WHATBOOK..?

…are you reading now?

I’M WRITING a play for the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh about the life and death of Christopher Marlowe, so Emma Smith’s This Is Shakespeare has been both a treat and an invaluable aid to thinking about Elizabethan society and the theatre it produced. This is not a book for academics, it’s for anyone who enjoys theatre.

It’s clear, it’s clever and it’s often also very funny. Although she’s an Oxford professor, Emma Smith doesn’t tell us what to think — she suggests questions we might want to ask, then discusses them.

Probably the greatest single revelation for me as a playwright was the importance of what Smith calls ‘gappiness’ — I don’t have to explain everything laboriously, but can trust the audience to fill in the gaps from their own life experience.

…would you take to a desert island?

THE Collected Works of Robert Louis Stevenson. He was a writer of extraordinary gifts and range. From the suspenseful horrors of Jekyll And Hyde to the swashbuckling adventure of Treasure Island, from travel literature to distinctively twisted short stories, he was master of whatever he turned his pen to. Whatever mood I was in, I’d find something to console or entertain me.

When I was learning my trade as a writer, I learned so much from Stevenson’s narrative skills and still, to this day, I have little moments of epiphany when I’m reading him.

…gave you the reading bug?

THE first book I remember having read to me was The Wind In The Willows by Kenneth Grahame. I was about six and I had measles so I wasn’t allowed to read for myself.

My mother, who had instilled a love of stories in me long before I could read, by taking me to the library, read me the adventures of Toad and Mole and Ratty, and I was captivated.

My gateway drug to crime fiction came later, when I was around nine and I read Agatha Christie’s The Murder At The Vicarage. One fix and I was hooked.

The Murder At The Vicarage introduced us to Miss Marple and Christie was at the peak of her powers. I still admire this book for the cleverness of its multi-layered plotting. The intersecting subplots mean there is never a moment when the story sags and that’s a valuable lesson for any writer.

…left you cold?

I’VE always been a voracious reader, but for a long time I struggled with that Scottish Presbyterian sense of obligation to finish what you’ve started.

And so I ploughed through quite a lot of books with little enthusiasm. Luckily, there were plenty that excited and engaged me, so I never lost my appetite.

I’ve become much more ruthless in recent years. That’s partly because I chair the New Blood panel at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, which means I have to whittle down upwards of 50 submissions to just four.

Now, if an author hasn’t done something by page 20 to stir my interest, I move on. I’ve come to realise there are more good books out there than I have time to read, so a book has to earn my time!