Perhaps it wasn’t the healthiest way to navigate a pandemic, but it beat heavy drinking or heroin. Others were – quite understandably – struggling to write, while I used productivity as a coping mechanism, writing enormous amounts of mostly drivel. I’m often embarrassed by my creative output. They seem serious and earnest, whilst I feel slapdash and over-eager, like a little kid, acting up. I am jealous of those careful, slow writers who take a decade over a book. Early on I realised that – as in life – I would never be the less-is-more type. She read Graham Greene and Muriel Spark, and a host of other contemporaries, championing their writing though it was wildly different from hersĪ huge part of writing is coming to terms with the kind of writer you are. Fifteen years ago, when I started writing seriously, I re-read her biography and found a blueprint for the kind of writer I wanted to be. Her paperbacks, tucked into my rucksack pocket, were devoured on trains and airplanes. Later, we travelled around the world together.
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I filed my new words away for later use.Ĭhristie kept me company as a teenager when I spent long stretches in hospital unable to concentrate on anything but her novels. I frequently paused my reading to look up words in the dictionary. As a child I loved the language of her books. Poirot’s just the excuse we use to spend a few hours together, sharing something we love.Īgatha Christie is one of the constants running through my life. Even now, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas if we didn’t squeeze in a Poirot or two. We soon fell into the habit of watching her adaptations together. I think my dad was actually glad I’d discovered crime. My parents never curtailed my reading, unsuitable though it might’ve been. Agatha Christie became my gateway drug to Sherlock Holmes, Bram Stoker, Emily Brontë and Stephen King. Six months later I read And Then There Were None. Overnight I transitioned from Nancy Drew (who dabbled in robberies and the odd kidnapping) to Agatha Christie (who liked to murder liberally). It was clever, vicious and, most importantly, not meant for children. Having devoured all the books in the children’s section of Ballymena library, I wandered into crime and picked up Murder in the Clouds.
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I first encountered Christie at the unlikely age of eight. I’ve been modelling myself on her for years. If I’m being entirely honest, the writer who has most shaped me is the late, great Agatha Christie. But the truth is I came relatively late to the kind of books you’re supposed to read. As a lapsed Presbyterian magic realist, I’m the love child this pair would never have had. When asked which writers have influenced me, I usually say Flannery O’Connor and Gabriel García Márquez.