Killing time with three crime writers

Summary of story from BBCNews, July 21, 2011

In anticipation of Europe’s largest crime writing festival taking place in Harrogate this weekend, the BBC tracked down three female novelists on the rise in the popular area of crime fiction.

SJ Bolton is the only woman on the shortlist for Crime Novel of the Year with her “rural gothic” novel, Blood Harvest.

Born in Lancashire and now living in Oxford, Ms Bolton said she had always been fascinated by the nebulous world that sits in parallel to our own.

After years of working in PR she published her first novel, Sacrifice, in 2008.

Blood Harvest was inspired by her sister’s discovery of human remains in their garden, apparently not unknown for those living next to graveyards.

“It got me thinking, is there a better place to hide a body than in a graveyard?”

Her fourth novel, Now You See Me, was published in May and a fifth is awaiting release.

Elly Griffiths has just published her third novel about Ruth Galloway, a forensic archaeologist based in the rural wilds of Norfolk, with a style labelled as “rural noir”.

“It’s so difficult to write a crime novel in a world where everyone has a mobile phone and can contact each other. Maybe ‘rural noir’ is in vogue because in the countryside you can lose that phone signal.”

Ms Griffiths’ real name is Dominica de Rosa, but she felt that it was more suited to a fictional romantic novelist, so adopted her Welsh grandmother’s ‘grittier’ name instead.

Sophie Hannah has had all of her six psychological thrillers optioned for TV. Her novel, The Point of Rescue, was aired on ITV1 in May as Case Sensitive.

“My main interest is the way in which our minds make things difficult for us. You can see that far better in the lives of people who have enough money and who in theory should be happy.”

“So for psychological thrillers, I think middle-class characters work very well,” she said.