“My Crime Novel Addiction Revealed!” – an essay for TueNight.com – Los Angeles

Greetings readers and subscribers!

Here’s an essay I wrote for the online magazine, TueNight.com, about my passion for crime fiction.

I was one of those kids who always had her head in a book. I didn’t just adore reading—I loved being transported to fabulous other worlds, rendered magical by clever fiction writers. The first books I remember reading were those “learn to spell” picture books Dick and Dora. “This is Dick. Run, Dick, run.” I don’t remember Dora doing much running, but Nip sure did.

At age nine, I remember being asked by my teacher to read The Hobbit aloud. I had excellent comprehension skills and a quick eye, so I didn’t stumble over the tricky names or complex dialogue. No one else got up to read to the class. Towards the end of primary school, I was placed in an advanced reading strand along with one other boy and we were granted access to a more challenging set of kids’ literature. To keep up with my insatiable appetite, my mum enrolled me in a borrow-a-book club. Various slim paperbacks started arriving by mail every two weeks. It was so exciting! During lunchtime, I mostly hung out in the school library, sometimes just grabbing books off the shelves based on their cover. I attribute my pedantic grammar and spelling abilities to my voracious appetite for fiction. No wonder I became a writer!

I started hungering for meatier stories. I marveled at Anna Sewell’s novel Black Beauty, written from the point of view of a horse. I read that book so many times I virtually had it memorized.

You can read the rest of the essay here.