It's not a crime to laugh - if you're Lynda La Plante!

Photo courtesy of the Guernsey Literary Festival
Jenny Kendall-Tobias interviews Lynda La Plante

 

 

 

Lynda La Plante made me laugh this week - even though she's been dubbed The Queen of Crime. Lynda was one of the star speakers at the Guernsey Literary Festival 2014 and for a lady with a dark agenda she proved both light hearted and full of sparkle.

 

The hugely successful writer has mixed with police, forensic scientists and criminals to make her novels and tv scripts authentic and the one thing that comes over from her writing is  a healthy attitude to humour. Like the day she was seated next to a psychiatrist at a posh New York dinner party.  Her head started to whir, she said, at the thought of him  helping with her research, so she asked if she could pay him a visit.  Immediately she could see him thinking: oh no - here's another nutter....

 

Lynda's advice to aspiring writers crosses all genres and is probably the wisest I have heard. New writers, she said, make the mistake of going back to read what they have written.  They think about it, they question it ,and they stop too much to think.  The answer is to always 'keep writing, see where it takes you and never look back.'   She also recommended 'writing in layers' so that, even the author ' never quite knows what is going to come next.'

 

As someone who admits that she has no structure to her writing day, Lynda is clearly very organised managing at times to work up to 13 hours a day.  Her success she puts down to starting life as an actress which meant auditioning in front of the great Brian Rix and starring in BBC's cult classic  Rentaghost.  Linda made her writing breakthrough with the incredibly successful television series The Widows. She also has fond memories of working with Helen Mirren who became synonymous with the small screen's Prime Suspect.

 

Every one of Lynda's novels has become an international best seller -  from Blind Fury and Backlash to The Talisman,  Wrongful Death and Bloodline, the seventh in the popular  Anna Travis series. But despite her success in acting and writing I still think she would have made a brilliant stand-up comic.