What is more powerful than hearing directly from a favourite author except seeing him/her live in a few weeks! So while QCT readers anxiously await the QuebeCrime Festival to meet the 23 invited writers, I emailed them and asked if they would kindly (and succinctly!) answer a question for a QCT article.

The QCT question was: What inspired you to pick up the proverbial pen (keyboard?) and become a writer of crime and mystery novels?

Patrick de Friberg: “I am a writer of the Cold War. On November 9, 1989, I was in East Berlin. My vocation came to me in this contrast between the world and me. Almost twenty books later, I still hunt for this momentum in a time that switched history. I'm more interested in the hand which holds the gun than the bullet that will kill.”

Chris Holm: “I inherited my love of crime fiction from my grandfather. He was a cop, and a voracious reader of mysteries as well as a consummate storyteller. Papa didn't live to see my first book published, but I suspect he would've approved. If I'm half as entertaining in my fiction as he was, I've done my job.” 

Wayne Arthurson: “I never set out to write crime fiction. I created my character, Leo Desroches, and he just went in that direction. So I went with him. My mother is from Ancienne-Lorette and I have many relatives living there. My character's last name comes from that side of my family.” 

David Swinson: “I never intended to write crime fiction really. I've always been interested in what motivates certain people, good or bad. It wasn't until I joined the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, DC, and became a detective that I discovered, through my actual experiences, that everything I wanted to explore as a writer exists in that environment."

Brian Freeman: “ My grandmother made me a lover of mysteries.  She would always tell me, ‘I’m reading this great book, and it has lots of bodies in it!’ How could I resist a genre like that?” 

Peggy Blair: “I was a criminal defence lawyer and Crown prosecutor for many years and so writing mysteries and crime fiction came naturally. But it's Cuba, the setting for the Inspector Ramirez series, that inspired me. The book practically wrote itself!”

Giles Blunt: “It was an accident . . . I only intended to write one detective novel but publishers disagreed.”

Johanne Seymour: “I write mainly because my head and my heart will explode if I don’t. Why crime fiction? Because it’s my first literary love. And first loves are hard to leave . . . ”

Chelsea Cain: “One word: pregnancy. Hormones made me do it. I started my first thriller in my second trimester, and finished it when my daughter was a baby in a bassinet next to my desk. She is seven now, and quite well adjusted, considering.”

John Connolly: “I can recall the first crime novel that I ever read, Ed McBain's Let's Hear It For The Deaf Man, and feeling that urge to hunt down every other 87th Precinct novel that McBain had written. When I came to write, it seemed natural to me to use that form. The crime/mystery form was the perfect means to explore the subjects that interested and impassioned me: justice, morality, compassion, empathy.”

Linwood Barclay: “I can't write romance, don't know enough about horses to write westerns, am too technically-challenged to write sci-fi. Crime was all that was left. Oh yeah, and I love it.”