A biography for Mark Billinghamhasn’t been written yet.
“The day a character becomes predictable is the day a writer should think about moving on - because the reader certainly will.”
“As I write each new Thorne novel, I'm determined that whatever is happening plot-wise, a new layer of the onion will be peeled away and reveal something about Thorne that is surprising to me as much as anyone else. If I can remain interested in the character, then hopefully the reader will stay interested, too.”
“I've often said the reader knows every bit as much about Thorne as I do. When I created him for 'Sleepyhead,' I was determined he should be a character who would develop, book by book, change and grow as we all do, and who - crucially - would be unpredictable.”
“The problem with being a writer is that some readers tend to think that anything that comes out of a character's mouth is you talking.”
“Crime fiction has always been what I wanted to read, so when I sat down to write my first book, it was naturally the way that I was going to go.”
“If something is crucial to the plot, then I'd better be sure I've got my facts straight. Readers of crime novels are smart and savvy, and they'll waste no time letting me know if there's a hole in my plot.”
“When you think of a great twist or a red herring or a way of misdirecting the reader, it is good, but you know that they are just tricks at the end of the day, and the way to keep interest is to write characters that people care about.”
“It's heretical, I know, but I've never really been able to get on with Agatha Christie. She is, of course, a giant of the genre, but I never feel that she cared a great deal about the characters. Consequently, neither do I.”
“I was never a fan of cozy mysteries of anything set in the countryside, you know.”
“In the 1970s, there was a trend for all detectives on TV to have some quirk or gimmick, and this was often physical.”
“Like my fictional protagonist Tom Thorne, I love country. My tastes go back a bit further than his do, and I still listen to stuff from the late '70s and early '80s.”
“Whenever people ask where I get my sick and twisted ideas from, I reply, 'Just open your eyes.'”
“The fact is that most crime novels contain a good many punchlines. They are just rather darker than the ones you might hear in a comedy club.”
“I write slowly and get distracted a lot.”
“I read 'Jaws' and 'The Godfather' back to back one summer when I was 14 and was suddenly aware of how powerful fiction could be.”
“I started performing as a stand-up comedian on my own in the mid-1990s.”
“I'm a city boy. I grew up in a big city, in Birmingham, and I want to write about a city. It's much richer tapestry for me than green fields. Fields and wild life make me feel ill. I don't like - I don't want to write about that stuff.”
“In America, they have specialist mystery book stores with whole sections devoted to cat mysteries, golf mysteries, quilting mysteries. It's a hugely broad genre from the darkest noir to tales of a 19th-century vet who solves crimes, thanks to his talking cat.”
“I bought an insurance policy covering the inheritance tax my kids will have to pay when we die, which I thought was a good bit of forward thinking. And I always know I'm going to have enough for tax because I make sure I keep it back in my business account.”
“All you can hope for when you get a book adapted for TV is that you get a good actor and not some muppet off 'EastEnders.'”