Writers Read: Alex Marwood

Alex Marwood is the pseudonym of a former journalist who has worked extensively in the British press. She is the author of the word-of-mouth sensation

The Wicked Girls, which won the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original; The Killer Next Door, which won a Macavity Award for Best Mystery Novel; The Darkest Secret; and The Poison Garden. Her novels have been short-listed for numerous crime writing awards and been optioned for the screen. She lives in south London.

Marwood's new novel is The Island of Lost Girls.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

I’m settling in to writing my next book, which means that my reading habits are taking on their writing pattern. Though I consume books in the manner of someone who fears that all the books will suddenly vanish from the face of the earth, I find it very difficult to read fiction while I’m writing, so my knowledge of contemporary fiction can be quite patchy.

There are a number of reasons for this: I’m always nervous that my focus, which is bad at the best of times, will be drawn away from the subject I’m trying to tackle by the ideas in other people’s novels. If the book is bad, I feel a gnawing sort of rage at the waste of my time, and if it’s good, I fill with melancholic self-criticism and a conviction that my own powers are lacking. So I generally stick, with the odd exception, to non-fic in this period. And obviously, that reading will often be related to the book I’m writing. You might, from the first two books on this list, get a hint of where I’m going with my work in progress. The working title is Boomers, though no doubt there will be reasons to change that by the time it’s published!

Days of Rage – Bryan Burrough

An deep-dive overview of America’s underground terror movements in the early years of the 1970s, this is a mad, broad sweep through a bit of history that seems to have fallen out of many people’s awareness. This study of how the civil rights movements of the 1960s metastasised in the minds of a subset of its followers is superb in every way: jaw-dropping statistics (a bomb a day going off in the States between 1970 and 1974!), beautiful pen-and-ink portraits of how the belief that one is well-intended can transmogrify into a ruthless belief that anyone who doesn’t agree with one is fair game, and moments of shout-out-loud laughter. Honestly, I’m in awe – and its relevance to the current world is hard to ignore.

The Baader-Meinhoff Complex – Stefan Aust

The Baader-Meinhoff gang, otherwise know as the Red Army Faction, was Europe’s equivalent of the Weather Underground. This book takes a literary, rather poetical stance to its subject matter; it’s dense and demanding, and fascinating, and less of a single-sitting read then Burrough’s book. I’m currently reading about the time when the BM went to Palestine to train with the PLO, and the culture clash between the rather solemn Muslims that made up the PLO and this raggedy band of naked-sunbathing German radicals is both sad and hilarious.

Killing for Company – Brian Masters

I have two nesting rituals as I go down into writing mode: I build a piece of flatpack furniture (it was a garden shed this time), and I read this book. Masters’s psych-heavy biography of the British serial killer Dennis Nilsen is a classic, changed the face of the true-crime genre and was the starting-point from which my novel The Killer Next Door grew. I also sometimes read Gordon Burn’s extraordinarily brilliant biog of the folie a deux between Fred And Rose West, Happy Like Murderers, but it’s so disturbing, in a truly visceral way, that I can’t always face it.

The Siege of Mecca - Yaroslav Trofimov

An account of another major incident that seems to have barely registered – partly as a result of severe censorship - on many people’s awareness. In 1979, hundreds of hardline Islamist gunmen descended on Islam’s holiest shrine at the height of the Haj, holding many thousands of pilgrims hostage. This tale of how it happened, and how the Grand Mosque was eventually relieved with the secret help of foreign special forces (non-Muslims are not allowed to enter Mecca), reads like a Boy’s Own adventure and is unputdownable.

None of This Is True – Lisa Jewell

Of course there are exceptions even I will make to my no-fiction rule, and anything Lisa Jewell writes will immediately leap to the top of the pile. Lisa’s an old friend, from the days when we were both categorised under the rather patronising “chick-lit” label, and watching her come over fully to the dark side, and do it so dazzingly well, has been an utter joy. Her Barbara Vine-ish psych thriller The Family Upstairs is one of my all-time favourite books, but dare I say that this gorgeous story of a celebrity podcaster and the stalker who gradually invades her life is even better?