The Joys of Binge Reading

This week on The Joys of Binge Reading to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, a little bit of green. Irish thriller author Catherine Ryan Howard with her latest nerve shredding suspense Runtime.

It’s a book that was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Crime Fiction Book Of The Year, and is a Top 10 Kindle Best Seller.

Hi there. I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler, and on Binge Reading today, Catherine talks about her psychological thriller about an actress cast in a horror film that begins to mirror real life.

And as well as talking about Run Time she also tells us how she plots her intricate stories – she has a very special Excel spreadsheet for the job – and how she came to be dubbed the Queen of High Concept thrillers.

Links to Things Discussed In The Show

Beyond the Woods: the horror movie Catherine’s brother was in:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Woods

The TV Set: a comedy movie about making a comedy – one of Catherine’s favorites: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0473709/

Jurassic Park: (1990 novel by Michael Crichton) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Park_(novel)

Netflix documentary on Sophie Toscan du Plantier

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14681732/

Sophie Toscan du Plantier: Unsolved Cork murder:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Sophie_Toscan_du_Plantier

Danya Kukafka: Notes On An Execution: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57773248-notes-on-an-execution

The Secret Race: Inside The Hidden World of the Tour De France: https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Race-Inside-Hidden-France/dp/034553042X

The Quiet Tenant: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/705718/the-quiet-tenant-by-clemence-michallon/

Michael Connelly: https://www.michaelconnelly.com/writing/desert-star/

Strong Irish Crime and Thriller Writers:

Liz Nugent: https://www.liznugent.com/

(Liz is coming up on Binge Reading mid year.)

Jane Casey: (Maeve Kerrigan series) https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1173340.Jane_Casey

Jo Spain: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14190033.Jo_Spain

Jo on Binge Reading: https://thejoysofbingereading.com/jo-spain-best-selling-irish-thrillers/

Andrea Carter: https://andreacarterbooks.com/

Dervla Mctiernan: https://dervlamctiernan.com/

Where To Find Catherine Ryan Howard Online

Website: https://catherineryanhoward.com/

Instagram: @cathryanhoward

As usual we got a historical fiction giveaway – New Year’s Historical Fiction – lots of historical fiction free for download, including Tainted Fortune Book # 7 in my Old California Of Gold and Blood Mystery series.

DOWNLOAD HERE IF BUTTON DOESN’T WORK! https://books.bookfunnel.com/historicalgiveaway0423/yk7cg8skez

GET FREE HISTORICAL FICTION

Links to Catherine’s books and the giveaway as usual can be found in the show notes for this episode on the website, www.thejoysofbinge eading.com.

If you enjoy the show, don’t forget to leave us five stars, or a pleasing comment on your favorite podcast provider, so others hear about us and can enjoy the show too.

But now here is Catherine. Hello there, Catherine, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us

Introducing thriller author Catherine Ryan Howard

Catherine Ryan Howard: Thank you so much for having me.

Irish thriller author Catherine Ryan Howard

Jenny Wheeler: Now you are in Dublin and I’m in Auckland, so we’re just about as far apart as we could be, but it’s wonderful to be able to talk directly like this.

Catherine Ryan Howard: I think if, we went any closer, you’d start coming back to me. We are literally on the opposite sides of the world.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s right. Look, you’re an award-winning, internationally best selling thriller writer whose books have been optioned for screen, From your debut, you’ve enjoyed a great level of success. Tell us how you actually got started on this trip.

Catherine Ryan Howard: Thank you for that lovely recap. I always wanted to be a writer. As I work, I have a picture on the wall behind my computer screen here of me aged eight, and it was taken on Christmas morning.

I’m in my night dress. I’ve got a little ponytail coming out either side of my head and I’m tapping away on the typewriter that I asked Santa Claus to bring me.

So, I always wanted to be a writer. Now, when I was younger, when I was in my twenties, I made a mistake, which was that I became obsessed with getting published.

I would read all the books and I’d go to all the talks and I knew exactly what I needed to do. But I never actually did any writing, which it turns out is a crucial part of getting published.

When I finally realized that’s what I needed to do, I had read an article about an employee who disappeared off a Disney cruise ship.

A Disney story got Catherine’s fiction career launched

And I used to work for Disney. I used to work on all Disney World in Florida. That’s why I was reading the article, but it mentioned something called the International Cruise Victims Organization.

Now, I had never been on a cruise. I certainly haven’t gone on one since, or I’m planning to go.

But when I started researching maritime law, I basically discovered that, if you go on a cruise, it’s like going on holiday to a country where there’s no police. And I thought that’s a great setting for a thriller.

I finally sat down and started writing it. And once I did that, once I forgot all the silly, being obsessed with looking for an agent and how to do this, once I just sat down and started writing it, actually, I wouldn’t say it was easy cause it’s been a very long road.

But then everything happened quite quickly.

I got an agent, she got me my first book deal, and then we were off to the races after that.

Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. Was that first book the one that you got inspired to write, was that the first one that was actually published?

Catherine Ryan Howard: Yes. It was called Distress Signals. Prior to that, write three chapters of something or five chapters of something.

But I never tried to write crime. I was always again, trying to write – like -stupidly what I thought would get me published. My heart wasn’t in really.

But I should have tried to write crime from the beginning. Because that’s what I love. That’s what I love to read and have been reading since I was way too young to be reading crimes.

Write the book you want to read but can’t find

Once I realized, and I say this to other writers, like my favorite advice is write the book you want to read but can’t find on the shelf.

And I think once I did that, everything then clicked into place.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. Now this book that we are talking about today Run Time, which is the latest one that you’ve published. It’s the story of a down on her luck former soap actress.

She’s had a wonderful career in soap. She thinks she’s going to use it as a platform for launching herself into international stardom.

She almost slaps the soap people down and says, “I’m moving on to bigger things.”

And then she has difficulties and she is desperate enough to take this role in a rather B grade horror movie.

As soon as she gets onto the set weird things start happening, which mirror what’s supposed to be happening in the script.

You’ve said that the original idea was inspired by your brother. Can you tell us about that connection

Catherine Ryan Howard: He loves when I do interviews about this book because he gets a mention.

He is an actor, and a few years ago he was in an independent Irish horror movie called Beyond the Woods. And of course he was telling me all about the experience of being on set.

And one of the things he said, and it will sound very familiar if you’ve read Runtime or seen Beyond The Woods, because it was filmed in this house out in the middle of nowhere in the core countryside, in the dead of winter overnight.

Perfect cover for the perfect crime…

They were shooting everything in the movie at night, and he said one of the first things they did is the director had to go to the local police station. and say, look, if someone calls you at four in the morning to say, “I hear screams, I think someone’s getting murdered, they’re not. It’s just us filming.”

And of course, being a crime writer, I immediately thought, what if it is someone getting murdered? That’s a great cover story.

You’re giving yourself a bit of time to get away, a headstart. When I sat down to write the book, that idea turned into something else.

But that’s the initial seed. And I loved the idea of there being a script for a horror movie, that when the actors go to film it, the same things that are happening in the script start to happen, on the set.

Because of course, your first question I think would be, is this really happening? Or is my director, secretly filming me or something? It’s hard to know what’s real and what’s not. And I think that’s at the core of the novel.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, exactly. You do open with a scene where the director and assistant go and knock on someone’s door and say, if, you hear any screaming, don’t worry. And I immediately thought, oh, what a perfect cover for a crime. Exactly that. The story does show a very close understanding of the filming process, what happens on set and all the different roles that there are in the production side of things, and I wondered if you’d had any personal experience of that yourself?

Catherine Ryan Howard: I really don’t. First of all, my brother was a great resource, of course, and I have a couple of other friends who’d be involved in the industry.

The movie industry’s insider stories

If there was something specific I wanted to know, I would go and ask them. And then I made sure after I had written it, that I had done it right. But I actually love movies about movies, so I love for your consideration movies like the TV Set, which is about trying to get, a comedy made. and they’re both comedies.

I love all that kind of insider, inside the industry story. I wouldn’t have any deep knowledge of it, but I think there’s a lot of parallels between being an actress and being a writer in that you’re both in this entertainment industry, in a creative industry.

I used every little thing I had heard about. There is some stuff that literally I got from people I know, especially there’s a scene towards the beginning where Adele, the main character, goes to audition for a commercial and my brother has done lots of commercial auditions and I was asking him, what are they like?

He said, the funniest thing is you’re often given completely contradictory instructions so that you go into audition and they say, your character is confident, but also terrified, show a that, and what are you supposed to do?

I just love all that. I think it’s hilarious and I used as much as I could in the book to make it seem like I had some in depth knowledge.

Jenny Wheeler: It switches between the book that the film is based on and the film set itself and it’s quite hard sometimes to think about, hang on a sec, are we in the book or are we in the movie?

It gets very intense, so I wondered, how did you plot it? Did you have it all sorted out at the beginning? Did you use a spreadsheet? How did you keep track of all those intense twists and turns?

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100%;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] [data-style="minimal"]{padding:40px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"]{margin-left:-5px;margin-right:-5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field,.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{margin:0 5px 15px 5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field{-webkit-flex:100 1 auto;-ms-flex:100 1 auto;flex:100 1 auto;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{-webkit-flex:1 1 auto;-ms-flex:1 1 auto;flex:1 1 auto;} Catherine Ryan Howard – famed for plotting spreadsheets

Catherine Ryan Howard: I’m famous for using spreadsheets. I’ve never written a book without a spreadsheet , and every time I start one, I think this time I’m going to keep it simple.

But it seems I can only write one kind of book, and they’re complex, like this book is almost like a Russian doll in that you’re taking out all these different stories.

To keep things easy for myself, the first thing I did was decide what happened in the movie script, and I started with that and I had a good idea, of where I was going with it.

And then I went and I wrote what happens on set as they’re filming this book.

Oftentimes you meet people beginning of their career and they’re say ‘I could never write a book this complicated,’ but it doesn’t come out that way.

You do numerous drafts and you get to fix all your mistakes as you go along.

It takes a lot of work. to get to that, to get to that final point. And Runtime is probably the most complex novel I’ve written. It’s supposed to be a bit of a game, a bit fun. It’s not supposed to be too serious.

I want you to be like, wait a second. The movie or the book, I want that feeling because that’s what Adele feels in the book.

She doesn’t know what’s real and what’s not. And so, for me the aim is to make the reader feel that as well.

Fly on the wall filming

Jenny Wheeler: It was actually interesting because you did mention just a moment ago about the feeling that the director might be secretly filming her being bewildered and I gathered from the background that you’ve given the book that there was a period where there was quite a popular film trend for that to happen.

Where they did a live fly on the wall filming, and it never occurred to me until you suggested it in the book that they could be actually pulling a double kind of, trick on her.

That introduces a third level of deception, of ‘hang on a sec.’ Does everybody else on set know this is happening? Except her, is that it?

Catherine Ryan Howard: That’s the beauty of it. I thought of this novel as being on like moving ground. Like you’d never feel steady footing as you were going through it because you would be second guessing everything. and I loved it. I had great fun

Jenny Wheeler: Now you mentioned drafts. How many drafts would you normally do for a novel?

Catherine Ryan Howard: I always tend to do three drafts and then a kind of half draft where I just go back in and move a few things around, but I don’t really write three drafts.

I write three books in the sense that I write a draft and then it goes to my editor, and I hope she’s not going to have remorse that she gave me a book deal and then I start again with a blank document.

I start from scratch, a second draft, and I do the same thing with the third draft, although the third draft usually has chunks of texts that survive.

Three rewrites of every book her process

But I just like to rewrite entirely because I think that’s how you get really lovely. Smooth storytelling and tight prose and it’s just the best way for me to do it.

It forces you to get the best sentence you can, each time, and I just love doing that. That’s my way.

I’ve tried to work in more efficient ways, but I think I’ve figured out now, I’m writing my seventh book at the moment, but there’s no point trying to change that. That’s my process and I need to embrace it.

Jenny Wheeler: Amazing. I think I might find it a bit boring to write the same thing again.

Catherine Ryan Howard: But it’s not quite the same thing because I’m setting aside the earlier version and now that I have a bit more confidence now.

I know, like for instance, when I’m writing the first one, I probably don’t have the ending all figured out. But then when I get to write the second one, I know exactly what’s going to happen.

The hard work is done. And now that I have this confidence and I know where I’m going, it’s much more fun to write that part. But I’m changing everything as I go. All that really stays the same, is the general idea.

Like character name changes, villains change, twists change. Each draft is its own discovery, if you like.

Jenny Wheeler: Wow. and how many sections would these spreadsheets have? how extensive are they?

Catherine Ryan Howard: They are horrendous. They look like schematics. They’re all color coded.

When I showed them to other people, I actually stopped showing them to other people when I saw their faces when I showed them what they looked like.

The Covid lockdown novel that became her breakthrough book

The other thing is, I’m a really big procrastinator, so I probably don’t need to color code the spreadsheets, but I do because if you’re color coding a spreadsheet, you can’t start writing it.

There’s probably an element of that to it too. But they are quite complicated. they’re a bit scary. Even. I would say, especially for this one,

Jenny Wheeler: That’s amazing. You didn’t have any background in kind of maths? It sounds like you’re a real kind of nerd brain

Catherine Ryan Howard: I have an absolutely zero ability. I can’t even add Scrabble scores together. Like I’m definitely not a nerd.

I am quite visual. I do like planning stuff out and being able to see the whole story at a glance. So I think that’s the point of it.

Jenny Wheeler: Oh, that’s great. Look, the book before this one also sounded very interesting.

56 days is set in Covid lockdown, and this couple decides to move in together very quickly, because of the fact that if they don’t, they’re not going to be able to see each other and they don’t know how long lockdown is going to last.

And you actually wrote it in lockdown. I think. Is that right? I thought that would be quite a weird experience. If you could expand on that a bit for us?

56 Days – and at the end of them someone is dead…

Catherine Ryan Howard: I think it was a weird experience, anyway, to be in lockdown.

New Zealand can probably relate to Ireland more than most because we both had very severe and strict lockdowns, whereas our neighbors here in the UK just didn’t experience the same thing we did.

So back in March, 2020, the 27th of March, we were put into lockdown and the main rules were you.

You had to stay at home unless you were grocery shopping or were taking individual exercise, meaning alone, within a two kilometer radius of your house.

And everything stopped. Schools, non-essential businesses, public transport, it just all went away overnight. And I was supposed to be writing a book that I was contracted for which I had decided was going to be about a shooting in a nightclub.

And of course that involved crowds and international travel and all sorts of things, which just went away.

So overnight, this book became science fiction. And at the time, everyone was like, this is an unprecedented global catastrophe, so I wasn’t worried about missing my deadline.

I was like, no one’s going to care that I’m missing my deadline. The world’s falling apart.

And then we did hear about people, if you were dating someone, and you knew you had to stop dating them or move in together if you were going to stick by the rules.

Haunting a deserted city gave Catherine material for 56 Days

You weren’t supposed to mix with people even outside who didn’t live in your house.

And for a while I’d had this like very vague idea about a couple who meet and fall in love, but all is not what it seems. But I had nothing for them to do for a whole book.

I knew what the ending would be, but I didn’t know what would go on for, a hundred thousand words. And suddenly we have this lockdown situation and I just thought, “This is the perfect plot for those two characters.”

I couldn’t invent a better situation for what they both need to do. And I live alone. I was living alone then, and I was in a much smaller apartment than I am now.

A studio apartment that was about the size of three parking spaces. I was going absolutely nuts. You think you want to be told to stay at home and watch Netflix and read and you do for a few weeks, but then you know, things start to go a little crazy.

I lived in the center of Dublin, so I’m walking down what is normally one of the busiest streets in Europe. And it’s empty, at lunchtime, on a weekday. Because I was in the city center, I was getting to see things not many people did.

It was like walking around a zombie apocalypse movie. I’d come home and I’d take whatever I had seen that day and I’d put it into the book. I was nearly writing that first draft in real time. and it was weird, but honestly, it also kept me sane.

Like I’m so grateful for that book, not just because like it’s been my most successful book to date, and it changed a lot of things for me. It changed my career. But also I am thankful for it, for just keeping me sane during those very odd months.

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Catherine Ryan Howard – Mind-Twisting Thrillers