I would only read Irish books when I was younger - James Stephens, Flann O'Brien, Michael McLaverty, the Blasket books. Or else politics, history, philosophy.
I must have lightened up a bit later on, that's when I started reading about murder as entertainment. The classics, of course, Hammett, Chandler, Cain, Himes, Parker, Macdonald, Jim Thompson. Then Ellroy, Mosley, Burke, Rankin, then all the Scandanavians (the Icelander Indridason is the best).
Started to match books to the places I travelled to -Orhan Pamuk in Turkey, Camilleri in Italy, Montalban in Spain, Mercier in Portugal (originally in German).
I started to write Blood from a Shadow as a standard thriller, no big messages. Then I realised I couldn't help it, all that stuff about being an underdog, free will limited by inherited cultural baggage and everyone's basic human right to be treated with dignity, it all had to come out.
Join 12,000+ Authors
* 14 day FREE trial. No credit card required.If you're an author or publisher, you've come to the right place. BookBuzzr provides one of the most comprehensive set of book-marketing technologies and services in the world. We're constantly adding new features in a race with ourselves to build technologies that will help your books fly out of book-stores.