Stand up comedian, TV writer, and now best-selling crime fiction
novelist Mark Billingham has no shortage of ways to fill his time.
And despite his claim of “never [doing] a proper day’s
work in [his] life”, Billingham has numerous bestselling novels
from the Tom Thorne detective series under his belt, a seventh on
its way, contributed short stories to a number of anthologies,
written essays on the subject of crime, and has written extensively
for film and television.
Not one to mince words, Billingham has strong opinions about his
chosen craft. “For me, if a writer can’t write dialogue,
they can’t write. That’s really my outlook on it. You
can write the most breathtaking, lush prose about the description
of a sunset until you’re blue in the face, but if you can’t
write dialogue you shouldn’t be writing fiction, you should
be writing poetry.”
His favourite crime fiction hero of all time is Sherlock Holmes,
partially due to the fact that he can now “see him as the
crazed, controlling junkie that he clearly was.”
Born and brought up in Birmingham, his first novel, Sleepyhead,
was an instant bestseller in the UK. It has been sold widely throughout
the world and was published in the USA in the summer of 2002.
Mark lives in North London with his wife and two children.
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