top of page
Writer's picturebobsandbooks

Author Interview: Paul Gitsham

I am so excited to have the brilliant author Paul Gitsham on my blog.


Ooh Paul 'Web of Lies' is one roller coaster of a ride- without spoilers - how did you go about plotting such a tangled web? I am not a big plotter! I start with a few ideas, then see where it takes me. I also write out of sequence! I am a huge fan of authors that hit the reader repeatedly with twists and drip feed new suspects and theories throughout the book. What I like is a book that is slippery. Just when you think you have an idea who the culprit was, or what happened, something changes your mind. I don’t care if a reader correctly guesses the culprit early on, as long as I can make them second-guess themselves or change their mind as the story progresses. I love red herrings and the apparent elimination of early suspects, only to make them suspects again later.

Love that. What do you think draws readers into real life missing person cases that also makes us addicted to them in fiction? Is this something you notice about yourself as well?

I had been wanting to do a missing person book for a while. The attraction for me was that they are structurally different to a standard police procedural. Typically, those investigations start with a body; the victim is already dead, and whilst there is a clock ticking to bring a dangerous perpetrator to justice, the investigation will follow a set format and run at its own pace. With a missing person case, there is an added time pressure. Out there is a missing woman. Is she alive or dead? Is she in danger at this very moment? The longer they take to find her, the greater the chance of an unhappy ending. So, the police are working flat-out against the clock from the moment they exit the starting gate. It adds an additional layer of tension to the investigation, and we can see the effect on the investigative team and the loved ones.


Its definitely a tense read. I think I suspected every university housemate, did you set out to make every housemate unreliable? I have a general rule – everyone should be a suspect. I then have to decide how long they should be a suspect for, will they be eliminated early on or under suspicion until the final act? Should someone become a suspect later in the book? Are characters perhaps guilty of other things – be they crimes or morally-suspect acts that they would rather keep secret? That can then make them act suspiciously because of their attempts to keep their secrets hidden, which is guaranteed to make a copper’s nose twitch (and make a reader wonder about them). As DI Sutton has observed previously everyone lies to the police. Nobody tells the full truth, because we all have something to hide or something we think is nobody’s business but our own. The question is whether these lies are significant (and of interest to the police) or just part of human nature?

Ooh, that's fascinating. I liked the way a cold case was woven into a modern case, did you plan this from the start, or did a backstory form? Yes. I decided that a parallel backstory was essential quite early in the development stage. I don’t think the one would work without the other. I spent a lot of years at university, sharing houses with other students, and I vividly recall the tensions and secrets that some student households could hold. I also saw first hand the toxic atmospheres that could develop (fortunately not within the house-shares that I was part of, but I had friends living in very unpleasant circumstances). That gave me some really great ideas. It is also fascinating to see how people change once they leave university and “grow up”, and how societal changes mean that behaviour (not necessarily malicious, often just immature or naïve) evolves. The characters in this book met a decade or so previously, and in some ways have changed, but in other ways are still the same.

Louisa on the face of it has it all, even though the reader learns early on that she’s struggling with workload, how much did it matter to you to show how appearances can be deceptive? The theme of deceptive appearances is one that fascinates me, and I have explored it before. The seventh book in the series, Out Of Sight, centres on a victim who hid his true self from the world. That means that when he was killed, the police had to unravel and uncover his hidden life and figure out whether it was relevant or not. In the case of Louisa, her struggles add an extra dimension to the missing person search. From very early on, the police decide to run a parallel investigation – a standard missing person investigation for a potentially vulnerable person who has decided that they can’t cope or perhaps just need time out, alongside a potential homicide investigation. As DCI Jones says, it’s easier to stand down a homicide investigation if it becomes unlikely that she has been killed than it is to start one up if the missing person unit find indications that something untoward has happened. The book was written before recent tragic events in January of this year, but I was struck by some of the parallels.


Thanks Paul for answering my questions, and giving such insightful answers too.

Web of Lies is part of the DCI Warren Jones series, and is out now. Check out the series now.


7 views0 comments

Comments


bottom of page