KEY POINTS:
Elizabeth George has never paid much heed to literary critics. Hailed for her crime fiction, she also remains oblivious to the accolades that have accrued across some 23 books, including five story collections and a non-fiction book on writing.
She once stated that she made a point of remembering that "critics are interested in their own careers, and I, as a writer, am merely the fodder for a critic's career".
The only thing that matters to the creator of the bestselling Inspector Lynley series, she insists, is the relationship between herself, her books and her readers. Give her half a chance and this former English teacher will deliver a small homily on the need for all writers, no matter their genre, "to forge some kind of bond with the readers, to form what John Steinbeck calls the trinity, so you have the book, the reader and writer bound together."
George's Lynley novels now sell around one million copies each and are translated into 20 languages. The ongoing BBC series based on her books, about the aristocratic New Scotland Yard detective and his working-class partner Barbara Havers, pulls 6.5 million viewers annually, ensuring the American author a devoted following in Britain. But reader loyalty only goes part way to explaining why, when George recently toured the US to promote her 14th Lynley mystery, Careless in Red, she found herself forced to address lingering rage over the murder of Lynley's wife in the 2005 novel With No One As Witness.
"Their anger surprised me," admits George, who had already penned a novel about the events leading up to the murder, What Came Before He Shot Her. "But I think what they were reacting to was the fact that they felt something, and largely the reading experience these days doesn't ask readers to feel very much."
She spent the better part of the tour spelling out the complex demands of her craft, the need to open up a story, not close it down. She astonished many by divulging that she'd planned to kill off Lynley's wife some six years before. But the reader reaction to a three-year-old novel was a writer's dream.
"That was exactly what I wanted, the strong reaction. That's the purpose of fiction. Many books tend to be read for the purposes of diversion only. The way I have always seen fiction is that its purpose is to ask people to feel. So it's an interesting phenomenon to be the writer in this kind of situation."
Careless in Red, which sees Lynley for the first time since the death of his wife, typifies the close level of attention to character and place that sets George apart from many in the crime genre. Set in Cornwall, against the backdrop of its surfing community, it plunges the reader into a complex story of relationships and subplots when Lynley, walking the Cornish coastal path in a fog of grief, discovers the body of a young rock climber.
"I made a commitment to character and place. I wanted to have that kind of situation where the characters did grow, change and develop. As a reader I've never much cared for books in which your continuing characters are always the same." It was her fascination with character that led her to write What Became Before He Shot Her, which was lauded by many critics for transcending the crime genre - and condemned by others for daring to do so.
"I'm sure it was disturbing to some people not to have the same kind of approach to crime writing as they're used to," she laughs, "but I never wanted to write the same novel twice. With some writers it seems like they are churning out the same novel over and over again, just changing the names to protect the innocent, as it were. I never wanted to do that. I never wanted to have this sort of cookie-cutter approach to creating a crime novel."
George, 59, first manifested her interest in psychopathology at the age of 7, when she used to scour the daily papers for true crime stories. She wrote her first novel when she was 12, and collected rejection slips on two more books before being published in 1988.
Even then it was only thanks to her infatuation with the British aristocracy's penchant for using commas after their names that Thomas Lynley, Lord Asherton, found his way into the pages of her 1988 novel A Great Deliverance. A bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, it won her the Anthony Award, the Agatha Award, and France's Le Grand Prix de Literature Policiere as well as a two-book contract.
"I never really expected to get published and there was no way I was going to have fun writing about characters exactly like myself," she says. "I was a high school English teacher and it's not really very interesting to write about that. I wanted to create characters I could have fun with." She also wanted to create characters who would allow her to portray the changing face of Britain.
"So many people around the world have this image of Britain that comes to them via the BBC but I like to look at British life as it really is." So deftly does she gauge the British pulse in her novels, the revelation that she is American still draws an incredulous response from many English readers.
In fact, she was the first American crime writer to have her books adapted by the BBC. Her stock response is, "It worked well enough for Henry James". George has never considered setting her novels anywhere else, having fallen in love with all things British in 1966, while studying Shakespeare at a summer school.
She maintains an apartment in London where she spends large chunks of each year researching her novels, but writes from her home on Whitby Island in Seattle's Puget Sound. She rises at 5am each morning to write five pages a day, and says she writes as "a way of keeping the crazies at bay. If I don't stay creative I very quickly become depressed".
Years ago she devised a process that would appease her need for organisation and make the actual writing of the book less frightening, a method she wrote about in her popular 2004 book Write Away, saying, "Craft is there to rescue you when art fails". But she cheerily admits that self-doubt stalks her every day.
"If you are going to try to write a different novel every single time it, of course, only gets scarier and scarier. As Woody Allen once said, when you start writing, you don't know if you have a book or a paragraph."
Careless in Red (Hodder & Stoughton $38.99)
