SHOTSMAG CONFIDENTIAL

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Romy Hausmann on How a Sausage Seller made Her become a Crime Writer Posted: 23 Jun 2021 11:30 PM PDT   When I started writing in 2009, I never thought that one day I would end up as a thriller writer. I rarely read thrillers myself and when I did, I couldn't understand what attracted people to this genre. For me, blood and any form of slaughter were not exciting, just disgusting I have to admit though, there wasn't a lot that I knew of the genre and probably lumped all novels together. There were no corpses in my early stories; it was never about physical survival for my main characters. Instead, I wrote about young women trying to find their place in life. Like the story of the sausage seller Lisa, who escapes from her small village to a big city because she believes she will find a better life there – but, of course, she is wrong. I assumed that I had written a coming of age story, full of absurdities and crude humour. Although there was also a bit of suffering as the shadow of her mother's suicide still lay upon Lisa. I used this element more like a literary tool to show that no place in the world will ever make you happy as long as you don't face your own inner demons. Still, if I had been asked what genre this story fits into, I would have immediately said: It's mostly a comedy.  In fact, this book was released – and it was a big flop. I got four or five rather mixed reviews and that only because I gave the book away in various book groups. Funnily enough, in the end I actually became a thriller writer because of a rather disastrous review. It said: "Dear Romy, next time please write about what you probably understand more of: mass murderers, psychopaths or little boys who drown newborn cats – but don't disguise this psychological nightmare with a cute cover and sell it as a funny novel". You could say that I hadn't even noticed what kind of story I had apparently written and how it had affected my handful of readers (poor them!). Well, I still don't think that I write about mass murderers and I would never let a kitten drown. But eventually I did find my literary home in psychological thriller writing. I believe that it is not only blood or scary creaking stairs that make a thriller captivating for us readers, but the emotions of the main characters that we cannot escape. Deep down, we all long for the same things: security, love, attention. And it is also the same thing that we fear: loss in any form. The loss of a loved one, the loss of the life we know, the loss of control. I did a lot of research on the human psyche, especially anxiety, and found out that in psychology, a distinction is made between fear as a state and fear as a trait. While the fear of a state is a temporary emotion resulting from a real danger (like creaking stairs), the trait anxiety leads to situations being assessed as dangerous even without an acute threat. So, in a figurative sense, I still write about the Lisas of this world, normal people with fears that have consolidated through their personal life experiences and that have developed their character. And then I create an external threat that confronts them with these very fears. But – just like us real people – the characters try to evade this confrontation. Either they try to repress it or eliminate it as quickly as possible and by all means necessary. Both ways are risky, and so the characters become the greatest danger to themselves.  You will see what I mean by this in my debut thriller Dear Child. Yes, there is a crime, there are corpses, a cracking skull and a little blood. But above all, there are main characters who want to protect themselves from loss – the loss of their family, of their view of the world and of their own identity.  And that's exactly what I learned to love about the thriller genre. It's a genre with so many possibilities. It is so much more than superficial horror. There is room for psychological studies and great emotions. It can reflect our society and make us not only bite our nails but also think. Who would have ever thought that a sausage seller made me realise that? Sleepless by Romy Hausmann (Quercus Publishing) Out Now It's over, my angel. Today I'm going to die. Just like her. He's won. It's been years since Nadja Kulka was convicted of a cruel crime. After being released from prison, she's wanted nothing more than to live a normal life: nice flat, steady job, even a few friends. But when one of those friends, Laura von Hoven - free-spirited beauty and wife of Nadja's boss - kills her lover and begs Nadja for her help, Nadja can't seem to be able to refuse. The two women make for a remote house in the woods, the perfect place to bury a body. But their plan quickly falls apart and Nadja finds herself outplayed, a pawn in a bizarre game in which she is both the perfect victim and the perfect murderer...

John Dryden on Passenger List - From Podcast to Novel Posted: 23 Jun 2021 10:00 PM PDT   It all started with a missing plane… The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was most expensive search operation in aviation history. It had been a regular scheduled international passenger flight that took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport to its planned destination, Beijing on the evening of 8th March 2014. Everything seemed normal. The crew communicated with air traffic control around thirty eight minutes after take-off when the flight was over the South China Sea. And then it just disappeared from the radar screens. Later military radars revealed that the plane had deviated westwards from its planned flight path towards the vast India Ocean. Over the coming weeks there were new theories every day about what might have happened and who was responsible. Was it the pilot, who had recently gone through a religious conversion? Was it the two passengers travelling with fake passports? Had the plane been hijacked and diverted? Were the passengers being kept hostage in a hanger somewhere? It was a global mystery.  What impacted me most was the relatives of the passengers, the pain they were having to endure in the gaze of the media. Imagine being told you had lost a precious child or partner or parent without any further information or knowledge of how or why, of what had happened. The pain was etched into their faces as they turned up to the many briefing and press conferences and as they gradually lost confidence in the official investigation. Without facts, whilst the fate of the plane was still a mystery, they had one thing they could cling on to; hope. Hope that their loved-ones may still be alive out there somewhere. Air travel has always fascinated me. As a child I was a regular "unaccompanied minor" flying from the Middle East where my parents worked, to school in England. I used to dread arriving at Heathrow where my aunt would meet me and dutifully deliver me to a small boarding school in Eastbourne. It all seemed so dreary to my eight-year-old self. On the flight I'd looked down at the vast empty desert and pray that the flight would have to make a crash landing and that I'd join a tribe of Bedouins and go on a great adventure. It never happened and thankfully I've never been involved in an air crash. They are incredibly rare. Maybe that's why they are so fascinating. Cock-pit recordings of doomed flights are striking by the lack of panic. Flight crews always sound so calm and professional, doing what they've been trained to do, or maybe they are clinging to the one thing left to cling to; hope that they will make it out alive. A career in writing stories and scripts and producing audio dramas followed, and after the disappearance of MA 370 I became quite obsessed with plane disappearances of which there are a few – flights that have simply disappeared with no conclusive answers as to where, how or why.  So to my podcast series Passenger List, which is now a novel… It's a mystery thriller about a plane, Atlantic Flight 702 that goes missing between London and New York. Six months after the disappearance, Kaitlin Le, a college student whose twin brother Conor was one of the passengers, goes on her on a quest to discover the truth. She has long lost faith in the official investigation which has concluded that a bird-strike caused the plane to crash in one of the deepest parts of the Atlantic, and against the wishes of her parents, puts her degree course on hold to obsessively pursue her own personal investigation. She makes contact with other relatives of the passengers on board and becomes increasingly convinced that there are darker forces trying to conceal the truth. It's a very human story of grief and coming to terms with the sudden loss of a loved one, but it's also a deep mystery, circling in on itself as the truth becomes harder and harder for Kaitlin to find. The idea of making a fiction podcast using just "found sound" was immensely appealing. The whole story was constructed from tapped phone calls, cock-pit recordings, FBI interrogations and, of course, Kaitlin's personal recordings – she meticulously records everything she does and every encounter in the hope of going over it again and again and finding some nugget of information that may lead her to the truth. I saw it as a story about a fruitless quest for answers where, in the end there are none. But I found myself also going down the same rabbit hole as Kaitlin, and the further I went the more real the world of the story became and I didn't want to let go until I had all the answers. This wasn't something just I experienced but, to my surprise, the podcast gave birth to a global community of amateur investigators picking through every clue and piece of evidence in the podcast, as if the story were real. Working on the novel helped me complete the journey. Having only "found sound" in the audio series was compelling but it was also limiting. It meant there was could be no "interior" Kaitlin. In the novel, I could let the reader experience the very personal journey she goes on. The one thing that keeps Kaitlin going is hope; hope that, despite all the odds, her investigation might lead her to finding not just the truth about what happened to Flight 702, but finding her brother alive.  Passenger List by John Dryden (Published by Orion) Out Now A missing plane. A cabin full of suspects. One woman's quest for the truth. When Atlantic Airlines Flight 702 disappears mid-flight between London and New York, the world is stunned. With the public clamouring for answers, authorities seem at a loss as to how to explain the plane's disappearance. There were 256 passengers on Flight 702, with many carrying dark secrets on board with them. Could one of them hold the truth behind the plane's disappearance? College student Kaitlin Le's beloved twin brother Conor was on that plane. She refuses to believe the official statements, or to join her parents in their blind acceptance of Conor's death. But as she journeys deeper into the murky heart of what really happened on board that plane, it becomes clear she's drawing attention to herself. And there are some people who would rather the truth behind the fate of Flight 702 stayed buried...

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