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A: Quite a long time since we did our last interview possibly over 3 or 5 years ago.

J: Really? Was I with Headline at that time?

A: Yes, you were and we are here once again at St Hilda’s and I remember that it was a nice sunny day as well, so what has happened since then?

J: Well, the first thing to happen was that I changed publishers. I am now with Allison & Busby.

A: It is commonplace nowadays that authors cannot just depend on their own publicity people to do their publicity for them.

J: I think that this is true; I was speaking to somebody last night who spent the entire advance that she got for her first novel in publicising herself.

A: Did it work?

J: Yes, it worked and then I talked to Alexander McCall Smith who printed 1000 of his own books and gave them away before anything happened and I look at today’s top novelists who are often journalists or come from a journalistic background, who have friends in the trade and know what type of stories to supply the press.

A: It is self-promotion to certain extent. I think if you are a new author or still trying to get your feet off the ground, you need some guidance and this is what your publicity is for and this is where I think they need to be guiding you apart from anything else.

J: I do a lot of teaching and at the end of the course that I do I give my pupils a mini course on how to publicise themselves and tell them how necessary it is. Of course living in Scotland is so different from living in London where people will invite you along to speak because they don’t have to pay out a £150 on fares and accommodation. In Scotland, there isn’t such a network of publicity possibilities.

A: As an author, networking is very important isn’t it and how do you feel about attending conferences? We will to talk about St Hilda’s in a bit because it is such a unique conference in itself, but conferences in general how do you feel about them?

J: Unless I am speaking, I don’t think that they have done be a great deal of good. I think that perhaps I should have gone to more and taken a bigger interest in speaking to people and making out a network of people and contacts, but if I am speaking at a conference then I am quite sure of selling many books and to my mind selling books is the best way of publishing myself.

A: Do you find it difficult to stand up in front of people and talk? I don’t think you are because I have heard you talk!

J: I’m constantly terribly nervous, there have been times at St Hilda’s when I feel that I am amongst friends, it is very much a family at St Hilda’s, but even at St Hilda’s I have on occasion stood up and have been unable to get my teeth apart.

A: So what is it about St Hilda’s because, I mean people constantly come back here year after year and I sometimes wonder what is that unique thing about St Hilda’s for you that makes it so unique?

J: There are several things to be very, very honest, perhaps dangerously honest. I made a hit the first time I came to St Hilda’s, I was a success, and I felt loved. Believe me it is pathetic isn’t it but it does my ego good. I come hear, I meet people from Austria and Belgium and the United States who know my books and love my books, and people are nice to me here. The bottom line is that they laugh at my jokes.

A: Compared to the UK how you are doing with your books in the US?

J: I am not doing anything outside the UK and I am doing pretty dammed little outside Scotland to be perfectly honest. I was number four in the Scottish best-sellers, I beat Ian Rankin, and I beat Quintin Jardine. South of the border, I am not known.

A: Do you think that with some authors it is an “underground” thing and that it is a select group of people that know where to get hold of your books?

J: It is not good enough. I get e-mails maybe three or four emails a day and they all say exactly the same thing. Some days I don’t but it is a bad day that I don’t get an e-mail asking where I can get your books and they love the books and this sort of things. I know that there are people out there who enjoy the books. I did a gig l in a very small library in Edinburgh, outside Edinburgh in fact and I sold over £100.00 worth of books, because it was a little clique of people, a reader’s group who had passed them round each other. There were thirty-five people there and we were selling two to three books to each one. Other people just don’t know me at all. You cannot overcome the initial barrier of not being publicised.

A: There is also as you said word of mouth.

J: But does it really overcome that do you think?

A: I am not sure, I think it is difficult because crime fiction still to this day is not considered to be literary enough and therefore you have that barrier and to overcome that barrier it’s hard.

J: If you write light-heartedly, comedy or humour or however you describe it you are automatically downgraded to someone who has nothing to say. I don’t make a big deal of it but there is a social comment in the different way in which Buchanan lives his life and Fizz’s way of living her life.

A: Thanks for bringing up Fizz and Buchanan because I wanted to ask you about the two of them. When you started writing about them did you anticipate they way their relationship was going to be?

J: Yes, I knew from the very beginning. Fizz of course came first as a character and then I wanted someone to be the opposite of Fizz and the person that she could bounce off and so I invented Buchanan. At first, he wasn’t going to have 50% of the action but when I started to write Payment Deferred the first one I didn’t want to write a woman in the first chapter because an awful lot of men will not read books where it’s a female protagonist. I wanted Buchanan to have the first chapter.

A: You have written nine books now. Missing Link being the ninth. Did you think you would write so many? Alternatively, did you have this idea in your mind that you were just going to write possibly half a dozen and then go on to something new and you still enjoying writing the series?

J: Yes, I can’t imagine not writing it. It is my whole life? I live Fizz and Buchanan twelve months of the year even though I am only writing them for 3 or 4 months, but they are very real to me. They are as real as my own family and in a way; I would like to try something else, like the comedian wanting to play Hamlet. I would like to try a one off book with a broader canvas and perhaps a bit more serious. However, I have to write Fizz and Buchanan at the same time I can’t stop writing those.

A: Do you think though that if you write something different, and left Fizz and Buchanan for bit that you would come back to them with a fresh eye?

J: That’s a possibility, but then it could just as easily go the other way.

A: That is true you might miss them too much and feel that I don’t really want to write this book, I want to go back to Fizz and Buchanan!

J: Yes and of course, my publishers want a book a year and a lot of my readership are expecting a book a year.

A: Do you find it difficult this pressure about writing a book a year?

J: I find it difficult to get the original seed from which a plot grows; it is the only difficult bit for me. Once I have that original concept the clever bit, the bit at the end you go oh yes, that I find difficult. Once I have that it seems to develop quite naturally and the writing of it is just good fun.

A: What are you working on at the moment? Is it another Fizz and Buchanan book? Does it have a title?

J: Another Fizz and Buchanan and it has a working title Watery Grave is what I am calling it at the moment but it will probably be something different by the time I have finished. I have the idea of quite an involved mystery but it has technicalities and it is going to be very, very clever if I ever work it out. Then I may never work it out and will have to start something else.

A: Going back to the possibility of doing another series would you like to do another series? Has it crossed your mind?

J: My agent would like me to do at least a one off that is purely comedy, a funny book. She quite likes chick- lit but I am not into chick-lit and I what I thought would be quite funny is to write a really funny book set in Roman times. In also have an idea for a sci-fi humorous book.

A: Do you like sci-fi books?

J: Um yes, I used to be crazy about sci-fi and I loved Red Dwarf.

A: So what made you decide to write a crime book if you were so interested in sci-fi?

J: At that time, I was writing historical romances and somewhere along the line, my editor decided that I was hopeless at writing historical romances because I couldn’t keep my face straight and she said that, romantic readers did not like humour. It sounded as if you are writing them tongue-in-cheek and they don’t like that.

A: I can understand that especially in historical romances, I think that in ones that are more contemporary the humour is always there in romances. Nevertheless, not in historical.

J: So she said that the market is falling out in historical romances and she advised me to return to crime and also when you write romances you have to take an awful lot of stick. People really go into the Barbara Cartland thing and you have this sort of image as a romantic writer whereas if you write crime you can be this hard-boiled, feisty person.

A: Going back to the original question – why not science fiction? Why has it taken you so long to think about the possibility of writing a science fiction novel?

J: I never thought from the science fiction point of view I had this idea that after the Holocaust after the Armageddon sort of thing when the world is picking itself up again, that is the only time where it could be sent. Therefore, I came at it from there.

A: But you can combine science fiction with crime fiction as well.

J: Of course, so many of the science fiction books are just ordinary stories set in the future.

A: So what about the Fizz and Buchanan series? Any chance of it becoming a television series? I am surprised that the series has not been picked up!

J: One or two production companies have asked for the books, but nothing has come out of it. One prize wining, BAFTA wining playwright has put them forward many times and tried to get them accepted he wants to translate them into television programmes and nothing has come of it. They just have not taken off. She let me read an e-mail from her editor at the BBC who said that she absolutely loved the stories, loved the plots and the characters but she would have started with Payment Deferred and she reckoned the ending, which takes place during the Edinburgh Festival Parade, would be too expensive to stage.

A: What do you think of the state of crime fiction today?

J: I do not think it is wonderful.

A: Do you think that the American’s are a lot tougher and a lot more selective?

J: I think they are, I think they publish a fraction of the number of books that are published every year in Britain and I am not talking per capita. I think it is about 10,000. Numbers do not stay in my head.

I know that we publish a vast amount more of different kinds of fiction than America do.

A: Do you think that we should be much more selective?

J: I certainly do.

A: Going back to awards it is very subjective because it depends on who the judges are on the panel.

J: I am not sure how you would make it fair, I am very dogmatic in my tastes, and what I like should be liked. My criteria should be the criteria and I cannot understand other people’s taste.

A: You were saying earlier that you lecture where do you do your lecturing and how did you start doing this?

J: I am quite often asked to speak to writers groups and clubs and people like that and sometimes at schools; people ask me to speak in schools on how to write and I spoke at the Edinburgh Festival last year on writing and I doing what they call a “Master Class” on character writing to Edinburgh Writer’s Club and I am also due to speak at Sutherland Writers Club on plotting and plot development and I do occasionally the Library Board pay me to do a full week’s course on various things like plotting, plot development and character and dialogue and I really enjoy that. I would rather be a teacher than a writer. I

always wanted to be a teacher. It’s why I am so opinionated.

A: You have had such a wide range of jobs, you used to be a private detective, but you didn’t look like one.

J That is why I was so successfully, as a private detective, nobody ever thought I was trailing them.

A: Have your various jobs been of help to you when you have been writing your books?

J: Oh, yes no doubt about it. I have had a vast array of jobs. I get terribly bored in any job, I never last more than a couple of years in them, and then I do something completely different. However, I think certainly working for the detective agency introduced me to a whole strata of Edinburgh society with which I was completely unfamiliar. I used to go round these housing schemes getting dispositions and talking to eyewitnesses and I was absolutely gob smacked at the way the other half lived. I remember walking into a house, which was a total tip and the woman told me to sit down and offered me a cup of tea, to which I said yes and she picked a cup of the table which had sugar already encrusted in the bottom which she wiped out with her skirt before she poured the tea. I was absolutely amazed.

A: It makes me wonder why you didn’t write a series featuring a private detective?

J: I think it had been done to often. I am fed up with detective agencies, fed up with police procedurals. .It seems to me to be all the same. Police detectives all seem to be cut from the same pattern. They are also somewhat middle-aged, drink too much and smoke too much and don’t eat properly, divorced. Their boss is always shouting at them and breathing down their necks, irresistible to women.

A: So what have you been reading recently that you have enjoyed?

J: I enjoyed Denis Lehane’s Shutter Island. I thought that was a wonderful book. I have been reading the Flashman series by George McDonald Fraser, that has been good and I recently caught up with Miss Simila’s Feeling for Snow, which I liked. I . ked Snow Falling on Cedars except that the crime was a waste of time because I mean the author may be a wonderful novelist but he is not a crime writer. That’s about all I have enjoyed.

A: What books would you suggest to people if they wanted to start writing crime fiction as good examples of good and well-written crime fiction?

J I tell you what, In my experience of teaching people. I would advise people to read every single how to write book that they could find and I am still doing it after forty-years of writing. If a new one comes out I buy it and read it and 99 times out of 100, I get nothing out of it and then the hundredth time I get a very small nub of gold. I find that people are all too willing and would never sit down at a piano and say that they are going to write a piano concerto if they couldn’t read a word of music and have never touched a piano before, but they are all too willing to sit down at computers and say that they are now going to write a crime novel.

A: I actually think that if someone wants to get a good grounding in crime fiction then they should start at the beginning and work their way through. Because you can see the way in which crime, fiction changed. I mean people may not like people like Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Marjorie Allingham but the taught both readers and writers a lot of things and you can see the way in which crime fiction naturally progressed to the modern day crime fiction novel.

J: But many people need it to be pointed out to them what to look for. What I have found myself doing, as I teach my class is my way of doing things. It is only one way of doing things. I teach them what to look for in a book and then I say if you want practical examples of my way of doing things read my books because they are straight forward books and if you start by deconstructing them and looking at any of the Fizz and Buchanan books you can look at them and say what was the original idea here what was the seed from which it grew? Generally, it comes out at the end and how did she develop it?

A: Going back to your books, how do you start your books? Do you outline or don’t you outline?

J: I outline to a certain extent, I know the beginning and I know the end and I know certain key scenes. I start by having this original idea, like in Missing Link. When I am looking for an idea the normal ideas that initially come up are all the clichés and I start maybe if I am desperate with a clichés and say how can I turn that on my head and make it a missing link and coming to Fizz and Buchanan and wanted to be proved innocent of a crime I started Missing Link with someone coming to them asking to be proved guilty of a crime and then I say to myself why would somebody do that and or would they be telling the truth that she committed the crime or would she be lying? Alternatively, would she may be a bit dippy because she was an elderly lady. The police have assumed that she is going senile and with a crime novel, you always have to give a very good reason for the protagonist/detective not just to go to the police to hand it over to the police.

A: There has to be that hook that needs to keep one hooked.

J: Curiosity certainly the fact that the police have already told her to run away and stop wasting police time. Which is why, I mean if I were not to go to the police in the first place and she did go to the police. Rightly or wrongly, whether she is lying or whether she is nutty or whether she is actually telling the truth you have a mystery and how will it develop and which was she at the end, and then you just cast it.

A: I take it that you had a lot of high hopes for Missing Link did you really enjoy writing it.

J: I really enjoyed writing it and what my husband said. I only let my husband read it before I print it and send it off. I don’t let him read it before I’ve finished because he will pick holes in it and I will go back and change it anyway. When he said it, he said “you know I was never really sure until the very last page. I thought that was what I had hoped for. I don’t love all my books the same.

A: You definitely loved this one.

J: I am not sure that I loved it but I liked that aspect of it. It is may be not as funny as Hot Potato or Mr Big which I think are the funniest.

A: Don’t you think that you are going down a much darker route and making them slightly more serious?

J: I think they are becoming a little more serious and I don’t want them to become more serious. The one that I have started now is a lot funnier. You see that some of them are funnier than others and some of them are better in different ways. They have a more satisfying plot and a more surprising ending. I mean I love them all but not all to the same level.

A: I am not going to embarrass you and ask which one is your favourite one out of the lot of them?

J: I would be hard put to it really, I liked Hot Potato. I enjoyed Hot Potato but the guy who reads my books James Brice he didn’t like it. He preferred Bitter End , which I don’t like. I mean I like it but I don’t think it is one of my best.

A: Why don’t you read your books?

J: Because James Brice is a genius basically, he can do all these different voices and he does them exactly as I wrote them. When I heard them doing grandpa I thought my God how did he know that Grandpa talked like that.

A: One last question? What do you expect to be doing next year?

J: I don’t know, I honestly don’t know. There have been times that I have felt like giving up. Quite honestly, I am not sure.

A: I hope you don’t because there are still a lot of us who want to read about Fizz and Buchanan.

Our thanks to Joyce for taking the time out to talk to us.

More information about Joyce can be found on her website: - http://www.joyceholms.com