Andrew goes nuts with gore in thriller
CHAPTER 13 is the one not to read before your tea in Andrew Grant's debut crime thiller, Even. That's when Cyril the Squirrel undergoes some gruesome torture in the trouser department.
Not to give too much away but the Diary will think twice before ordering sweetbreads again.
"It's been interesting the reaction to that. Some people wanted much more detail, others have said it was just terrible," says Andrew.
The book is out this Friday and on July 21 he and international best-seller writer Lee Child will talk about their work at a double header, first at the Lyceum, then at Sheffield University. They know each other quite well. Lee is Andrew's older brother and they've already done book tours together in the US.
Lee's about a dozen books ahead of him but if you think Andrew played the old pals act before you're wrong. "I didn't show him the manuscript until I'd signed the deal," he says.
The night that happened there was a small earthquake!
Unlike Lee, Andrew has kept his real name although at first he thought he'd adopt a nom de plume and write as Eddie Brown - a little closer to the start of the bookshelves if you work on the premise his brother did that would-be readers start from A and work through to Z.
"My agent said Andrew Grant was more marketable," he muses.
While born in Birmingham he studied, like Lee, at Sheffield University and, unlike Lee, stayed. After forming a small theatre company he went into the world of telecommunications but always wanted to write.
"When some customer was telling me about a terrible crisis at work I was thinking that would make a great story," he says.
Andrew's hero is an Englishman, David Trevellyan, with a background in telecommunications in New York and he plans to run him through a series of novels.
It was published in America first - and irritatingly keeps the Ameri-canised spellings - where reviewers have called it Grit Lit. It's not something he has heard of before.
"A lot of readers want gritty realism," he says and there's plenty of that plus a complex plot. The Diary won't spoil it for readers who buy this well-written, faced paced book.
"It's quite daunting writing a thriller. My big nightmare was that people would say 'call that a thriller, a 10-year-old could have written that,'" he confesses.
He had a little help from his previous job which involved "making complicated things simple."
Andrew always had an ambition to write but trying to double it up with his day job didn't work out so he quit on June 30, 2006 and gave himself a year to get a book deal.
"I thought I could leave telecommunications on Friday and write on Monday but it took until November before I got the bit between my teeth."
It was a damn close thing, getting a deal just before the year was up and the redundancy money fast running out.
He's finishing book two and is taking advice on whether future characters, like Cyril, will be losing their nuts. Or worse.
Even is published by Pan Macmillan in paperback at 12.99. He and Lee talk about their books at the Lyceum at 1pm, July 22 (tickets free on 0114 249 6000) and the university at 6pm (0114 222 8893).
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