I have been a crime fiction fan for thirty years, since reading Thomas Harris’, The Silence of the Lambs, and my enthusiasm for thrillers dates back to Peter Benchley’s Jaws. I had always aspired to write a great crime thriller one day. When I read the Stieg Larsson Millennium Trilogy back in 2008 and came across Lisbeth Salander, I was already writing seriously for children. It was then that I realized the time was ripe for stretching myself creatively and bringing my crime writing plans to fruition. After years of working hard, I had honed my writer’s craft. At the time, no more Salander books had been planned. Larsson was dead. So, I determined to write a new kickass heroine who could fill the void for bereft Salander fans. Her name is George McKenzie and she is The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die.
I took much of my inspiration for the series from my own life. Growing up in a tough housing project in Manchester in the north of England meant that I was weaned on real life crime. Some of the things that happen to the character, Ella in The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die did actually happen to me as a teen. My mother and I were terrorized in our house by feral kids on the prowl at night. We were always poor. It was always a struggle. The streets of cities have a complex subtext of violence, corruption and heartbreak, lurking beneath the grime. My youth in Manchester, my twenties spent in London and my return to Manchester as an adult incubated criminally gripping stories, the seeds of which were sewn inside me in the 1970s and 1980s of my childhood. But my student years at Cambridge University inspired me to write a thriller that was rooted in an academic world, too.
But what sort of a shape would an adult thriller penned by a children’s author take? Back in 2010, when New Adult was a newly mooted age-banding, I realized I wanted to write about a girl on the cusp of adulthood. I wasn’t ready to leave my stories in the hands of a solely middle-aged cast of misanthropes, perverts and murderers (although the series is inevitably littered with those). My heroine, George McKenzie is therefore twenty in the first book and an Erasmus student studying at Amsterdam university. I think her youth brings a freshness and derring-do to the genre, in the same way Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander did to the Millennium Trilogy. By book five – The Girl Who Got Revenge – however, George is turning thirty and a fully-fledged criminologist. Her sidekick, Chief Inspector Paul van den Bergen is turning fifty. I feel that the characters grew as I aged, in real life!
Back to this difficult birth, however… It took me two years to get The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die just right. Rewrite, after rewrite, after rewrite. It grew to 150K words. I cut it back to just over 100K. In the interim, I penned the first six books of the HarperCollins’ Time-Hunters series for 7+ children, under a pseudonym, Chris Blake. When The Girl was polished to perfection, after my second agent had sadly retired, I went on the hunt for a new agent, knowing that “clicking” would be essential for a long-term commitment. Within a few weeks, I had two offers of representation, and though both were from reputable agencies, I followed my gut instincts when I made my choice. Looking back, my judgement was clearly right, and my agent remains both a great friend and my perfect partner in crime fiction.
The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die took a year for him to place – the enthusiasm from HarperCollins in the UK was there immediately following submission, but my imprint had to undergo a lengthy period of restructuring and was not initially in a position to offer. We waited for them, though, and with hindsight, Avon – HarperCollins’ commercial imprint, which publishes great women’s fiction and crime – was always the right British home for my series. I began to see that patience and belief pay off. My debut made it into the UK Kindle top 50 and won an award for the best location in a crime thriller. Yet it has taken a further six years for the series to reach readers in the US. Now, George McKenzie is finally striking out on the other side of the pond thanks to chart-topping publisher, Bookouture. Patience really is a virtue in the world of publishing!
No doubt, being published can be a fraught and emotional rollercoaster ride – I’m just about to hand in my tenth crime-thriller to my Bookouture editor, and I also write historical sagas about nursing in the 1940s – but it’s a ride worth taking. The highs are awesome! It’s the best job in the world. So, if you’re an aspiring author, my advice is to keep writing, aim for the stars, surround yourself with supportive allies and never give up! And if you just happen to be an avid reader of crime thrillers, why not lose yourself in George McKenzie’s world and let her take you on the ultimate walk on the wild side on distant rain-swept shores?
Marnie Riches grew up on a rough estate in north Manchester. Exchanging the spires of nearby Strangeways prison for those of Cambridge University, she gained a Masters in German & Dutch. She has been a punk, a trainee rock star, a pretend artist and professional fundraiser.
Her best-selling, award-winning George McKenzie crime thrillers were inspired by her own time spent in The Netherlands. Dubbed the Martina Cole of the North, she has also authored a series about Manchester’s notorious gangland as well as two books in a mini-series featuring quirky northern PI Bev Saunders.
Detective Jackson Cooke is Marnie’s latest heroine to root for, as she hunts down one of the most brutal killers the north west has ever seen at devastating personal cost.
When she isn’t writing gritty, twisty crime thrillers, Marnie also regularly appears on BBC Radio Manchester, commenting on social media trends and discussing the world of crime fiction. She is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Salford University’s Doctoral School and a tutor for the Faber Novel Writing Course.
