ANDREW TAYLOR

What led you into a life of crime?

Probably it was due to reading too many crime stories at a tender age when I was too young to know better. All I know is that when I was trying and failing to write the Great Literary Novel in my teens and twenties, I usually found that there was a corpse by the end of page three. By page four I usually ran out of story. But the corpse was telling me something and I eventually listened. My first published novel, Caroline Minuscule, had a corpse on the first paragraph.

The American Boy is set in the early 19th Century, features (in a small yet significant role) young Edgar Allan Poe and is very convincing. We imagine you did an extensive amount of research on the issues but just how involved was it and did it take up more time than you first expected?

For nearly two years almost everything I read was written in (or occasionally about) the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The American Boy took much longer to research and write than I expected - but then, novels usually do. I think if you write a historical novel, you have to get the details as authentic as you can. The result is a pastiche, of course, but it has to be good-quality one. The research isn't just about the physical details of life - it's also about how people thought and spoke in another period. And then there was Poe himself - fortunately for a writer of fiction, many of his biographical details are murky.

Do you approach every book in the same way or does each new novel make new demands.

Each novel seems to demand its own approach. You'd think writing novels would get easier with experience. It doesn't.

Were you a fan of Poe before you started writing the novel?

Yes. He's one of those cultural figures that have achieved iconic status, and his particular approach to fiction has always fascinated me.

What made you choose to portray a real life character in a fictional story?

The book began when I learned that Poe had spent nearly five years of his boyhood in Regency England. He and Jane Austen could have passed in the street. That was the germ of it all - it seemed so unlikely that I knew I wanted to write a novel exploring some of the possibilities.

While doing our own research on Poe we found many discrepencies and sometimes found it difficult seperating the truth from fantastical stories. We are curious to know if you found this be be the case also?

Poe is an ideal figure for a novelist to work with precisely because so many details in his life are obscure, partly because of his tendency to mythologise his own past. We don't know much about his time in England. We don't know why, when or where his father vanished, or what happened to him. We don't even know why Poe himself vanished just before he died some forty years later, or what happened to make him collapse mentally and physically, leading to his death. His life is rather like one of his own stories. All I had to do was provide a few answers on the margins, as it were, of a Regency murder mystery whose form owed a great deal to Wilkie Collins. The boy Poe appears a secondary character, but he's the secret pivot on which the plot turns. I also had a lot of fun providing a sort of pre-history of Poe's creative imagination. For example, his most famous poem, "The Raven", was originally going to be about a parrot. So there's an ominous parrot in The American Boy...

In America, your novel 'The American Boy' was published as 'An Unpardonable Crime' - what was the reason for the change and do you have a preference yourself?

The US publisher wanted another title because they thought "The American Boy" would send out the wrong signals to the US market. Who was I to argue? We found "An Unpardonable Crime" in "William Wilson", Poe's story which reveals something of his English schooling, and whose doppelganger theme recurs in The American Boy. Frankly I prefer The American Boy but, as every author knows, The Publisher Is Always Right.

For those who may not have read it yet, could you tell us about your latest novel, A Stain on the Silence.

I thought it was about time I wrote another novel set in the present, just of for a change. A Stain on the Silence starts from three very simple premises: what if a childless man in his forties discovers that he has a daughter, the result of an affair 25 years earlier? What if the daughter is pregnant? And what if she's on the run for murder. But though the setting is contemporary, the themes and dilemmas of the novel are as universal as love and death. It's a book about children and parents, and especially about missing children - children who are lost; children who are stolen, children who lose themselves, and children who haunt the minds of those who do not have them.

What are you currently reading?

I'm deep in the 1930s at present, with excursions into the 19th century, researching the next book. I've just finished reading Frances Fyfield's brilliant "Safer Than Houses".

We are also interested to know about your next novel. How's it going and do you need any characters called Joe and Megan?

The next novel is already written - Naked to the Hangman, the latest in the Lydmouth series, comes out in October. The one I'm working on now involves (I think) a fictional version of a Victorian murder case with which my granny's family was slightly connected; an antiquary with a taste for the macabre; politics in the 1930s; and much else. I'm not sure how it's all going to come together, but fingers crossed... Have made a note about two characters called Megan and Joe. I can't guarantee what will happen to them, though!