I'm Marie Lightfoot, or at least that's the name my publisher puts on the covers of the books I write about true crime. In classic 'true crime' fashion, my latest one is titled 'Anything to Be Together.'
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The best crime novels are all based on people keeping secrets. All lying - you may think a lie is harmless, but you put them all together and there's a calamity.
When I was growing up, my stepmother's sister was the chief detective in one of the adjoining towns, so she piqued my interest in crime.
On the advice of my U.K. publishers, I chose a sexless anonymity and published my first five books under the semi-pseudonym, S. J. Bolton. I was happy. I could hide behind a genderless, classless persona and let my creepy, psychological murder-mysteries speak for themselves.
I've read crime fiction all my life. A thing that's bothered me about crime fiction is that it's generally about one or two people, but there's not much about society. I want to get away from that particular pattern: a lead, a supporting role and backdrop characters.
Crime is a very hard genre to feminise. If you have a female protagonist she is going to be looking after her mum when she gets older; she is going to be worried about her brother and sister; she will be making a living while bringing up kids.
With the crime novels, it's delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. It's like having a fictitious family.
I confess to loving a good murder mystery - anything by Scott Turow or John Grisham. Maybe it's a holdover from my days as a criminal prosecutor in Seattle.
I couldn't ever write a straight crime novel: there'd be an intrusion of weirdness at some point.
I don't really consider any of my novels 'crime' novels.
In everything I've written, the crime has always just been an occasion to write about other things. I don't have a picture of myself as writing crime novels. I like fairly strong narratives, but it's a way of getting a plot moving.