Callie Kazumi and Lucy Rose talk at Criminally Good Books

I had a wonderful day and evening in York. We headed through with the dogs on the train and went for some food and drinks before the Callie Kazumi talk held at Criminally Good Books. The talk was celebrating the release of Kazumi’s Greedy and she was interviewed by the wonderful Lucy Rose, author of The Lamb. If you haven’t already then I will always highly recommend reading it! Here’s my review.

I had the pleasure of reading an advanced readers copy of Greedy on NetGalley last year and I loved it, it’s different to her debut Cuckoo [review here] but the variation is amazing and both do have a signature style. It was really interesting to hear about how the book got picked up and went through as her second book with it being outside of the crime fiction/thriller genre. Rose was a fantastic interviewer and the pairing worked so well.

Greedy tells the tale of gambling addict Ed, desperate to earn a wage he takes up a chef job. The storytelling plays with dramatic irony, readers will instantly pick up there being something odd unfolding with the rare meat refrigeration. It’s fascinating to read on, wondering when Ed will open his eyes! It’s like Alfred Hitchcock said:

“There is a distinct difference between “suspense” and “surprise,” and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I’ll explain what I mean.

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let’s suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: “You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!”

In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.”

Here’s my full Greedy review.