16th November 2015

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.