The Joys of Binge Reading

You’d die for your best friend. But would you kill for her? That’s the question contemporary thriller author Cate Quinn poses in her latest book, Blood Sisters, an outback adventure that turns to nightmare for two American back packers when they are accused of a bizarre murder in Dead Tree Creek.

Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and our guest today on The Joys of Binge Reading is Cate Quinn. Cate is a UK-based bestselling author whose books are published in fifteen countries. She writes contemporary thrillers as Cate Quinn, and historical thrillers as C. S Quinn.

Our new feature, Encore, where each month we talk to authors who have already been on the show about their latest book, goes live this week with former diplomatic correspondent and international mystery author Martin Walker talking about his new Bruno the French police chief mystery, To Kill a Troubadour.

LISTEN TO MARTIN ON ENCORE

And our mystery giveaway – nearly 50 books from popular authors to choose from, with Hope Redeemed, A Spanish novella, book Six in my Of Gold & Blood series – on offer for the duration of the giveaway.

Link here: https://books.bookfunnel.com/freehistoricalfiction/mbroyl78yn

Hope Redeemed – Book Six in the Of Gold & Blood series – is a Spanish novella – set in northern California ranchero territory – more romance and slightly less mystery than usual with the series… Ideal holiday reading… And there are 50 other authors to take a look at as well!!

HISTORICAL MYSTERIES TO DOWNLOAD HERE

Cate is on Binge Reading on Patreon’s Five Quickfire Questions. Support the show on Patreon for as little as a cup of coffee a month, at patreon.com/thejoysofbingereading or if you particularly enjoy this episode buy me a cup of coffee on www.buymeacoffee/jennywheelX.com.

buy me a coffee! thank you!

The show notes for this episode contain all the links you’ll need to find out more, or you can join our weekly newsletter which updates you each week on new podcast guests.

Links in this Episode:

Blood Sisters: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59490850-blood-sisters

Black Widows: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/52658299-black-widows

C. S, Quinn Historicals: https://www.amazon.com/C.S.-Quinn/e/B00LNOAK5M

Gytha Lodge: https://www.amazon.com/Gytha-Lodge/e/B00699BG6I%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

Ruth Ware: https://ruthware.com/

Mark Edwards: https://www.markedwardsauthor.com/

Where to find Cate online:

Website: https://www.catherinequinn.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/catecsquinnauthor/

Food blog: www.thefoodexplorer.co.uk.

What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to the show notes in The Joys of Binge Reading.com for important mentions.
But now, here’s Cate.

Introducing thriller author Cate Quinn

Jenny Wheeler: Hello there Cate, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Cate Quinn: Hi, Jenny. Thanks so much for having me.

Cate Quinn – Thriller author

Jenny Wheeler: You write contemporary thrillers and historical thrillers. The historicals are under a slightly different name, C S Quinn, and we’ll touch on those towards the end of our show, but today we are focusing on two high concept, domestic thrillers that you’ve recently published – Blood Sisters and Black Widows – both with highly original concepts.

Blood Sisters, which I think is the most recent, is set in an Australian Outback town. Two tourists, two backpackers, turn up in this little town, which is a scratch in the desert, Dead Tree Creek. More or less simultaneous with their arrival somebody is gruesomely murdered and the town turns their suspicion to these two girls and thinks they must be responsible.

The town came through really strongly, and first of all I wondered, have you had personal experience of Outback towns?

Cate Quinn: Yes, I’ve spent a fair bit of time in Australia, and in my youth, backpacking round. That would have been in the 90’s. I’m 40 now, so I would have been in my 20’s. But definitely over my life I’ve had experiences firstly of working in the kind of, I want to say dead end bars that we find in this town, but also in small mining towns and those kind of communities. Just the experience, I suppose, of being that kind of out of towner coming into that community, and what that experience feels like.

A gritty story – reader be warned

Jenny Wheeler: It’s a pretty gritty environment, isn’t it? I’d like to warn some of our listeners because we often handle rather more clean and docile romance stories, but this is a little bit edgy, partly because the girls themselves are a little bit wild, but obviously the nature of a town where there are a whole lot of men and hardly any women. Porn is quite accepted as part of the normal lifestyle, and there are various other things that happen in the book that are a bit eyebrow raising as well. Have you had any comment about that side of things?

Cate Quinn: That’s a really good question. I’m quite a wimp in terms of things being very gritty or hardcore, so what I often do in my books is allude to things, and they can seem worse by omission. They seem scarier and worse than they are, because I don’t go into a lot of detail.

But yes, with this particular book there definitely is a harder edge to it. I’m exploring a little bit the idea of culpability. These girls come into the town, a murder happens, and to a lesser or greater extent one of the girls in particular is in the frame because she’s seen as a bit of a good time girl. She’s seen as the kind of girl who’s maybe asking for it, and it makes her suspicious to the townsfolk as to her motives, because she’s already a questionable kind of character to them.

Are women judged differently from men?

I wanted to ask the question, to what extent was she actually doing anything wrong in her behavior? To what extent are we judging women for their activities and their proclivities, and to what extent are they harming anyone and should be allowed to get on with things?

Jenny Wheeler: Yes, that’s right. There have some high profile cases where this kind of thing has come into the public domain. I’m thinking of a case in New Zealand where a girl had a Tinder date and ended up being murdered. The man claimed that she’d agreed to do S and M sex that had gone rather wrong, but he tried to deny any culpability. He saw it as a consensual act, even though it was right at the edge of what we might be comfortable with. There is definitely stuff like that going on in the real world, isn’t there?

Cate Quinn: Yes, absolutely. I’m sure at one point in the not too distant future it will be changed, but there is currently almost a clause in the law, a sort of rough sex clause, which means that if a man murders a woman and there’s any kind of sex involved, his lawyer will automatically in court break out that clause and say, oh, it was rough sex and it was consensual and therefore it wasn’t murder. It’s a classic tactic.

Jenny Wheeler: In this book, you feel rather sorry for the girls because in some sense they are slight innocents in the sort of environment they land themselves in. They don’t quite understand the whole ramification of how their behavior might be interpreted.

Barmaids put ‘at risk’ by employer?

Cate Quinn: Yes. And they’re younger girls and from my memories of being a younger woman, I’m sure you too, things sort of go over your head a bit. You can be put in situations where you don’t quite realize. In this book these girls are barmaids and they’re asked to wear kind of hot pants shorts and tight fitting t-shirts, and they don’t really question that or wonder why that’s the uniform.

Possibly I’m naive too, but I’ve definitely been in positions like that and maybe had an inkling that I’m being dressed in this way because I’m hired for my youth and gender, but not exactly thought about the message that might be delivering if I’m being put in a service role wearing a particular uniform. So yes, I think they are innocents to that degree, but also they certainly ran.

Jenny Wheeler: It’s interesting because you have a structure where you tell it from one viewpoint and then the other viewpoint and they are each concealing things from one another, so the reader sometimes knows a bit more about what’s happening in the story than the participants in the story, the way it’s written. That’s quite fascinating.

Quite a lot of things they don’t disclose to one another, maybe partly to protect each other. That’s an interesting structure, and you did it also in the other book, Blood Sisters. Is this something that intrigues you – to tell a story that way?

Story telling from multiple perspectives

Cate Quinn: It does. I really enjoy telling stories from different perspectives. I love the fact that in human nature – and I think we all have this with our friendship groups – you might have one friend who different friends speak of in quite different ways.

You have what you feel to be rounded perception of that friend, but one friend is seeing them from one view and one friend is seeing them from another. With both things you build a person, but I find it very interesting how different people can see the same person and the same situation in a completely different way.

Jenny Wheeler: The tagline for Blood Sisters, which hooks you in right from the beginning, is you’d die for your best friend, but would you kill for her? As we mentioned at the beginning, both of these books have got that thing they call a high concept hook, which movie lovers love.

You have got both of these optioned to film. Talk to us a little bit about developing those high concepts. Do you do that specifically to attract the attention of the film companies?

Cate Quinn: I wouldn’t say I do it to attract the attention of the film companies. What I would say is I’ve been writing books a long time, so probably I’ve learned the hard way. You put an awful lot of effort into writing a book and if the concept isn’t big, then you can lose readers.

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I think I’ve learned that way, that I’m not going to waste all my time and spend a whole year on a book, unless the concept is really, really big and I’m getting as many people as I possibly can. So there is that slightly cynical thought involved, but also once you hit on what you feel to be a big onset, you also really want to write it, the only downside being that it can sometimes feel quite intimidating.

I remember with Black Widows, the concept is polygamous Mormon marriage. One of the three wives murders the husband, is the concept. I came up with that idea and then was quite challenged as to, can I do this justice? So there is that element to the process, the downside.

Jenny Wheeler: That one was absolutely stunning. This man is murdered and the police are very certain that one of the wives did it because they live in an extremely isolated area and there’s virtually no one else there that could have done it. That’s what they presume. I read somewhere that there was a hint that that might have originally been based on something that happened in real life. Is that true? Can you tell us about it or would it spoil the story?

Cate Quinn: I can certainly tell you what it was based on and I don’t think it would spoil the story. You might have even seen it on the news maybe 10, 15 years ago. There was an enormous community cult. I’m not sure how you would describe it, but a religious community that was very large and was perhaps two or even three generations in, that was raided in America, near Texas.

It was a fundamentalist Mormon community. Child marriage basically was one of the reasons it was raided and broken up. One of the characters in that book, Black Widows, was raised in a community like this one, and she was then kind of liberated if you will and put out into the normal world and expected to cope.

The world of polygamous marriages

I did a lot of research into that particular community and honestly, you couldn’t make it up. It was much stranger and darker than anything I could have ever imagined – the kind of things that go on when you have two or three generations of people believing they’re going to heaven if they have polygamous marriages and follow this particular prophet.

Jenny Wheeler: There was that strange aspect that they actually believed it was somehow giving them entry to heaven.

Cate Quinn: Yes, and that the more children you have, they’re going to come to heaven with you. It’s almost that you’re building your heaven on earth, if you like, organically, and then you would represent that in the afterlife.

Jenny Wheeler: That one was set in Utah.

Cate Quinn: Yes. Classic Mormon territory, just outside Salt Lake City.

Jenny Wheeler: Have you visited Utah, or did you have any closer connection with the Mormon community than just researching them?

Cate Quinn: I did, because I have fundamentalist faith in my family, on my mother’s side. Not that I grew up with that in a close way, but I was certainly aware of that as something that seemed to cause an awful of drama and pain, to be honest, bubbling away on that arm of the family.

A mountain of research went into the book

In terms of visiting, I’ve traveled widely through America, but unfortunately that was during lockdown so I didn’t get to go. My plan was to go stay with some Mormon families in Salt Lake City, but I didn’t get to do that so a lot of my research with that book had to be augmented by phone calls and Zoom chats and that kind of thing.

But actually in some ways I think I ended up doing more because I wasn’t relying on the immediacy of having been there. I was really drilling down, almost like a historian would, the way I would for my historical novels.

Jenny Wheeler: We are moving towards the topic of researching and I understand that you are a researcher par excellence. In the past you’ve won a research scholarship. Tell us a bit about that side of your work and experience and how that all fits together.

Cate Quinn: Sure. In many ways that came about unexpectedly. I did a degree in English and during that degree, I happened to have two very supportive tutors and I ended up doing more historical modules. It wasn’t even a conscious choice. I just picked modules that I thought seemed to appeal to me.

Uni degree fed into Cate’s passion to write

Then during that process I had both my tutors mention they thought I should go for this particular scholarship and I was fortunate enough to do well in that degree. In England you can earn scholarships for not that many things actually, it tends to be more for the Maths and the Sciences. But I applied and was fortunate enough to get to do a historical MA for a year in Writing that was funded. That was a wonderful experience on every level, not least to have funding as a student.

Jenny Wheeler: That was great. Did that feed into your historical thrillers, which you publish under the name of C S Quinn? One series is related to the French Revolution. Tell us about that. Was your MA in any way involved in that time period?

Cate Quinn: Yes, very much so. My MA was 18th century and the first series of books I wrote were 17th century. I think I was being a bit strategic in some ways, thinking to myself what publishing seems like. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do. I’ve always wanted to write books since I can remember but I didn’t have confidence that I would be able to get into this massive scary publishing industry. So I thought, I’ll write something no one else can write, and that might give me an in.

I knew history, or I felt I knew history. Not as much as I thought I did it turned out when I came to do the 17th century. But I enjoyed researching it certainly, and I came up with this idea for a thief-taker in the 17th century, so I went back and researched that period. But actually during my English degree and doing my history research, my period was very much 18th century, so that would have been French Revolution, all that kind of thing, which then informed my second historical series.

Jenny Wheeler: With the French Revolution ones, you’ve got a fantastic heroine called Attica Morgan who breaks all the gender boundaries for that time. Tell us a bit about Attica.

Burning the 18th century boundaries

Cate Quinn: I loved writing Attica. Attica is an escaped slave who has come to England as a child but also has nobility in her family, so it’s a slightly strange setup. She’s like a female Scarlet Pimpernel. She is very active, very physical, and works as a spy for the English. She is slightly based on a real life English spy, or a couple of real life English spies actually, who were female.

I do always find it interesting that when you write historical novels, there’s always somebody in the reviews who knows exactly what it was like in 18th century London or 18th century England. This particular character Attica is bisexual, or she certainly has relationships with women. One of the comments was, that was very modern. I found that funny – as if there weren’t different sexualities in the 18th century. They didn’t exist. They are a 20th century invention.

Jenny Wheeler: I know. It’s funny because quite often you do find that thing, truth is stranger than fiction. People might say, oh, that would never happen, but in fact, it really did.

Cate Quinn: There were certainly lesbian relationships in the 17th and 18th century.

Jenny Wheeler: Moving on a little bit from the books to your wider life, I see that you’ve also got a blog about being a travel writer and eating scary food. We’ll put the links to it in the show notes, but that seemed like a remarkably original thing to do as well. Tell us about that.

Cate Quinn: I was a travel journalist for a long time, and so one of the things I enjoy doing is trying new food. That’s part of my travel experience, so I broadened it to try really scary food that other people might not eat. Dried spiders in Cambodia, snake, that kind of thing.

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Cate Quinn – Chiller Thrillers