My guest interview this week on the Crime Cafe podcast is with award-winning crime writer Victoria Selman. And, yes, we do have a brief discussion of Doctor Who! 🙂 And Guy Fawkes! You can download a copy of the transcript here. Debbi (00:12): Hi everyone. My guest today is the Sunday Times and Amazon number one bestselling author of five thrillers, including her popular Ziba MacKenzie series. Her novel Truly Darkly Deeply was shortlisted for the Fingerprint Thriller of the Year Award and longlisted for the Theakston’s Crime Novel of the Year Award, and was a Richard and Judy Book Club Pick. It has also been optioned by See Saw Films. In addition, she’s been shortlisted for two CWA Dagger Awards, has written for the Independent, and hosts a popular podcast called On the Sofa with Victoria on Crime Time FM. It’s my great pleasure to have with me today, Victoria Sellman. (01:50): Hi Victoria. How are you doing? Victoria (01:51): I’m good. It’s my great pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Debbi (01:55): I am very pleased to have you on. I was going to say you’re in London and what’s the vibe like in London these days? Victoria (02:06): Well, the vibe in London today is very noisy. I dunno if you can hear the children outside my window, but it’s Halloween, so we may be interrupted by some doorbell ringing and some dog barking as the kids come. Debbi (02:18): Oh, that’s right. It’s tonight where you are. Victoria (02:18): We’re busy on the streets tonight. Debbi (02:22): Good heavens. Oh my goodness. Perhaps goblins will come visit us. I don’t know. In any case, have you always wanted to write thrillers? Victoria (02:33): I’ve always wanted to write, so when I was from a very young age, I’m sure the same with you, I was always an avid reader growing up, and I think when you love to read, at some point you’re going to want to write as well. You want to have a go, and it was a dream. From the age of seven, I wrote my first inverted commas novel on two sides of A4 paper. It was a very great achievement, which my parents went and lost. Otherwise, I’m sure it would’ve been a fabulous bestseller, but it was fun. That was on my bedroom floor one summer I wrote that. No, I’ve always wanted to write, but as is so often, I think as a writer, it was a long time coming, so life got in the way. I left university, I got a job, I got married, I had children. And it wasn’t until I was in my gosh, I’m trying to think, my late thirties, I guess, that I started properly going for it and I haven’t looked back. I’ve loved every minute, even the downs as well as the ups because of course publishing is a journey of peaks and troughs, and I think the biggest takeout is you just have to keep riding those waves and believing in yourself and keeping going. But it’s a rollercoaster and it’s a fun ride and I’ve loved it. Debbi (03:54): It truly is. Yeah, it is a great deal of fun when you can get things to work out and get the story to make sense finally. Victoria (04:03): Well, that’s right. I think that’s part of it. It’s not just that we want to tell a story, but as a writer, the challenge of telling the story of getting it right, of getting the character’s voice spot on and getting the character in with that first thing that they’re going to say on the page, you just have to see who they are, how to create suspense. I love sleight of hands, so my novels, I love to keep people guessing and hopefully guessing wrong if I’m doing my job right, but also to play fair. So I dunno about you, but I think there is nothing worse than reading a novel and it’s all about the big twist at the end and you get to the twist and you’re like, okay, so I didn’t see that coming. But also it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. I think the twist should absolutely, when you get to it, it should be “Oh!” not “uhh?”, but when it’s done well, everything just falls into place and you feel satisfied. And one’s job, I think as a writer is certainly a writer of thrillers, is to do that. Debbi (05:02): Oh yes. Victoria (05:03): And that’s a challenge, and it takes a while, obviously, to get the books right. But as we say, that’s part of the fun. The puzzle isn’t just the puzzle we give to the reader, but the puzzle we give to ourselves about how do we tell the story in the best possible way. Debbi (05:16): I agree. Yeah, definitely. It’s really funny when you’re writing these things, you almost become like the protagonist in the sense of what do I do next? Victoria (05:28): Yeah, well, it’s got to feel real and you can’t just have the plot leading the character, the character, it has to make sense for the character to do whatever they’re doing. Again, there’s nothing worse than a character walking into a haunted house that they would obviously never think of going in. It just doesn’t make it. But no, they’ve got to do it. That’s where the author wants ’em to go, so they find the dead body and the skeletons hanging from the ceiling. Debbi (05:51): Of course. Yeah. Victoria (05:53): Sorry, I’ve got haunted houses on my brain. Like I said, it’s Halloween tonight. Debbi (05:56): I can’t imagine why, given the time of year. So, tell us about Ziba MacKenzie and what made you decide to start writing a series? Victoria (06:07): So Ziba MacKenzie, that was my very first protagonist and I was feeling my way into crime fiction. And back then I was enjoying novels, Patterson and Lee Child and all those really fun, big characters and big stories. And I was also watching a show, which I dunno if you like, I’m sure many of your viewers like, cause it was huge, was of course Criminal Minds. So Ziba was an ex-special forces criminal profiler, and this was at a time when nobody was, I think now lots of people are writing about profilers, but back then they really weren’t. And I wanted to write somebody a little bit different, but I wanted to tap into my fascination with psychology and what makes us do the things we do and have a character that could understand us perhaps better than we understand ourselves and really solve a mystery through her understanding of humanity, but also facing demons of her own. So Ziba, she’s super smart and she’s kick ass obviously, but she’s also, she’s lost her husband, she’s a widow, she’s lost her husband in tragic circumstances. And just to complicate things a little bit further, she’s also falling in love with his best friend. (07:18): We have a tortured protagonist who we admire, but perhaps also on some level relate to. And we have mysteries that are rooted in true crimes. So that’s one of my things I really enjoy is true crime. I read history at university, so the idea of tapping into something a little bit real, I really enjoy doing. And that’s actually been something for all of my novels that I’ve done in one way or another so far. It’s not a retelling, it’s just a launchpad. The series was very successful, so Blood for Blood, which was the first book in the series was shortlisted for the Debut Dagger Award. So over here in England, the Daggers, I think they’re probably a bit equivalent to the Edgars from what I understand, if that makes sense. Debbi (08:04): It does. Victoria (08:05): And being shortlisted for that was a brilliant springboard for me. I got a deal from that and the book did great. It was actually number one bestseller on Amazon for about, I think it was about five weeks. So it as a first book that was Debbi (08:21): That’s fantastic. Victoria (08:22): It was great. But of course it also sets your expectations at a little bit high as well. Debbi (08:26): Oh, I know the feeling. Victoria (08:26): [Cross-talk] downside. And then I went on to write two more books. So it’s a fairly self-contained trilogy. (08:35): And after the third novel, I wanted to do something new because writing a series is great fun. You get to know your character so well and you get to have a lot of fun with them. But after a certain point, it’s like wearing a comfortable pair of slippers when as a writer you always want to be wearing your dancing shoes, you want to be going out and trying new things and pushing yourself to grow. Otherwise how did we ever do that? Exactly. And so then I moved on to a standalone, which was my next journey. Debbi (09:06): Cool. So let’s see. What are you working on now then? Specifically. Victoria (09:13): What am I working on? So what I did after the Ziba MacKenzie series, so I wrote two standalones. The last one was Truly Darkly Deeply, which you mentioned in your introduction. And that was, I mentioned to you that I really loved true crime. So this one was not based on, but inspired by the relationship Ted Bundy had with his girlfriend’s daughter, which I was fascinated by, I dunno about you, but I watched the movie with Zach Efron that has that crazy long title, I’ll not remember properly, something like crazy, awful, terrible, vile, whatever it was. Remember what I mean? And I watched this movie. (09:46): And it was a brilliant movie, but fascinating. It was all about the girlfriend and a lot of these stories that we see are about the serial killer’s wife, the serial killer’s girlfriend. It’s that aspect. And there was one scene in the movie where this little girl, the daughter was sitting up at the counter and I thought, that’s what was interesting me. What was it like for her? How would it have been to had somebody you effectively think of as a father because this girl did, and he turns out to be a serial killer? How does it affect you? How does it inform your view of humanity? And because this is fiction in my novel, the story opens with the serial killer who I’ve named Matty, is in prison, so we know he’s been arrested, but he’s always protested his innocence. And so this girl in my story doesn
