David Hewson--Tips on Successful Audio Books

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I've commented a good bit recently on how much I'm enjoying audio books these days, so I was really tickled when I got a notice that my friend David Hewson had a new book in his Nic Costa series available on Audible. But it's not just the audio versions of David's novels that are big hits--he's been enormously successful in writing works directly for audio, as you will see. I asked him to chat with us about that, and about the latest in the world of audio books. This is so fascinating! I've become more and more aware of how my own books are going to translate to audio, so I'm going to be saving David's tips for constant reference.

DAVID HEWSON:  So there I was in the grand surroundings of the New York Historical Society waiting to hear who’d won an Audie, the audiobook equivalent of an Oscar, for the best original work of 2017. Had to be The Handmaid’s Tale narrated by Claire Danes and Margaret Atwood, didn’t it? Or maybe Nevertheless, We Persisted, a timely tale for the Me-Too era with a huge cast of voices.

Well no, actually. It turned out to be me, with no small amount of help from my wonderful narrator/performer Richard Armitage who breathed life into a revisionist adaptation of Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet: A Novel. (Here's a sample.)

Rarely has my gob been so smacked as we say on this side of the pond. It sits on my mantelpiece now, an imposing and very heavy reminder of how Richard and I took one of the best-known tales in the world apart and retold it in a new and very different fashion. But here’s the odd thing. People, fellow writers even, still look at me askance when I say I love writing audio as much as novels. More so in some ways.

Why, they wonder? Don’t I know that stories come from books not a download from Audible?

Be still my beating heart… how wrong can you get? Audio isn’t just an important financial part of the publishing business these days – and unlike books growing very healthily in audience and money terms each year. Of more immediate interest to me as a writer, it’s at the heart of what we do. If you think that stories come from books you damn yourself as someone of a certain age. For a modern audience they’re as likely to come from a video game, a Netflix series or a movie.

Or, indeed, a tale skillfully told in your ear by a consummate actor like Richard. Because the aural storytelling tradition is where it all began. Remember that chap called Homer? He couldn’t write. He was probably blind for one thing. He recited or perhaps sang his stories to a rapt audience while others wrote them down to save them for prosperity. In fact there are people who believe that this is one reason writing first came into being.

I knew none of this when, largely by accident, I fell into working on audio original projects for audible, first Hamlet and Macbeth, co-written with my fellow author and Shakespeare expert A.J. Hartley, then on my own with Romeo and Juliet. There are more in the works too, not that I can tell you about them at the moment.

I still write books, of course. And I’m delighted to say my popular Nic Costa series has made a return with a new book, The Savage Shore, which has just appeared in the UK. The audio is released simultaneously, thank goodness, and if you’re in the US you’ll find the audio edition is the only immediately available version since the print and ebook versions won’t be out over there until November. See – it is important, isn’t it?

(Here's a sample.)

Another crucial thing that needs to be said about audio, too, is that writing to be read aloud tests and improves your technique for book work too. For example… here are some of my simple rules for tackling audio. You may think they work pretty well for books too.

Keep it simple

A physical book has a physical form of navigation built in. We know through the feel of the pages how far we’ve traveled and the distance left to go.

Once stories turn digital, navigation isn’t so simple. Yes there are ever more sophisticated tools that let you skip and navigate around the story. But listeners still crave signposts along the way, an indication, hopefully suggested by the story, where they should stop, rather than abandon something unsatisfactorily mid-scene.

Here are some of the ways I try to achieve this.

-       I write in short scenes. The average scene length in Romeo and Juliet: A Novel is probably around 1,000 words or five minutes or so in listening time. Some may run to twice that but they’re rare and usually important. Short scenes make it easier for the listener to choose when to break. They also tempt them to take on just one more scene when otherwise they might give up.

-       I structure the narrative in parts (or acts). Maybe, as in Romeo and Juliet: A Novel, a story that happens over a few days so it’s broken up by time, with an audio marker to denote the start of each act. Or it’s something thematic that marks a break. Whatever your divider you need to say to the listener… we’re starting a new section of the story now. It’s going to be big so if you want to put it off until you have the time now’s the point to do it.

-       Always, always make it clear at the beginning of the scene where we are and whose point of view is in operation if any. Listeners need to know that. They shouldn’t feel they have to catch up on what’s happening.

-       Make the narrative linear. Time jumps, flashbacks, flash forwards are going to produce speed bumps that will confuse the audience. I’m producing mainstream narrative fiction. Listeners should be engrossed in the story, not thinking about how it’s written or the cleverness of the author. The best writing is the writing that’s invisible just as the best acting doesn’t look like acting at all.

Dialogue

I’m working with world class performers and part of my job is to help them shine. A novel is a work inside itself, the author the cast, narrator, cinematographer and director. An audio project is closer to a film, TV or stage script. The way dialogue is handled is essential in all this. 

-       It must match the character. People speak differently according to class, sex and their role in the story. If they all sound the same it won’t work – and your narrator won’t have good raw material to work with..

-       The horror of ‘he said’ and ‘she said’. God how we all wrestle with that. Look, attribution is necessary from time to time. But mostly I will let the narrator deal with the change in speaker through accent and approach. Too many ‘he said’ and ‘she saids’ in a book can be annoying. In audio they can drive you up the wall. I recently had to give up on a very good book in audio because the writer hadn’t given this a second thought. Tip: always read your work out aloud and listen to it very carefully. That goes for any kind of writing.

-       Speech must be easy to understand and straightforward. One of the key ideas behind these Shakespeare adaptations was that they ran with the heretical idea that his language would go out of the window and they would focus on the story. Shakespeare is difficult, archaic and often open to interpretation even by experts. What I wanted were people from the late fifteenth century speaking in modern, comprehensible English, occasionally with a twist. Anything else and we’d be back producing speed bumps for the reader.

Location

Characters, Narrative and World. It’s essential the first two come out of the last. If anything I write, whether it’s in Scotland, Italy, Amsterdam or Copenhagen, can be easily transferred to a new location I’ve failed to do my job. Making the world of Romeo and Juliet vivid and real, in Verona and during his brief sojourn in Mantua, was essential. I spent a week visiting both in a chilly February before writing a word of the story. If I can’t see the world in my head I can’t reproduce it for readers and listeners. It was particularly gratifying to hear from Richard when we met during the narration that he loved the Verona I’d painted, a new take on a city he’d visited, with aspects he’d never seen while he was there.

That’s what writing location is about: making people see the world with fresh eyes, even if they feel they know the place you’re writing about well already.

When I look back on the new Nic Costa I can see that The Savage Shore has benefited from my audio work. It has a more novel-like structure but I hope there’s a clarity to it that I wouldn’t have found otherwise. And I’m also lucky in having a fantastic narrator here too, Saul Reichlin who’s become the voice of the Nic Costa series. 

If you want to be a storyteller you need to think about audio. Professionally and artistically too. It’s a fast-growing, exciting and dynamic medium reaching a bigger and bigger audience each year. And we’re still playing with what it can do, of which more later when I can tell you about it.

DEBS: That's a hook! And can I just say how fabulous Richard Armitage is reading Romeo and Juliet: A Novel??????? I mean, it's Richard Armitage!! Be still, my heart! The story is so gripping that you won't be able to stop listening.

Romeo and Juliet: A Novel, narrated by Richard Armitage, is available exclusively through Audible worldwide. Juliet and Romeo, the print version, is published in the UK by Dome Press. The Savage Shore is published by Severn House in print and Whole Story Audio in audio, narrated by Saul Reichlin. 

Here's David on David:

 Photo by Dingena Mol

One way or another I’ve spent my entire life earning a crust through the written word. I left school at the age of seventeen to become a cub reporter on the Scarborough Evening News, one of the smallest newspapers in the country. Over the next two decades I worked for The Times, Independent and Sunday Times as a journalist.
But the hankering to write fiction never went away. My first book Semana Santa, now reissued as Death in Seville, appeared in 1995 and was later turned into a movie with Mira Sorvino. Since then I’ve written more than twenty different books in various locations around the world.
In 2011, with my good friend A.J. Hartley, I branched into audiobook adaptations with Macbeth: A Novel, narrated by Alan Cumming. Now we’ve added Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: A Novel to the audio portfolio, this time narrated by Richard Armitage.
After writing eleven books set in Italy, nine featuring the young Roman cop Nic Costa, I went to Copenhagen for the three novel adaptations of The Killing series. After that I turned to Amsterdam with a series set around Pieter Vos, a detective who lives on the Prinsengracht canal. In 2016 I returned to the audio world with Romeo and Juliet: A Novel, once again narrated by the superlative Richard Armitage.
I live near Canterbury in Kent. The photo above is available for general use, but please give a credit to Dingena Mol and Crimezone  who took it in the bar of De Eland in Amsterdam, the fictional Drie Vaten in the Vos books.

David is in Italy, (I hope researching another book) but he'll be checking in today to chat with us and answer our questions. 

And do check out David's website at www.davidhewson.com. He's a very good photographer and if you're not careful, his photos will have you buying your plane ticket to explore the settings of his books in person. 

David Hewson on Writing

DEBORAH CROMBIE: You would think I'd know how to do what I do, right? Having written a few

books, I'd have it all down pat. 

Oh, so, wrong. I'm always looking for ways to write better, write smarter, and, um, write faster... 

It's not that I don't know that the main ingredient to all those things is butt in chair, but--there are ways to do it better. My friend David Hewson, whose novels I adore, has written a non-fiction book on writing that I think is simply the best book on writing out there--and believe me, I've read quite a few. But I don't think I've ever read one cover to cover, until this one. I literally could not put it down, and I refer back to it regularly.

This is not just a book for beginners (although it would be my top recommendation for someone wanting to write a first novel) but a great resource for established writers, as well. But I can't tell you about WRITING: A USER'S MANUAL, nearly as well as David, so here he is--

DAVID HEWSON: I used to teach at writing schools quite a bit. One of my favourites — and where I first met Deborah — is the annual mystery writers’ conference at that wonderful store Book Passage in Corte Madera. It’s an incredible event gathering writers and would-be authors for a long weekend of chat and learning about publishing, the business, the craft.

But I don’t do writing schools any more. For one thing I don’t have the time. But I also have to admit it got wearing to discover how many enthusiastic wannabes turned up at these occasions, sometimes at great expense to themselves, without even a basic grasp of the tools required for the job. They seemed to want instant enlightenment, an attitude which misunderstands the writing process quite fundamentally. No one ever learns to write. We’re always fumbling towards perfection, changing constantly, struggling to make the next book better than the last.

A large part of that process hangs around practical matters: craft, management, work. So instead of trying to cram all that essential knowledge into a few sessions over a single weekend I came up with Writing: A User Manual. What’s it meant to be? Simple: all the things I wish someone had told me before I first started out in this business twenty years ago. As I say out the outset ‘a guide to practical craft not cerebral art’.

It’s all very well understanding character arcs, three-act structures and Joseph Campbell. But if you don’t have the chops to get the damned book written in the first place all that comes to nothing at all.

Let me stress what this book isn’t.

-            A how-to guide. I’m not sure you can teach writing but you can certainly teach people how to think about writing which is what I hoped to do here. In other words I wanted to set out some starting points then challenge readers to find their own way to meet them.

-             A set of writing rules. Something in my nature means whenever someone tells me there’s a rule for something I want to break it. I hate the idea that anything as individual as writing can be broken down into cogs and components as if a book were a business plan or a spreadsheet.

-            A template to follow. There are structures to modern mainstream narrative fiction. But I don’t believe the old adage that there are only three-four-five-or-more stories in existence and every new one is simply a rewrite of something old.

So this entire work is just my opinion — the approaches I’ve developed to writing over more than two decades in this business. What I’m trying to do is prod people into finding what works for them.

I break the manual down into the three stages I use for my own projects — planning, writing and delivery. To help people try to see how things develop I begin with a very rough idea for a story called Charlie and the Mermaid. In the planning area I try to work out what kind of story this is going to be — and that could be anything from horror to fantasy or crime.

Then when I’ve settled on the approach I go through the writing process, research, background and story planning. Finally in the delivery section I cover the business of rewrites and editing. There’s no career advice — how find an agent and that stuff. All I’m focusing on is getting together the best manuscript you possibly can.

People who know me won’t be surprised to find a few rants along the way. I pop off on the subject of cruelty to adverbs (it’s that rule thing again). I’ve a few words to say about overuse of sex and violence too. You may disagree. I rather hope you do. That’s why I’m saying these things.

I also focus quite a bit on writing tools — in particular software and how it should be used. Not for a millisecond do I believe snake oil stories about how a certain fiction app can ‘unlock your creativity’. If you need a computer to do that you’re really in trouble. But computers — and now phones and tablets — are wonderful things for helping you make the most of your time, and time is something we’re always short of.

So I cover apps like Scrivener, Microsoft Word and OneNote and try to suggest ways in which you can focus on their best features to get words down on screen, which is what this game is all about.

The book was written four years ago so a fair bit of that is now out of date. Software’s moved on and so have I. Back then I was a dedicated Scrivener fan. Now all of my writing happens in a different Mac app, Ulysses, which has the power I need with none of the complexity. Ulysses is also cloud-friendly, something that was meaningless four years ago. Now all my work — every last scene, chapter, book and article like this — syncs automatically through the web to my desktop, laptop and, with Ulysses, my iPad too. So I can edit it anywhere, on a plane, train, in a hotel, where I like, and know that the changes are updated automatically everywhere without any effort on my part.

Now that is truly magic. I only use two other tools. Google Keep for storing notes and references, a wonderful free app that works on my Mac and syncs to a great phone app too so I can jot down ideas anywhere. And a diary app, Journey, which again works on a phone as easily as a desktop and is a great way for keeping the essential book diary, something I outline in the book. Then, at the end, Ulysses outputs a properly formatted Microsoft Word file for my publisher and I’m done.

Even with a foreword from Lee Child this book is not exactly easy to find in book stores, largely because it was published as an academic tome, not a mainstream non-fiction work. But people who’ve found it seem to have found it useful.

I hope so because the way the diary stands my teaching days are over. That said if you have a quick question you’d like answered here — one I can deal with in a single sentence — fire away and I’ll do my best. 

DEBS: REDS and readers, if you have questions for David, now's your chance! 

David, I don't suppose you'll tell me how Charlie and the Mermaid turns out...

For more about David and his novels check out davidhewson.com, and don't miss his terrific blog.

(And can I just say how happy I am to have someone challenge the "no adverb" rule???? Who else thinks adverbs rock??) 

David Hewson--The Flood

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Every so often you run across a book that you absolutely love. It may seem a bit odd that there are crime novels that create a world you don't want to leave, but it does happen. It takes just the right combination of story, setting, and character, but when it happens, it's magic.

I've been a fan of David Hewson's books since I met him at the Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference in Corte Madera, California a few years ago. (I was on tour for In a Dark House, I think, so it's been a good few years! And that, by the way, is also how I met Hallie! It's a terrific workshop for aspiring writers.) I picked up one of David's Nic Costa novels, set in Rome, and was immediately hooked. So when I heard a few months ago that David had a new novel coming, set in Florence, called The Flood, I couldn't wait to read it. Here's a little synopsis.

Florence, 1986. A seemingly inexplicable attack on a church fresco of Adam and Eve brings together an unlikely couple: Julia Wellbeloved, an art student, and Pino Fratelli, a semi-retired detective who longs to be back in the field.

Their investigation leads them to the secret society that underpins the city, and back to the darkness in Florence’s past: the night of the great flood in 1966.

Rich in the culture of Tuscany’s most mysterious city, The Flood takes a dazzling trip back into the history of Florence, recent and as distant as that of the Medici.

The book is terrific--one of my best picks for the year. But David can tell you about it much better than I can.

DAVID HEWSON: I’ve written so many books set in Italy that I have sit to back and count them. Lucifer’s Shadow almost fifteen years ago. Then came nine Nic Costa novels, mostly set in Rome.  This is where the Nic Costa series actually starts.After that there was another Venetian kind of standalone, Carnival for the Dead which featured one of the Costa series most popular characters, Teresa Lupo.
And now we have The Flood set in Florence, with scenery like the wonderful Medici dwarf in the Boboli gardens you see here. So that’s a round dozen. Over the last twenty years my books have encompassed Spain, the US, the adaptations of The Killing TV series in Copenhagen, and now a new crime series set in Amsterdam. The fact these are all lovely places to work and visit apart, why do I do this? Aren’t we all supposed to ‘write about what you know’?

Well I don’t believe in rules for writing, and even if I did I wouldn’t think any of them were universal. ‘Write about what you know’ may be great advice for some, but rotten for me. My very first book back in the Nineties was set in a city much like Seville during Holy Week. I was a working journalist at the time and couldn’t afford the time and money to go there to research it. So I simply created a fictional Andalucian city and wrote the damned thing anyway.

Semana Santa got me a three-book deal and was later made into a movie. And yes, I did get a few letters saying that I’d made ‘mistakes’ when it came to portraying Spain. But just as many saying I captured the true spirit of the place too.

Five books later I made the decision to focus on Italy, moving to Rome for a while to enroll at a language school and try to see the world through Italian eyes. It was probably the best investment I ever made.

Writing about what you don’t know works for me on many fronts. For one thing it makes me work, and if writing isn’t work then something’s wrong. I have to deal with a foreign language, culture, and history. I need to read background books and learn to navigate strange cities. I must pound alien pavements, taking pictures, imagining scenes. Those photos are important by the way and I still keep them. Here’s a grainy photo of Tiber Island taken on a rainy February day in 2001.

Books must build worlds, in the heads of both author and reader. By assembling all this material about places I don’t know, I have to construct my locations from the ground up brick-by-brick. It wouldn’t be the same if it was London or some place around the corner.

And the great thing is you develop a routine. In 2011, with my friend A.J. Hartley, I produced an audio novel of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Now this is a fascinating play, but it’s full of holes. We’ve no idea, for example, why Macbeth begins as a hero and abruptly turns in a bloody villain. I hopped on a plane to Scotland and spent a week exploring Macbeth’s real-life Highlands — here’s a photo of Birnam wood, part of his comeuppance. It’s a beautiful part of the world, and there was the clue to his character.
 
Our Macbeth is a patriot, killing Duncan to oppose tyranny, just as Brutus and Cassius murdered Caesar to maintain the Roman republic. Could I have got that out of a book or Google Maps? Not in a million years.

The Flood is a standalone novel, not part of the Nic Costa series. While I tried quite hard to picture a Costa book set in Tuscany every effort stumbled on a simple obstacle: the characters don’t fit.

Romans are southerners, colourful, sociable, outward-looking. Whereas Florence has a darkness to it, a grim side visible in the fortress-like architecture of its rusticated palaces. Rome has always been a show-off, keen to display its glories to the world. Florence, especially under the Medici, preferred to keep them hidden and show them only to the privileged few.

It took a lot of visits before that became clear, and only when it did could I began to grasp the story I wanted to write.

The tale begins in Rome in 1942 where a young Jewish boy is being smuggled out of the ghetto to keep him out of the hands of Mussolini’s thugs. We then move forward to the winter of 1966 and a terrible real-life flood which claimed more than thirty lives in the city.

Then, for the bulk of the story, we find ourselves in 1986, dealing with two far from complementary characters desperate to unravel secrets from both those previous eras. One is an eccentric carabinieri officer, Pino Fratelli, the second is a young Englishwoman, Julia Wellbeloved, fleeing a failed marriage, thinking she can find herself in the art and history of Florence.

I want the reader to feel they’re there walking the streets with Pino and Julia, feeling her disgust when he stops for a Florentine snack of tripe, and his wonder at the marvelous paintings in the Brancacci Chapel and San Marco. I can’t think of any way to achieve that without going to the place myself. I know. It’s a tough life. But someone has to do it.

Jules Verne wrote Around the World in Eighty Days and he’d never set foot outside Europe. But today the world’s a smaller place, which makes it so much harder to create a vivid version of it for readers’ eyes.

So what do you think? Can you write convincingly about somewhere without going there? Or is fiction just that… made-up stuff and the secret’s in the making?

DEBS: You can probably guess where I stand on David's question. I think writers can build any world they can imagine, convincingly, but it does take work. REDS and readers, what do you think?

While you're contemplating, I want to have another Negroni in a cafe in Florence with Pino and Julia....

And David, I have to ask: Wellbeloved is such wonderful name. How did you come up with that?  

David will be dropping in to respond to comments, and will pick a lucky commenter to receive a copy of The Flood. 

One last thing, although certainly not least. Be sure to follow David on his blog, where you'll find some of the best advice I've come across on writing. And David's book about writing a novel, Writing: A User Manual, is a terrific resource for both new and experienced writers. I'm hoping he'll come back and talk to us about that! 

David Hewson and Rome's Fallen Angel

DEB: Today I'm especially pleased to be talking to one of my favorite writers, David Hewson, about his new Nic Costa novel, The Fallen Angel.

I first met David a few years ago when we were both on the guest faculty for the Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference, and I've been a huge fan ever since. David's books, set in present day Rome, are intelligent, articulate, evocative, and compelling. David is also an extremely nice guy, a talented photographer, and a foodie. No matter how disturbing the case, David's characters never lose sight of the really important things in life, and his descriptions of Roman food are enough to make you book your plane ticket. (David also--at least according to the photos on his blog--has the neatest desk of any writer I've ever seen. This is obviously a subject for future discussion...)

In The Fallen Angel, when British academic Malise Gabriel falls to his death from a Rome apartment, detective Nic Costa rapidly comes to realize that there is much more to the accident than he first thought. It also becomes apparent that Malise’s family — mysterious and tragic daughter Mina, stoic wife Cecilia and troubled son Robert — may be keeping vital information hidden.

Costa becomes obsessed with the case, intrigued by Mina’s story which seems to be linked to the sixteenth-century real-life tragedy of a young Italian noblewoman, Beatrice Cenci.

As the investigation deepens, Rome’s dark and seedy side is uncovered, revealing a tangle of deceit, treachery and corruption. Costa realizes that the key to the truth lies with the Gabriels. Why are they so unwilling to co-operate, and who, or what, is the reason for their silence?

Tess Gerritsen says, "Intricately plotted and gorgeously written, THE FALLEN ANGEL weaves a spell that will entrap you until the final page. David Hewson’s Rome is dark and tantalizing, seductive and dangerous, a place where present-day crimes ring with the echoes of history."

I wholeheartedly agree, and asked David to tell us more.

DEB: David, I was particularly intrigued by the fact that you, as a Brit, choose to set your books in Italy, a place neither your native country nor your home,although I understand that you spend considerable time there researching the books. And although your characters are Italian, you tell your stories from an insider's viewpoint. Do you find having an outsider's perspective an advantage?

DAVID: One of the daftest pieces of advice given to wannabe writers is 'write about what you know'. It works for some people but for a lot it doesn't. Most of us are bored with what we know and take it for granted. When you write about what you don't know you have to learn about it, see it in a different light and perspective, and build your image of it from scratch. To write these books I had to move to Rome for a while, learn Italian, build my Rome brick by brick.

I'm sure it's the same with your England, Debs. Books are work and setting them somewhere alien to us makes us work harder, which hopefully makes for a more vivid world when we come to create them. I think it also makes us more willing to be bold and creative with that world too, more than we would with the one we live in day-to-day.

DEB: We are all too familiar with the fictional male cop--middle-aged or past it, alcoholic, dysfunctional, unable to sustain relationships, lives only for his job . . . and yet in Nic Costa you've given us a policeman in his twenties. Nic is a complex and fascinating character, and although he's suffered loss in the course of the series, he is coping. Was the departure from the flawed anti-hero detective a deliberate choice on your part?

DAVID: It was a very deliberate decision. Most male crime characters have been handed down from the brilliantly-drawn template of Chandler. I wanted to move away from that to concentrate on an ordinary, decent guy struggling to come to terms with a fractured, corrupt world. That seems to me a much more modern and familiar dilemma than Chandler's lone wolf, damaged individual from the Forties. Not everyone gets it, of course, and occasionally people say, 'You don't write crime at all.' And maybe they're right. Can't say I know or care. The stories and the characters are what matter, not some genre tag stuck on the side.

DEB: One of the many things I love about your books is the well-drawn ensemble cast. Again, was this a deliberate choice? (I know in my case, I began with the two main characters, and over the series the continuing cast has grown a bit like topsy.)

DAVID: I wrote the first book as a standalone, and that is very much Costa's story. When it was finished my editor suggested very clearly - with the offer of a very enticing contract - that I turn this into a series. I had to think long and hard about that. I was worried I was going to go down the path to the Reichenbach Falls, where Conan Doyle shoved Holmes to his death because he was sick of him (only to revive him later).

Avoiding character fatigue was something I really wanted to work on. My secret was to think back to Ed McBain's wonderful 87th Precinct series and give Costa a family of similarly-decent people around him. It's that which has sustained the book as they grow, I think, and attracted the TV development deal too. But I've been very careful not to let the family grow too much. There are, and always will be, only four principal protagonists: Costa, Peroni, Teresa Lupo and Leo Falcone. No more - the rest are side characters.

DEB: How did you learn about Beatrice Cenci, and why did you decide to weave the novel around this haunting story?

DAVID: I spend a lot of time in Rome hanging round places, reading, talking to people. The Cenci story is well known in Rome but not much outside, even in Italy. I have a stack of story ideas waiting to be written. Beatrice was just one of them. One of the many things I love about Rome is the way the past informs the present. It's not history, it's a part of today.

Beatrice died more than five hundred years ago yet it doesn't take much to sense her presence still in the city today. With a little research I was able to see where she lived, where she was imprisoned, buried, executed, see the painting supposedly of her in the Barberini, then finally go into the black museum of the Ministry of Justice and see the sword historians believe was used by her executioner. She's a fascinating character, part saint, part something else perhaps, and her dilemma - how far can you go to defend your own identity - seemed to me a very modern one which is why I chose it. But there are plenty more Roman stories with that feel too. The problem is always picking one.

DEB: I, for one, hope you will pick many more, and I'm wondering what's next in the offing. What about you, JR readers? Any questions for David? He'll be dropping in throughout the day to answer them, although as he's on UK time we'll have to try not to keep him up too late!