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Marnie Riches, The Lost Ones
1. I speak five different languages. At school, I studied German, French, Italian and English (of course). At university, I went on to do a Masters degree in Modern & Medieval German and Dutch. After graduating, I didn’t use my linguistic capabilities at all…until I wrote my first crime-fiction novel, The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die. I set the series that followed partly in Amsterdam. It’s the only time I’ve professionally ever used my languages!
2. When I started writing, I hoped to carve out a career as a children’s author, and had six historical adventure books for 7+ year olds – the first six books in the Time-Hunters series - published under the pseudonym Chris Blake. I had my real breakthrough, writing crime-fiction for grown-ups, but I am also published as a historical saga author, under the pseudonym of Maggie Campbell. The lighter stories counterbalance the darkness of crime well!
3. I used to be the singer and played rhythm guitar in an indie rock band called Interference, in the late 1990s – think, more early Radiohead than Foo Fighters. I managed the band too, which meant I spent rather too much time during my working day, calling A&R managers at record labels to see if they’d come to our gigs at famous Britpop venues, such as The Garage and Camden Underworld in London. Sadly, we were on the tail end of the Britpop movement and ran out of steam after three years. When our drummer moved to Canada, that was the end of that!
4. Before being published, I worked as a professional fundraiser – mainly raising money from corporate sources for youth charities, such as The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award. At the DofE, I attended several Gold Award ceremonies at St. James’s Palace, as well as fundraising receptions and garden parties at Buckingham Palace, and I met HRH The Duke of Edinburgh on many an occasion. Thankfully, I managed to curtsey properly and remembered not to swear!
5. Despite growing up on one of Manchester’s roughest council estates and being brought up by a very hard-working but poor single parent, I managed to learn my way to the ivory towers of Cambridge University. Contrary to popular belief, even back in the 1990s, Cambridge was a place where working class kids could really excel on the basis of their academic ability and work ethic. I never felt that it was a world that wasn’t for me, and at Girton College, I was following in the footsteps of suffragettes and feminist icons, the Pankhursts and Emily Davies.
6. After I had my children, I’d intended to become a property developer, full time. I’d renovated and/or extended six houses in three different cities, moving roughly every two years, and it was only the 2008 credit crunch and ensuing property market crash that stopped me from donning a hard hat permanently. I took up writing instead!
7. The Lost Ones will be my tenth crime-thriller and the first in a new series, – my fourth crime-fiction series – but by the end of 2022, I will have had a stonking nineteen books published. That’s approximately 1.5 million words in print, and that doesn’t take into account the books that I wrote ‘for practice’ that didn’t get placed with publishers – before landing my first deal and since! Those shelved projects include one picture book, two YA thrillers, three middle grade books, one women’s novel and one dystopian grown-up crime-thriller. Practice hopefully makes perfect…
