Guest post written by author Luca Veste
Luca Veste is a writer of Italian and Liverpudlian heritage, married with two young daughters, and one of nine children. He studied psychology and criminology at university in Liverpool. He is the author of the Murphy and Rossi series, which includes DEAD GONE, THE DYING PLACE, BLOODSTREAM, and THEN SHE WAS GONE. You Never Said Goodbye is out now.
The first books I remember reading where mysteries. More childlike, of course, where the biggest crime might be someone stealing apples from the local farmer, but mysteries all the same. Right up until the age of eleven or twelve, when I discovered first the Point Horror series and then Stephen King and moved into horror, I was a reader fascinated with the mystery genre. I stopped reading any books around the age of sixteen for almost a decade – my lost years – before someone pressed Sleepyhead (Mark Billingham’s debut novel) into my hands and told me I should read it. I did, and my love for crime fiction was reborn.
I read police procedurals almost exclusively at that time. I went through the modern oeuvre of Mark Billingham, Val McDermid, Ian Rankin – all the British greats – and was a happy reader. Then, by chance, I picked up Tell No One by Harlan Coben in a second-hand bookshop and discovered another facet to the crime fiction genre.
I was almost reading in parallel lives. Detectives one day, then ordinary people in extraordinary situations the next. I read all of Harlan Coben’s novels. I found Linwood Barclay’s, and became the biggest fan of his (still am to this day). I read Gillian Flynn, before Gone Girl came out. I found Megan Abbott and opened up another strand of the genre. Mo Hayder, Steve Mosby, Will Carver, CL Taylor, Mark Edwards, Tim Weaver . . . all great novelists, ostensibly working within the same genre, but doing something completely different within it.
When I started writing, I was twenty-eight, and didn’t think I was allowed to actually do it. It was almost as if I was doing something I shouldn’t, but I pressed on because I enjoyed it so much. Those early forays into the world where in the form of short stories – usually set on the mean streets of Speke, Liverpool, with a cast of nefarious gangster types. None of them are readily available to read now, but those were my first tentative steps into telling stories. My first four novels were police procedurals – all set in Liverpool, England, with a detective pairing that felt familiar, in a setting I step out of my house each day and live in.
You Never Said Goodbye is my eighth novel. This is the first book I’ve set outside of Liverpool, so already out of my comfort zone. It’s also the first novel that is like those thrillers I grew to adore, like Linwood Barclay, like Harlan Coben. Those ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances type of books. I’ve had the idea for the book for a long time, but could never quite figure out how to make it work. It couldn’t be in a police procedural. It couldn’t be in crime/horror mashup, like The Bone Keeper or The Silence. It had to be something different. Very different to anything I’d attempted to write before. Sam Cooper, the main character in the book, is the closest I’ve ever come to putting myself in a novel, and that gave me a closer connection to what he goes through in the story than any book I’d written before.
It was hard work. I couldn’t rely on a detective to smash in a door, question a suspect, be anywhere they needed to be. I couldn’t rely on a bit of darkness in the woods, a noise in the night that can’t be explained. This was throwing someone like me, like us, into a situation and seeing how you or I would handle it. An impossible situation to get out of, using only the tools and skills that any of us have available to hand. It was ridiculously hard.
It was also the most fun experience I’ve ever had writing in the past decade. It has rejuvenated me as a writer, giving me a new lease of life. I feel as if I’ve been building up to this moment for a long time. I love my earlier novels, but this is on another level now. The freedom is immense. The love I have for my characters increased immeasurably. The love for the plot, the story . . . everything increased for me. I was excited to sit at my desk every day. I had ideas overflowing, about what I could throw at Sam Cooper, and seeing how he would manage to deal with it and still find answers.
The best thing about the genre of crime and mystery is that it has room for all these different types of novels. These different types of stories. We can cover any part of society, any part of the psyche, any part of life . . . all wrapped up in a satisfying read for anyone. I’m incredibly lucky to have found a space to do that and wouldn’t swap it for anything in the world. The ability to reinvent myself as a writer is awesome. I can’t wait to carry on this journey and see where it takes me next.
