“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” # 534: Peter Tremayne

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...
What crime novel would you most like to have written?
Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose) by Umberto Eco (1980).
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Edgar Wallace, E.C. Vivian and Leslie Charteris.
Most satisfying writing moment?
Looking at my royalty statements.
The best Irish crime novel is …?
One by Peter Tremayne! (If he’s excluded, I’d choose Ken Bruen’s Priest).
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
One by Peter Tremayne! (and if he’s excluded again then I'll stick up for Ken once more).
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing is doing the basic work for my accountant to approve and the best thing is receiving the royalty statements.
The pitch for your next novel is …?
It’s Dancing With Demons and the 17th in the Sister Fidelma series. She’s tackling solving the murder of the High King of Ireland in Tara in AD 670, an actual historical event.
Who are you reading right now?
Dáibhí Ó Cróinín - An Cúigiú Díochlaonadh (The Fifth Declension), Cló Iar-Connachta (1994) - with the aid of a dictionary!
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Characters, background, plot!

Peter Tremayne’s Dancing With Demons is published on September 6

The Tremayne Man

Rejoice, o ye fans of Peter Tremayne (right) – Dancing With Demons, the latest Sister Fidelma mystery and the sixquillionth in the series, is due out in hardback on September 6. The woman who puts the ‘nun’ into ‘nundefatigable’, Fidelma is investigating the murder of the High King of Ireland this time around, and hoping to prevent civil war breaking out in 7th Century Ireland in the process. So why is Sister Fidelma such a (ahem) habit- forming read? Quoth Peter, via the Bridlington Free Press:

“The fascinating law system and culture of 7th Century Ireland, sadly, was little known when I started writing the books – the amazing position that women enjoyed, the fact that they could divorce on equal terms with men, that women could aspire to all the professions and be lawyers, doctors, poets and so on, a situation not really paralleled in other European societies at that time, seems to be one reason why the books attract attention. I was even worried about how I could put this across to readers in the English language but it seems to carry into all cultures. The fact that, as of this time, Fidelma has gone into 15 languages, from Japanese to Russian, Bulgarian to Spanish and so on, has been surprising. It seems that readers find a resonance with Fidelma, whom Books Ireland have described as ‘an Irish heroine for both the seventh and the twenty-first centuries’.”

Well, what are you waiting for? Get thee to a nunnery, people …