Greg Mosse: From cosy mysteries to futuristic thrillers
Gregg Mosse
Greg Mosse may not have bedazzled the world of popular fiction like his wife Kate, but he has made a tidy name for himself with six cosy mysteries, in the style of a body being found at a country vicarage (set against the early 1970s – with cream teas and dowager ladies and the sunny chalk cliffs of green England) while also writing a series of thrillers set in 2037 (featuring a Norwegian genetic lab and the extraction under fire of the prime minister of a breakaway North African republic). He has also written 25 plays and musicals which did their rounds in the West End long before he was seduced by the novel…
Greg has always given precedence to wife Kate Mosse (whose surname he took), out of admiration for her flair as a storyteller (with bestselling mystery and ghost story novels like Labyrinth and Sepulchre) but also because Greg is a feminist harking back to a difficult childhood when all his mother’s three husbands were “dreadful men”. He did not want to take the names of his mother’s tyrannical husbands and since his mother’s own name was (the ubiquitous) Smith, he opted for Kate’s.
Greg began his career in theatre, where he says the most exhilarating thing for a playwright is the deadline. “It is solid and it is there – the date when the first performance will be seen by an audience. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s just like pregnancy.”
As a writing teacher currently conducting a script development programme in the West End, Greg says the quintessential thing to remember when writing stories is that “drama rises out of competing objectives that cannot be reconciled.” The main characters should always be vying for the same object – which they cannot of course all win.
Shifting from writing plays to novels was not difficult for Greg because even within the theatre world he would shift from drama to comedy to musical plays. There is an automatic switch in his mind which flicks, helping him shift from cosy crime to thriller.
He admits that it may seem paradoxical that he writes both thrillers and cosy mysteries, the former with the uncertainties and threats of a strife-torn apocalyptic future (as future always has seemed to humanity); the latter full of reassurance and nostalgia where “the only bad thing that happens is the murder.”
Greg got into writing novels inspired by Kate, after their marriage. “I’m very lucky that I always read the first draft, the second draft, the third draft, (and) so… understand the evolution of writing from somebody who’s brilliant at it.”
Now, following his first six Maisie Cooper mysteries, Hodder and Stoughton has asked for a new series in the same genre. With titles like Murder at Bunting Manor and Murder at Church Lodge, he feeds a genre the world can’t get enough of.
This visit to Sri Lanka is the first time Greg has been east of the Arabian Gulf. “It’s been magnificent; there is an incredibly warm welcome from an intelligent and interesting reading public. The quality of welcome at the airport, the taxis, the hotels, the guest houses is exceptional. The fabric of history you see around us is incredibly inspiring…”
Galle, especially the fort, Greg says in conclusion, “would be an incredible location for a murder mystery…”
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