Tag Archives: Anna Smith
The amazing Anna Smith’s new novel To Tell the Truth has been getting some great reviews and there is a fabulous new interview with her from The Evening Times:
NO-ONE can accuse Anna Smith of shirking the big issues in her novels.
Child kidnapping and people trafficking both feature heavily in her new book, which starts off with the abduction of a three-year-old Glasgow girl from her parents’ holiday apartment on the Costa del Sol.
It goes on to introduce a senior New Labour politician with a furtive secret who socialises on a yacht belonging to a corrupt Russian oligarch.
And along the way it explores how certain newspapers exploit other people’s tragedies – the abduction, in this case – to increase sales.
With the Leveson Inquiry in full swing, Anna’s book, To Tell the Truth, is highly topical, but this won’t come as any surprise to anyone who knows her.
Much of the story’s background, and some of its characters, stem from real-life stories she investigated as an award-winning journalist in Glasgow.
“It’s fair to say I’ve spent more than a few years on newspapers, wading through other people’s misery,” is how she puts it.
To Tell the Truth is the second novel to feature her alter ego, Rosie Gilmour, a seasoned news reporter on the fictional Post.
Recovering from a traumatic experience in Glasgow, recounted in the first book, The Dead Won’t Sleep, Rosie finds herself in Spain when the abduction unfolds on a summer day in 1998.
The kidnapping has obvious similarities to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann almost five years ago.
“I thought about this a lot when I was writing the book,” concedes Anna. “But writers use real-life events all the time to trigger off stories.
“I was in Spain at the time, and once I decided to make the new book about people trafficking. I thought that this abduction was the best way to start.
“People have shied away from any dramas – TV or books – about missing children these last few years because of what happened to Madeleine, and of course I understand the sensitivity of that.
“As a journalist I wrote huge articles in defence of the McCanns – what happened to them is the worst thing that could – but as a writer I don’t think child abduction is an issue we should shy away from.
“The abduction in the book isn’t about the McCanns at all.”
One of the book’s most disturbing scenes is set in a dilapidated farm near Tangiers, in Morocco, where young orphans and street children from Romania and Africa – children no-one would miss – are imprisoned in cages.
This, too, has echoes of one of Anna’s real-life encounters. As a journalist, she visited hellish orphanages in Romania.
She says: “I remember these kids, lying in cots, dehumanised and never knowing what it is to be loved or touched, and I wondered, both then and later, ‘what became of these people? What did they grow into?’ ”
One of the book’s central characters has just such a background.
The increasing use of children in pornography, which also crops up in To Tell the Truth, is another issue that has long concerned Anna.
“It has now become so massive because of the internet,” she
“ It’s actually quite terrifying when you research it; there are street children in north Africa and elsewhere on that continent who are worth nothing and they get picked up by people and exploited,” she says
To Tell the Truth, an atmospheric and fast-moving story, is set mostly in Spain and Morocco, although Rosie does return to Glasgow on various occasions and for different reasons: to visit Barlinnie, an East End hostel, and a run-down Saltmarket hostelry that, as Anna writes, definitely isn’t the kind you’d find in the Good Pub Guide.
“There are certain crime novels set in Glasgow that are slightly one-dimensional – set in the city and there’s a murder or series of murders – but I wanted to make Rosie a completely different character,” she says. “I wanted to take her all over the world. I want to give my books an inter-national feel.”
She’s true to her word: her third Rosie Gilmour novel, Refuge, is almost finished, and due out next year. It’s set in Glasgow but some of the action moves to Kosovo.
The first Rosie Gilmour book sold well and the publishers see no reason why the sequel shouldn’t perform likewise. . .
To read the rest of the interview head on over to The Evening Times.
A wonderful interview with Anna Smith about her new novel, a stark and frightening Glaswegian crime novel The Dead Won’t Sleep. Anna Smith has been a journalist for over twenty years and is a former chief reporter for the Daily Record in Glasgow as well as being a former columnist with News of The World. She has covered wars across the world as well as major investigations and news stories from Dunblane to Kosovo to 9/11. The Dead Won’t Sleep is the first thriller in a series featuring crime journalist Rosie Gilmour.
The lovely Anna Smith took the time to answer my questions on her new novel as well as giving valuable insight into her writing process and the themes which her novels incorporate.
Daniel Fraser: How did you come to write The Dead Won’t Sleep?
Anna Smith: I suppose I’ve been writing that novel and the character of Rosie Gilmour, most of my working life as a journalist. I was brought up in newspapers in the 80s and 90s in Glasgow, working as a young reporter in the Daily Record, and quite quickly I found I established myself doing more of the human stories, and often the darker side of the city. As time went on and I eventually became Chief Reporter, I was more and more steeped in the huge crime stories working on backgrounds, which led me to meet many of the characters such as drug addicts, prostitutes, gangsters and dodgy coppers – as well as some terrific police contacts. I was always very moved by the stories, and the great tragedy of how drugs has ravaged entire communities in Glasgow and across Scotland. So a lot of the stories I would work on and the characters I came across, I think sub-consciously I was squirreling away for the future. And when the time was right, I opened my laptop and began writing without any real plan – and The Dead Won’t Sleep was the result. So there’s a lot of myself in Rosie. But she’s not me.
Daniel Fraser: Why did you want to tell that particular story?
Anna Smith: The central story in my novel is about people in positions of power abusing that power for their own ends. There are a lot of people who use their positions like that, from politicians to policemen to the legal profession – and also many more who are in positions of trust. I think a lot of readers identify with a story like that. The main thrust of the novel is Rosie’s determination to expose corrupt police who were using prostitutes. I worked on a story like that in Glasgow and unmasked a detective who was using and abusing prostitutes – he was later allowed to take early retirement through ill health, which I thought was wrong. So stories like that, where vulnerable people are used, were one of the motivating factors. But I also worked on investigations where children were sexually abused by people in positions of trust. When you listen to their stories and how their innocence was stolen from them, leaving them damaged individuals, it kind of stays with you. There are a lot of people out there who grew up in children’s homes and suffered abuse, but always felt they had no voice and they would never be believed. I looked back over the years at many of the people I had interviewed and I gradually built up a picture of the fictional characters I have created.
Daniel Fraser: Please could you tell us a little more of the background to the novel?
Anna Smith: The novel is set in Glasgow in the 90s – when the city and housing schemes are gripped in the heroin epidemic that was sweeping the country. When a teenage prostitute is washed up on the beach, the story only becomes news because she was 14 and from a children’s home. Rosie is given key information from another prostitute and she sets about trying to expose the key figures at the top of the establishment – senior police detectives who were using street women. During this investigation, she also discovers a child abuse ring being run from a children’s home, linking top figures in the legal establishment, and she knows that this is a story that will be almost impossible to get into the newspaper. In the midst of the story, we learn little by little of Rosie’s background. She is a troubled character because of a childhood trauma, which we don’t hear fully about until the middle of the book. But she wakes up crying a lot, because of a dream she has which takes her back to a scene she witnessed as a kid. So she begins as a bit of a tormented soul, and perhaps that is why she is so keen to listen to the harrowing stories of others.
Daniel Fraser: There are consistently some fairly dark themes running through your books, do you think that crime fiction is particularly adept to examine how these elements are present in society?
Anna Smith: The story does examine and deal with some very dark themes – from drug addiction, prostitution and child sex abuse. And there are many TV dramas these days and crime novels that do examine these elements in society. Often they are dealt with in true crime novels which are popular. But I think when you write fiction, you can take the themes further and explore them.
Daniel Fraser: Rosie is an amazingly strong and resourceful character, with whom you share a profession, did you draw on a lot of your own characteristics and personal experience when creating her?
Anna Smith: Everyone who reads the novel and knows me thinks Rosie is me. But she’s not. She may have began as me, perhaps a bit like the opening scene, but I found that within a very short time, Rosie became her own person. It’s strange, because to me she is very real, and once I start to write anything involving her, I do find myself morphing into her, and that she is speaking with my voice. But that’s because I am in the character, it’s not absolutely who I am. I do share a lot of her characteristics and my voice would always be one of indignation like Rosie’s, when she is moved by people being hurt or abused. I share her compassion for the underdog and her fearlessness to step forward and say if she thinks something is wrong. So I built her out of someone like me, and yes, I used plenty of my own personal experiences to create her.
Daniel Fraser: With your journalistic background what aspects of your writing did you find you had to alter most radically when writing fiction?
Anna Smith: My background has always been tabloid journalism of the red top type! So writing has always been punchy, sharp and colourful. A good tabloid journalist will be able to describe a situation in half the words of a broadsheet writer, but the trick is to make it just as good. However writing a novel is vastly different. So it was important to stand back, look at the story and the characters and let them develop along with the story. Though I still have to stop myself, because I do write very quickly – too quickly sometimes – because of my obsession with deadlines, which is a throwback to being a daily newspaper journalist. But I’m working on it! Keep taking deep breaths!
Daniel Fraser: What do you like to do when you are not writing?
Anna Smith: When I’m not writing I like to take plenty of exercise – power walking or training at the gym to keep my weight down. I live by myself, in a bit of a clutter because I don’t particularly like housework! I spend time between my house in Scotland and in Ireland, and also Spain. So I keep moving a lot, and seem to have separate lives in each place, which suits me. When I’m writing, I’m very isolated, and although it’s what drives me every day and I love it – it’s quite lonely, and after a few weeks of digging in, I really miss the company of friends. So when I can, I like to get together with those closest to me, eat good food and drink some decent red wine. I travelled all over the world as a journalist, mostly to troublespots, and it was all a bit of a blur. In time, I’d like to take some trips and spend longer periods in certain countries, like South America, Spain and Sri Lanka.
Daniel Fraser: Did you have an idea in your mind of an “ideal” reader when writing your books or do you write for yourself first?
Anna Smith: I don’t really think of an ideal reader, because I think if you write for certain types of people you are restricting yourself. I tend to create the characters and the storyline and see where it goes – and just hope that readers will empathise with them and be interested enough to see what happens to them.
Daniel Fraser: What are you working on now?
Anna Smith: I’ve just finished reading the bound proof of my second novel in the series – To Tell The Truth. But for the past few months I’ve been working on book three. I’m already a third of the way through it, having worked hard in at my home in the gale-lashed west of Ireland. Now I’m about to head to the Costa del Sol until nearly Christmas, where I will absorb myself in the novel and hope to have made great strides with it before I return. It will be good to feel the sun on my back when I’m having a morning walk along the beach planning my next chapter!
Daniel Fraser: What is your favourite book?
Anna Smith: It’s hard to think of a favourite book. I loved A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini. It was a wonderful sweep of a novel, so beautifully written that I kept going back and savouring every paragraph! I was also able to identify with it, as I was working on an assignment in the Afghan border with Pakistan at the time when the novel is set, so I can picture the backdrop and the atmosphere and unrest among the people very well when the Taliban took over.
Daniel Fraser: Who is your favourite fictional character?
Anna Smith: I don’t really have a favourite fictional character. Usually whoever I’m reading or if I’m absorbed in a TV drama, then that is my favourite character at any given time.
Daniel Fraser: Do you have any tips for the aspiring writer?
Anna Smith: The only tip I can give to an aspiring writer is to keep believing in yourself. It will happen.
Daniel Fraser: What do you think of eBooks, online writing, blogs, fan-fiction etc? Are you involved in any online writing yourself?
Anna Smith: I’ve never read an eBook before, though a lot of my friends have Kindles and I can see the attraction of them. I like the feel and smell of a brand new novel, and whenever I pick one off the shelves and buy it, I treat it like a bit of gold dust. I read all the acknowledgments, the dedications, everything on the jacket and then I settle into the first chapter. Buying a book for me is a ritual, and while eBooks will always have their place and I’m sure are great in terms of getting your novel out there, give me a novel to hold and caress any day of the week! The subject of online blogging is a bit of a thorny issue among print journalists, who don’t like people doing it. But I blog online for the Daily Mail RightMinds section as often as I can, because they give me a page with a picture of the jacket of my novel, and the Mail Online is now the biggest read newspaper in the world. So it’s good publicity, and since I don’t have a newspaper column with the demise of the News of the World, it also gives me a platform where I can rant about various issues.
Daniel Fraser: Are you optimistic about the future of books and reading?
Anna Smith: I’m very optimistic about the future of books when I see young kids reading avidly. I just wish more of them would read more, instead of so many hours being spent in front of the television or a computer. If young people can find the love of books that our generation did, then the future will be bright.
Anna Smith has been a journalist for more than 20 years. This book is the first in her series featuring tabloid journalist Rosie Gilmour and smacks you with one thunderbolt after another, right between the eyes, from page one through to the end. Smith’s writing style, and the way the storyline develops, in The Dead Won’t Sleep is excellent. But the subject of the investigations that Anna and her colleagues carry out is shocking and leaves you feeling raw, though not necessarily in a nice way.
In brief, a decomposing body is washed up on a beach near Glasgow. The body belongs to 14 year old Tracy Eadie – already a drug addict and prostitute, despite her tender years. She went missing some six months earlier, after going on the run from the children’s home that she was living in…
Although this story shocked and, at times, downright horrified me, I loved it. It is a fairly easy read but well-crafted and captivating. Rosie Gilmour is a welcome addition to the small group of strong female characters in today’s crime fiction. I am looking forward to getting to know her better!
Highly recommended.
Read the whole of Amanda Gillies’ great review over on Euro Crime.
The body of a young teenage hooker is found washed up on the beach near Glasgow. This stark event barely captures a headline in the cynical world of tabloid newspapers. This is Glasgow in the 1990s and she’s just another dead heroin addict.
But Tracey Eadie was only fourteen years old and came from a children’s home in Glasgow. How did she get from there to where she is now?
One of Tracey’s friends on the street contacts Rosie Gilmour, a tabloid journalist. She gives Rosie a tip off that’s dynamite, too hot to print but impossible to ignore.
Rosie has covered many dark stories in her career. Her background has plenty in common with Tracey’s and her own life could have gone either way. Her investigation exposes a sordid tale of corruption and child abuse that leads from the murky streets of Glasgow to the very top of the establishment.
For Rosie, it is the only story worth telling, but she soon discovers that the forces united against her will stop at nothing to make sure nobody ever gets to the truth.
Learn more about the author, Anna Smith, over on her website.
Read More: The Dead Won’t Sleep
“At Shots Ezine we’re always looking out for interesting debut novels, and though not a debut novel as such, The Dead Won’t Sleep is Anna Smith’s debut crime novel and one to look out for if you enjoy tough urban noir.
Following the journalistic traditions of fellow Scottish crime-writers Val McDermid and Tony Black, Anna Smith has been a journalist for over twenty years and is a former chief reporter for the Daily Record in Glasgow.
She has covered wars across the world as well as major investigations and news stories from Dunblane to Kosovo to 9/11. She writes a regular newspaper column in the News of The World with a readership of more than a million in Scotland alone.
The Dead Won’t Sleep is the first thriller in a series featuring crime journalist Rosie Gilmour.”
Read more about Anna over at the Shots Magazine blog…
Read more: Dead Won’t Sleep
