seeing my work translated onto the small screen might have been uncomfortable if I hadn’t seen the adaptation in progress, but I was lucky in that STV studios let me see the script as it was being written and edited, and attend read-throughs and filming so that it was a gradual process. I loved it: the casting was perfect, and it was beautifully shot. A couple of sweeping changes were made to the story which fans of the book objected to, but actually I didn’t mind that at all. It helped me to think of the television programme as a separate piece of work, which is of course the only healthy attitude. You can’t be faithful to 90,000 words in 80 minutes of screen time, and the drama has to succeed in its own right.

R - Your latest book – The burning air shares a theme with your other novels; past events coming back to haunt people. Why did you choose this theme and why does it seem to work so well?

EK - So many of my favourite stories play with this theme – for example Rebecca and The Secret History – and their popularity tells me that the idea of past mistakes coming back to haunt the present appeals to something primal in all of us. Don’t we all have something in our past we’d rather bury? My books take that idea to nightmarish extremes.

In practical terms, a ‘then and now’ structure lets me create suspense, with jump-cuts, multiple points of view – The Burning Air frequently shows the same event seem from different characters’ perspectives – and my favourite technique, the flashback.

R - Without giving too much away about the book, The burning air is about the conflict between two very different families, how did you create them and why did you choose an academic family?

EK - I wanted to write about the gap between privilege and disadvantage and how the opportunities we have as children shape the adults we become. Sense of place is also very important to me, and I wanted to write about a family whose lives were inextricable from the city they lived in. I’m also fascinated by the dynamics of people who live and work in any kind of microcosm. PD James is I think the master of creating tiny, intense, fictional worlds. A public school seemed to be the best way to achieve all of these things with one stroke. It was important to me that the MacBride children were exposed to huge advantage, and at the same time sheltered from the hardships that set them apart from their nemesis.

The plot is quite intricate, with lots of links between past and present – how did you write the book – was it a free flow, or did you set out the plot and then write?

My method, if you can call it that, is a mixture of the two. I think in scenes rather than plotlines, often with a twist in mind, and write to get to know the characters. I have to say I wouldn’t recommend it, I’m not sure how efficient it was.

None of my books are linear, but The Burning Air was the hardest I have written yet in terms of plot. The story is told from five different points of view in all, ranging from an 11-year-old child to a man in his mid-sixties, and keeping track of who knows what, and when, was difficult, especially as there’s a big twist halfway through the book that had to be preserved.

My method, if you can call it that, is a mixture of pre-planning. I usually have some idea where the book is going, but I can’t predict how my characters will behave until I have begun to write them, so in that sense it’s something of a Catch 22.
My friend, the novelist Stav Sherez, says he never knows what his book is about until he’s finished it and that’s exactly how I feel about my work too.

I certainly don’t have anything as structured as a chapter plan: I tend to write in scenes and chop them up into chapters in the final draft.

R - As we’ve had a big interview recently with “the bearded writist” could you tell us whether naming the central family as the MacBrides was deliberately ironic or just coincidental?

EK - It was absolutely a coincidence! I honestly just like the sound of the name.

R – about you: you started as a journalist – why did you become an author? Did you always want to be an author?

EK - I always wanted to write fiction. I only really got into journalism because I thought that having my name in print would help me get a book deal in the long run.

R - How easy was it to move from journalist to author? How different is it being an author?

EK - There are of course advantages – I’m used to writing professionally, which means I’m not scared of the blank page and the editing process didn’t come as a shock to me.
But in many ways fiction is the opposite of journalism: my training was all about being factual and concise, and working in short bursts to tight deadlines, whereas novels are marathons of imagination and concentration.

R - Your website highlights you as Erin Kelly, author so you’re not confused with Erin Kelly the actress. Have you ever been confused with her in real life?

EK - Regrettably our worlds have never collided.

R - Your reading – what is your preferred genre and why?
EK - I don’t have a preferred genre but because I get sent books by publishers, my reading pile is probably skewed towards my own genre, which is psychological thrillers. I actually don’t think this is particularly healthy. It’s important to know who else is out there in the market, but I think any author should read widely as well as deeply.

R - Who is your favourite author?

EK - It changes with every book, but I love Lesley Glaister, William Boyd, Maggie O’Farrell, Barbara Vine, Daphne du Maurier, Gillian Flynn, Rebecca Miller, F Scott Fitzgerald, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Jake Arnott, Kate Atkinson and dozens of others who will leap to mind the minute I press ‘send’ on this email.

R - What are the top three books on your reading list currently and why?
EK - I’ve just finished Rupert Everett’s second memoir, Vanished Years, which I adored. It’s wise and irreverent and beautifully written.

Next up is a proof of Tarnished, the new one by Julia Crouch, a contemporary of mine and someone I really admire. She writes the kind of thrillers I like – slow-burning, descriptive, deeply psychological, with vivid, realistic relationships.

I’m also making my way through Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, and loving it (even though holding it is spraining my wrists).

R - Have you any new ideas on the go at the moment?

EK - I’ve got two ideas for new novels bubbling away on the back burner. I don’t know which one I’ll write next.

R - I can’t resists asking this - when can we expect to see your next book out?

EK - January 2014: I’m putting the finishing touches to it now. It’s about Luke, a young, aspiring true-crime writer who uncovers an unsolved murder in 60s gangland Brighton. He befriends the prime suspect, who’s now a property magnate in his 80s and looks to the outside world like a reformed character. Luke’s friends warn him off the project but he gets so involved with the project that he can’t see the danger he’s putting himself in.

It’s a more straightforward and more masculine book than I’ve written before – perhaps I’m on the rebound from writing The Burning Air, which is a very tangled, twisty book about family and motherhood. It’s also the only one which has involved writing about a period longer ago than I can remember, so it’s been fascinating to immerse myself in a town that I know well – Brighton – but in a period that I’m not familiar with – the 1950s and 60s. Previously I have written about times and places I could describe from memory. Most of the book is contemporary, but researching even those few pages set in the past has given me a new and deep respect for historical novelists.

R - Erin, thanks very much for a great interview and hope to see you on the Crime Warp again soon!