From fiction to crime fiction
is not a big journey in my case.
I am a storyteller. I like narrative. I enjoy - no, enjoy is too strong a verb, better to say I find satisfying - the intricacies of plot and sub plots.
All my previous books have several interlinked storylines, and an element of suspense.
Singing Bird has been described as "a whodunit without a dead body".
Meeting Point is a "did-he-do-it?"
The main plot of Finding Home is resolved by a psychopath who is the subject of a sub-plot.
A major character in French Secrets is a con-man and a fraudster.
What matters to me is that a book is well-written - and - because I like narrative - well-plotted. Techniques such as free indirect speech, unreliable narrator, multiple unreliable narrators, time-shifts, shifts of tense are used by all writers. With the exception of the present tense - which I find slow and one-paced - I use these techiques in all my novels, including 'Bogman'.
Crime fiction differs in one respect, however. A conventional novel begins with a character in a situation. A crime novel begins with a body.
"Singing Bird", for example, begins when the mother of an adopted child gets a call from the nun who arranged the adoption some twenty-five years earlier.
"Bogman" begins with human remains found in a bog.
I chose a nom de plume, R I Olufsen. Why? The answer is here.
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