Police Procedural

Upbeat, the magazine for the Strathclyde Police Department, recently published an in-depth interview with Minette. We reproduce the full text of the article here with kind permission. Any other reproduction is strictly prohibited. An edited version of this article can be found on the Strathclyde Police Dept's web site.

Minette Walters - In it together
by Emma Baird

You'd think spending our working lives surrounded by crime would mean that at the end of the working day, we'd all want to relax with some romantic fiction or a political thriller &

Apparently not. Speak to many people in Strathclyde Police and you'll find numerous crime fiction fans. From Ian Rankin and his creation Inspector Rebus, to Agatha Christie and her classic whodunnits, Strathclyde Police officers (and the British public in general) love crime fiction.

Minette Walters is the best-selling author of The Ice House, The Sculptress, The Scold's Bridle, The Dark Room, The Echo, The Breaker, Acid Row, The Shape of Snakes, Fox Evil, Disordered Minds, and The Tinderbox, seven of which have won awards.

Upbeat, always on the lookout for tips on lucrative sidelines, spoke to Minette recently about the creative process, prison visiting and dealing with readers' expectations &

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Novel-writing, like any other form of making money, is a job which requires regular hours. I had naively assumed most authors set themselves the task of writing 1,000 words (or so) a day, giving them enough material for a book in roughly three months &

Perhaps not. Creativity takes time, Minette Walters tells me. While she sets herself regular hours - she sits in front of her computer in the morning and again in the evening - some days are easier than others.

There was one occasion when she agonised over a sentence, 10 words, for a day before deciding she didn't need the sentence after all &

"I do have lots of ideas for books," she says, "and at any moment in time, I could probably give you around 20 ideas. It's just that I don't develop them all.

"I am working on a book at the moment, but I don't tell people what the latest book is about anymore. I once told a journalist about three chapters I had written for my next book and, after the interview, I decided it was too boring and didn't continue with it. I think he got quite upset, as he had based his whole interview on this plot and of course that didn't happen.

"I'm a current affairs junkie. I read all the courts pages in newspapers and I have Sky News and BBC 24 on all day so that when I go through to the kitchen to make a coffee, I can tune in to what's happening.

"I'm not trying to recreate real crimes, but I get ideas from them. The Shape of Snakes, for instance [this novel focuses on a racist murder in the 1970s], was written round about the time of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry.

"I was very interested in expanding that theme - that if the murder of a black teenager could be dealt with in that way by the police in the 1990s, I certainly didn't think there would be any push to investigate the death of an old black woman living on her own in the 1970s." (back to top)

Minette Walters began her book-writing career in 1987, when her second son Philip started school. The book - The Ice House - took two years to write, another two years to sell and was finally published in 1992.

"I was lucky because my husband Alec did have great faith in me. By the time I sold the first book, I'd also written The Sculptress and I was more confident about being able to sell that than my first book.

"I had always wanted to be a writer. It's a bit of an addiction for me. I took six months off recently, after our three surviving parents died, but even then, I was firing emails off to George Bush about the Iraqi war and capital punishment, as I feel very strongly about both."

While the author does have friends in the police service - a contact in Scotland Yard and a book collector friend who is also a police inspector and she loves getting emails from police officers who have found her books realistic - most of her background information comes from other sources &

"I'm a prison visitor and I spent 12 years visiting prisoners in Winchester, but these days I go all over the place, and that's where I get most of my information. I prefer it when the police aren't the main focus of the story.

"That said, for my last book - Disordered Minds - I wanted to check up on something. I'd phoned Bournemouth Police Office and the officers in there were very helpful although they didn't know me."

Prison visits these days often involve talks and workshops on writing, as it seems a high proportion of the prison population wants to write, and she balances out the prison visiting with patronage of the local Victim Support Service in Dorset.

At the same time, the prison visiting is also about providing a social service to certain individuals.

"I've visited a lot of paedophiles, because they don't get many visitors and so always put their names down for the visitor list. I've found most of them to be sad and inadequate individuals, where the most they can aspire to is touching someone. It's rare to find the psychopath you see portrayed by the media.

"A lot of them I visited were absolute terrified that they would be outed by the News of the World campaign [a campaign started up by the Sunday tabloid in 2000, following the abduction and murder of eight-year-old Sarah Payne, which published pictures, names and addresses of convicted sex offenders].

"I'm far happier with the idea of the police and other organisations knowing where convicted paedophiles are and keeping an eye on them, than their names and addresses being public knowledge.

"One thing that drives me insane is the disproportionate fear of crime in this country and I think police officers will relate to this. You've got mum and dad not letting their kids out of the house because of a fear of paedophiles when statistics show that they are in far greater danger at home. It's all the fault of the newspapers.

"The other thing that really annoys me, and I blame politicians for this, is people not understanding that policing is a partnership with people  the police aren't robo cops. They can only operate by working in co-operation with society.

"I'm always hearing people talking about the police and the government as if they are a separate species. They aren't, and I also think we all have responsibilities about the way we live, and these should be laid down." (back to top)

Minette Walters' books are characterised by extra details, like letters, emails, newspaper articles and, in the case of The Shape of Snakes, even photographs. These details, she says, are primarily there to add realism to her novels, and hark back to Victorian adult fiction, which was always characterised by illustrations.

"Up until the First World War, all adult fiction was illustrated, but shortages during that time meant that the industry decided to save paper by not printing the pictures any more. I always think it's sad that adult fiction isn't illustrated.

"The books of the 30s by Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sawyers didn't have detail in them, like police memos or letters. They were more concerned with the puzzle of the crime. That's not to knock what they were doing, but it's very important to me to make it realistic. I see the articles and memos etc as a way of breaking up the narrative, changing the style from narrative to documentary, and giving readers information in a different way."

The latest Minette Walters novel to be televised will be Acid Row, a drama about the residents of a housing scheme, who decide to take to the streets protesting against the authorities' locating a convicted paedophile in the area.

Talking about the project, she says: "As far as I know, it will take the form of a two-hour TV movie, which will be done in 'real time' and the screen will be split between what is happening in different locations at the same time. So that should be stunning."

Is there pressure from publishers to churn out novels, particularly when you are published in 35-plus different countries as Minette Walters is?

"I don't think so, but I do find there is quite a lot of pressure from my readers. I think publishers realise it takes time to be creative and write books, but my readers are always looking for my next book and I want each book to be better than the last."

Having worked as a magazine sub editor after leaving university, Minette feels she had a better idea than most about the competition before she embarked on her book-writing career.

"I used to receive around 200 manuscripts a month. There are so many people out there who want to write. Whenever I hear people say they are going to write a best-seller, I am amazed. I think they must be either extremely confident or extremely stupid.

"If my first book hadn't sold, I probably would have gone on to do a proper job. After university, I thought about joining the police and sent off for an application form, but when it came back, the form said I had to be at least 5ft 4ins and I'm only 5ft 2ins. If equal opportunities had existed in those days, I might well have become a police officer!"(back to top)