The Wycliffe Companion

Radio Interviews - Transcripts

1. Date uncertain

WJB on Radio Cornwall.

I have always read detective fiction, and when I decided I would have a go at writing, I turned to detective fiction because it was the sort of thing I normally read, and I found to my great surprise the first novel I sent to Gollancz they in fact took, and from then it’s really never looked back.
 

My first thriller was about a school, and of course I was teaching at the time, so that the background was there, and one had to create the situation, and whilst the situations that normally occur in a school are not the sort you expect to find in a detective thriller, at least the germ of tension and conflict, those were the very situations that one tried to exploit. 

Anything, any experience you have in life, you can use in a novel, it is all grist to the mill, and if you don’t the novels don’t in fact come alive.  They have to be about your life essentially, and I suppose to that extent at any rate, Wycliffe is a projection of myself.

I’ve wanted to write ever since at school I made a reasonable job of essay writing, but I went into the labour market in the thirties, and you thought far more about getting a job, as indeed you do now, than about what that job was going to be, and whether you were going to like it.  But once I got committed to a job in engineering, one had to work in order to make a living, and the first opportunity I had, really, to settle down and write came when I was a schoolteacher with long holidays. 

I think many Americans in particular have a sentimental regard for Cornwall, I suppose half California is populated by Cousin Jacks, and it’s people with a sentimental regard for Cornwall, I think, who read my books in America, and fortunately there are enough of them to make it worth while.  As to France and Italy and Germany,  I really don’t know …