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We invite the public to post reviews to our catalog by logging into our online catalog. Reviews will then be posted to this blog. Comments can be added to existing posts or may be added as separate reviews on our catalog
APRIL 1, 2009
Meet the Author ~ David Hewson

  photo Mark Bothwell

Please welcome our guest blogger, British Author, David Hewson. Read on for a heads up on what makes his character, Nic Costa, tick and a bit of insight into his latest novel in this fascinating series, Dante's Numbers

"The worst advice budding authors ever get is 'write about what you know'. Do that and you're halfway bored already, and about to share it. I believe in writing about what you don't know, so that you have to discover your fictional world first for yourself, then build it brick by brick for your readers. This is why my series is set in Rome usually). In order to write it I had to move there temporarily, enroll at language school to learn Italian, and try to think, speak and act like a Roman. In a way this kind of activity is second nature. Until I became a full-time author a few years back I'd been a busy journalist for papers like the London Times and Sunday Times, so research comes naturally to me. Whether it's digging up the ancient pagan religion of Mithraism, as I did for the fifth book in the series, The Seventh Sacrament, or trying to find traces of Caravaggio in modern Rome in the sixth The Garden of Evil, I'm happy trudging those cobbled streets in search of inspiration. But fiction isn't journalism. It's about subjective, not objective truth, a search for questions, not answers. The issues I try to approach in these stories are more complex, and more open than any I could tackle within the strict rigors of newspaper reporting. My principle vehicle for doing this is the series protagonist, a Roman detective called Nic Costa. I deliberately set out to try to break the mold with Nic. He's not middle-aged, melancholic, alcoholic, divorced, miserable, cynical... you know the picture? No, he's young, a little naive, ordinary, and fallible, but always, always, shot through with integrity and decency, the kind of straight, good human being you'd really want around when things go wrong. Around him I've built a regular cast of characters who hopefully add some variety to the mix, and let me try to produce a different kind of book with each title. This is my way of avoiding Conan Doyle syndrome, the perennial disease of series writers who end up hating their creations and desperate to kill them. I can honestly say I feel more enthused by Nic and his colleagues now, as I write the ninth book, than ever. So at least he works for me. In the latest book in the series, Dante's Numbers, I throw a curve ball into proceedings. This starts off in Rome as usual, at the premiere of a big budget CGI horror movie of Dante's Inferno. But after some decidedly nasty events the story travels to San Francisco for the rest of he book, where Nic and his colleagues find themselves in the middle of a murder mystery very much set in the history of the city by the bay, not their native Italy. Why move them? I like shifting things from time to time. In Rome, my characters are at home, in charge of their own domain. When they travel they become strangers, a little vulnerable, and liable to show new sides to their character. In San Francisco a story that, at the start, appears to be linked to the work of Dante soon melds with a more recent fantasy, Hitchcock's wonderful movie Vertigo. So you get what I think is a typical book from me - complex, textured, twisting, unpredictable, a reader's book, not some super-quick, linear airport read. But it's quite unlike anything I've written before, or since (the next book being finished, and the one after close to completion). If you like them you can find lots of original research photos and other material on my web site

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Category: Meet the Author

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