British crime novelist Elizabeth George kicks off 2024 Southern Voices Festival
You don’t have to be British, and you don’t have to be a detective to write a good British crime novel, but you do have to be a good writer.
That’s what made it work for Elizabeth George, an award-winning novelist who kicked off the 2024 Southern Voices Festival at the Hoover Public Library Friday night.
George, who has authored 21 British crime novels and had her books turned into a BBC television series, spoke to a full house in the 250-seat Hoover Library Theatre for about an hour, including a 20-minute question-and-answer session.
She shared the story of how she came to be a writer and the process she goes through to write a book.
George said she was an introverted child who grew up in a small family in California isolated from most of her extended family and found the life she wanted by reading books. She loved the Little Golden Books series and other children’s books, including The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew book series.
“I loved reading series where I would go back and meet the same characters time and time again, and I especially liked series where the characters grew and changed and developed,” she said.
She decided she wanted to not only read books but to write stories as well. By the seventh grade, she had written her first novel — a mystery, and she wrote many short stories as well.
George went on to become a high school English teacher and taught for 13½ years. As summer neared each year, she would feel an anxiety she didn’t understand, but she later figured out it was that the summer gave her uninterrupted time to write, but she was afraid to do it, she said.
She didn’t know what to write about, she said. People often say to write what you know about, but she considered the things she knew about to be boring, she said. And she had absolutely no imagination, so writing science fiction, fantasy or a romantic suspense novel was off the table, she said.
A turning point came when she was asked to teach a class on writing a mystery, she said. She started reading British mystery books and decided she wanted to write one of her own. She elected to write a British procedural crime novel.
She created characters and decided the settings based on a visit she had made to England in high school. She wrote the book in 1983 but had it rejected. She decided to visit England again to get material for her second novel as an adult, but it was rejected, too.
In 1985, she got it right with her third attempt, “A Great Deliverance,” which was accepted and went on to win the Agatha Award for Best First Novel in 1988 and the 1989 Anthony Award in the same category. It was nominated for an Edgar Award in 1988 as well.
In subsequent novels, George has continued writing about the same characters, Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley (who is part of the British noble class) and his partner, Detective Sgt. Barbara Havers (a lower-class woman and the exact opposite of Lynley).
George said that, when she started, she didn’t know a lot about England or about things such as forensic science, but she has never let lack of knowledge about a subject stop her from writing about it.
She does, however, do a lot of research and interviews to learn about the topics and places she writes about to make the stories feel real, she said.
After she puts the story together and does two to three drafts, she presents it to a “cold reader” and asks the person questions about what they read to assess whether she achieved the impact she desires, she said. Then, she makes revisions and sends it to her editor.
Dave Koski, a Mountain Brook resident and voracious reader who attended George’s talk Friday night, said he found it very interesting that George is able to write about subjects of which she has no formal training.
“She’s not a police officer, a lawyer, a forensic pathologist,” he said.
He also found the writing process that George uses to construct her stories interesting as well.
Kathy Davis, a Helena resident, said she came Friday night thinking George was British but was surprised to know she was raised in southern California and now lives in Washington. She thinks George is a very courageous person to tackle a British crime novel.
Carrie Steinmehl, the assistant director of the Hoover Public Library and chairwoman of the Southern Voices Festival, said George is her favorite author.
Steinmehl said she hated reading as she grew up because her obsessive compulsive disorder made reading difficult. Between college and graduate school, she was working as a receptionist at a concrete company and had a lot of down time. Her mother suggested she take something to read in the slow times, and she read “A Great Deliverance.”
“I tore through those 413 pages in a matter of days,” Steinmehl said. “Something about her writing just clicked in my head, and I was hooked. Over the course of that summer, I read every book she had written up to that point, and I have devoured every single thing she has written since. She is the first author who allowed me to enjoy reading, and for that she is my hero to whom I will forever be grateful.”
The Southern Voices Festival kicked off Sunday with two concerts by power ballad and rock star John Waite and continued on Tuesday with a reception for artist Katie Baldwin.
The festival concludes Saturday with an authors conference that will kick off with historical fiction writer Kate Quinn and also include Yasmin Angoe, John Archibald, Kim Cross, Kristin Harmel, Daniel Nayeri and Kenan Orhan. The conference is scheduled to run from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.