Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "helen-fitzgerald"

It will be a long time before anyone thinks of a better way to open their first novel than this: “My best friend Sarah was asleep. Her husband was lying beside her, and I was swallowing his semen.” That’s paragraph two of “Dead Lovely” by Helen Fitzgerald, a fabulous crime novel which manages to amuse, titillate and disturb. Since she published Dead Lovely in 2008, Helen has released three more adult titles and a teen novel. Born in Australia, she lives in Glasgow, Scotland, where she’s married to a Scot of Italian origin. We shared the stage at a German crime fiction festival in Menden, near Dortmund, late this summer, bonding over writing and Tuscany. In person she’s as amusing as her books, and when she talks about writing it’s with a mix of unassuming practicality and deep insight, as you’ll see from this interview.

How long did it take you to get published?

My husband is a screenwriter and he made it look very easy – most of his films seemed to make it to the big or small screen, and the word count for a screenplay was enticingly small (lots of lovely white spaces on the page). So I thought “If he can do this, I can!” I spent five years writing screenplays before realising that it was hard, and that I was a spectacular failure at it. One of my screenplays came very close to being green-lit. I decided that if this wasn’t produced, I’d write a book (which was what I’d always wanted to do, really). It didn’t get made, so I sat down and turned the treatment into my first book, Dead Lovely. It took three months. And another three before Faber and Faber bought it. So, my first answer is that it took me years to get published. My second is that it took three months.

Would you recommend any books on writing?

The only books I’ve ever read on writing are screenwriting books. Initially, I read everything I could get my hands on, but the only one I remember is How to Write Screenplays That Sell by Michael Hague. This book helped a great deal with structure, plot and characterization. It’s probably because of my background in screenwriting, and the lessons I learned from this book, that my novels have three acts and are easy to adapt into screenplays.

What’s a typical writing day?

Mostly I work at home in an office in the attic. I get the kids off to school, answer emails and do admin for a while, then settle down to a few hours writing before they arrive home again. My husband works in the office next door to mine, so we often yell strange things to each other through the walls like “Can you dissolve a body?” If I have a deadline, or if I’m really motivated by an idea, I can work all day and all night. My husband and I are pretty flexible and work well as a team, giving each other time off from domestic duties if one is on a roll. About three days a week, I head into Glasgow City centre, where I’ve rented a desk space in a studio. I missed having colleagues and life around me, and I love being shamed into productivity by other hard working people.

Plug your latest book. What’s it about? Why’s it so great?

Bloody Women is about a woman who’s about to get married to her Italian fiancé and leave Scotland to live with him in Tuscany. Before leaving her home, she decides to meet up with her ex-boyfriends to tie up loose ends and make sure she’s doing the right thing. Problem is, her exes all wind up dead, and she gets the blame. The book was fun to write and I believe it’s fun to read. It’s also pretty dark, looking at bi-polar disorder and a nasty-pasty serial killer.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

The only thing as evocative as a good noir crime novel is music. So, I thought, how about making an album of music about crime fiction? That’s what I’ve done and I’m unveiling it here.

The project's called Poisonville, after the mispronounced location of Dashiell Hammett’s first novel “Red Harvest.” (The place was really called Personville, but Hammett’s Op learns that people call it Poisonville for a reason.)

You can listen to the songs free on my website. I hope you’ll share them. I’ve found it inspiring to work on these songs. You’ll see the styles vary from industrial to rock to funk to the sound of hoboes in a speakeasy, as well as my impersonations of Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed.

Here’s the idea behind Poisonville: I’ve been in bands for many years, playing various instruments. But I have a newish baby and I don’t want to stay out late performing, because I need all the sleep I can get! So I created a studio – I call it Big Pink Oboe Studio. Not because I play the oboe. The pink oboe is an old Spike Milligan euphemism for an excitable part of the male anatomy. I also revived my old stage persona: when I was in an alternative band in New York in the 1990s, I was Napoleon Blownapart. (The band was Money Shot, which those of you with any knowledge of porno parlance will understand and also gives you and idea of the sort of gig we used to do.) The name gets me into the right head for music.

And so into the studio I went, writing songs about my own books and songs about books I love (by Hammett and Chandler). I perform most of the instruments, with a little help from The Talented David Brinn (which is the stage name of my pal David Brinn, in case you’re wondering) and The Lovely Jasmine Schwartz (which is the name in her passport, you should know.)

I’ve also written songs with a couple of crime authors: Jasmine Schwartz, whose fabulous Neurotic Detective series will be out in a few months, and Helen Fitzgerald, the Australian writer of the sexiest crime novels around. You can hear these writers reading a line or two from their books during the course of the songs.

Jasmine and Helen both wrote lyrics about their books, which I set to music. I’m intending to do the same thing with some other favorite writers of mine in the coming months. If you think there are crime writers I ought to get on board (because they’ve written books that’d work well in a musical setting), let me know.

You’ve probably stolen music on the web, even if the music wasn’t about crime. Poisonville’s crime fiction music is your chance to listen free – without being a criminal.

The only thing as evocative as a good noir crime novel is music. So, I thought, how about making an album of music about crime fiction? That’s what I’ve done and I unveil it here. The project’s called Poisonville, after the mispronounced location of Dashiell Hammett’s first novel “Red Harvest.” (The place was really called Personville, but Hammett’s Op learns that people call it Poisonville for a reason.) You can listen to the songs free on my website. Share them. I found it inspiring to work on these songs. You’ll see the styles vary from industrial to rock to funk to the sound of hoboes in a speakeasy, as well as my impersonations of Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed.

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