S. 3, Ep. 5: A Chat with Thriller Author Zoë Sharp

Debbi Mack interviews thriller author Zoë Sharp on the Crime Cafe podcast. The transcript is below, if you’d like to read it. Debbi: Hi everyone! This is the Crime Cafe, your podcasting source of great crime, suspense and thriller writing. I am your host, Debbi Mack. Before I bring on my guest, let me remind you that The Crime Cafe 9 Book Set is available for sale at all major and some minor online retailers. The Crime Cafe Short Story Anthology is also available online for sale and it’s $0.99 for the anthology and $1.99 for the boxed set, so check it out. Just go to debbimack.com and look under “Crime Cafe” or “Books” to find the books there. And with that, I would like to now introduce an author who created one of the most awesome female protagonists ever. The character is Charlie Fox and the author is Zoe Sharp. Zoe, it’s great to have you here today! Zoe: Thank you very much for inviting me, Debbi. It’s a pleasure to be here. Debbi: I can’t tell you how happy I am to have you on! So, you have one of the most fascinating bios ever! You actually wrote your first novel at 15? Zoe: I did! It dates me horribly to say my father typed it up with carbon copies. And it went out to publishers and received what’s known in the trade as rave rejections. So, it still sits in a box in the attic and my father, bless him, keeps threatening to get it out and put it on eBay. Debbi: Oh, that’s so cool! Zoe: At which point I remind him that it won’t be long before I am choosing his nursing home and he should be nice to me. Debbi: Good for you! And you became a photojournalist. I think that’s very cool and you mention that Charlie Fox grew out of the death threats you received as a photojournalist. What was that about? Zoe: Yes! That was, that was a weird set of circumstances. I was working in the motoring field. I was involved with a lot of auto magazines and I was sent to see a collection of cars with a guy. When I arrived two things happened. The guy was very surprised to see that I was not on my own as he was clearly expecting, and the collection of cars did not exist. So, it was around the time when a real estate agent in the UK, called Suzy Lamplugh, who’d gone to show a client around a vacant house, and was never seen again. And the death threat letters started, you know, shortly after that incident. And I was kind of wondering whether it was the guy who’d been hoping to get me on my own. So, it tends to concentrate your mind. Started me learning an awful lot of self-defense. But it also sort of sparked off the character of Charlie Fox. Debbi: Well I can just imagine. That must have been very scary. Zoe: It was first annoying and only afterwards when the ramifications sank in did it get a lot more scary. Debbi: [laughs] Yeah. Well I love Charlie Fox. When I was a kid watching action movies, it was always the women who put themselves in harm’s way and who would do what I would call “tripping over their shoelaces”. Running with the man and then they would fall or something. Zoe: Yes, always sprain their ankle. Debbi: Exactly! They would need some sort of help. But, I’ve always enjoyed strong women on movies and on TV. When I was a kid I used to watch The Avengers and I just loved Mrs. Peel and, and Honey West. I’m dating myself now. But… Zoe: It was exactly those kind of characters that I wanted to get to with Charlie Fox. And it still bugs me that even now you have to specify that a female character is strong. Debbi: Yes. Zoe: Whereas you don’t have to do that with a male character. Nobody ever describes, you know, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher as a strong male character because you just, you kind of assume that unless there is something very specific about the character, he is going to be strong just by the very fact that he’s male. So, I like to write about capable female characters and even in the stand alone, I’ve done the female character of Kelly Jacks, is still very capable and,