Books

Steve Cavanagh: ‘Thomas Harris sparked my interest in crime fiction when I read Silence of the Lambs at a young age’

The Northern Irish crime novelist on Hitchcock, having written the seventh most bought book in Germany and books as ‘empathy machines’

Steve Cavanagh: 'Books are empathy machines. Crime and thrillers allow the reader to be entertained while they also learn about the ills and injustices of society'

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Martin Doyle
Sat Jul 29 2023 - 05:00

You were born in Belfast in 1976. Did the Troubles influence your interest in crime fiction?

Not even in the slightest. Thomas Harris sparked my interest in crime fiction when I read Silence of the Lambs at a young age. I had never read a book like it before. My mother gave me a copy when I was about 12 or 13, and after that I read all the US-based crime thrillers I could get my hands on. Perhaps it was because crime novels set in the US introduced me to the genre that I went on to set all of my novels in America, most of them in New York. There’s something magical about that city. It’s full of possibilities. You get the impression that anything can happen in New York.

You won the CWA Gold Dagger for Crime Novel of the year 2018 for The Liar and the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award 2019 for Thirteen. Which is your favourite book?

It’s very difficult to pick a favourite. Certainly Thirteen changed my life, not just because it won the Theakston prize, but because it went on to become a best-seller around the world. That book continues to change my life. Recently it was the seventh most bought book in Germany, and the books that follow on from it have all been best-sellers. In terms of non-German authors over there, only Colleen Hoover sold more books than me last year – which I still can’t quite believe. I have been very lucky with that book. People really respond to Thirteen. I guess it’s the hook – a story about a serial killer who works his way on to a jury.

[ Steve Cavanagh: ‘I love Bosch for his heart, Reacher because he is unfettered by laws’ ]

Your new stand-alone thriller, Kill for Me, Kill for You, reworks the core concept of strangers swapping murders from Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. How big an influence is the film director?

He was the master of suspense. I learned so much from watching his films and listening to his interviews. There are few people who have changed cinema like him, and he did it over and over again. With Psycho especially. Not only did he buy every copy of Robert Bloch’s book, and kept them in a warehouse, so people couldn’t read the novel and discover the twist, but he also changed the way people went to the cinema. In the US at the time, people wandered into the cinema to watch a movie often when the film was halfway through, then sat on to watch the beginning of it on the next showing. Hitchcock changed that by insisting with the cinema chains, much to their anger at the time, that no one was to be admitted to the screening after the film had started. This resulted in lines of people queuing up around the block for the next screening – which helped build the buzz and fascination for this film. The lines would often be so long that they would take up two or three city blocks – which is how the phrase blockbuster came to be.

How and why is crime fiction a good way to explore social issues?

It allows us to come at these issues from a slightly different angle. A book that is aimed at social issues can sometimes feel more like a lecture, but if the narrative focuses on crime and the consequences of that crime, it allows the writer to pull in these important issues in a more interesting and natural way and makes them perhaps easier to understand. Books are empathy machines. Crime and thrillers allow the reader to be entertained while they also learn about the ills and injustices of society.

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This book tackles the idea of trauma responses. Why do some victims react by wanting to stop other people hurting the way they do, and others want to inflict harm instead?

This book is about what happens to damaged people who have been failed by the justice system and have no choice but to take matters into their own hands. Some see it as protecting people from violence by stopping a dangerous man, and others just want revenge, pure and simple, to make themselves feel better. There’s a quote from Walter Scott’s Heart of Midlothian, which opens the book, and it encapsulates the peril of taking justice for oneself: “Revenge. The sweetest morsel to the mouth that ever was served in hell.”

Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?

Before Covid I was in San Francisco on a book tour, and I retraced the steps of James Lee Burke, still perhaps one of the best living writers of any genre. He had been to City Lights Bookstore, and bought a notepad, then went to an Italian cafe up the street and sat down to write the opening lines of what became his novel The Neon Rain. I went to the bookstore, got a notebook, and enjoyed a coffee in that same cafe and wrote some lines for this book at that same table. Needless to say, my lines were nowhere near as good as Mr Burke’s.

What is the best writing advice you have heard?

Read a lot and write a lot. There is no substitute.

Which current book, film and podcast would you recommend?

Everyone Here is Lying by Shari Lapena, a brilliant psychological thriller that had me gripped. I really enjoyed the recent Spiderverse movie when I went with my son, and for a podcast – I still love Marc Maron’s WTF. He is one of the finest interviewers I’ve ever heard.

Kill For Me, Kill For You by Steve Cavanagh is published by Headline

Alfred Hitchcock