Featured Interview With Angela Wren
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I’m an actor and director at a small theatre near where I live in the county of Yorkshire in the UK. I did work as a project and business change manager – very pressured and very demanding – but I managed to escape and now I write books.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I’ve always loved stories and story telling and became an avid reader when I was still very small. So it seemed a natural progression, to me, to try my hand at writing and I started with short stories. My first published story was in an anthology put together by ‘Ireland’s Own’ in 2011. That was the spur I needed to start writing a novel and that was when I began to take writing seriously.
Very quickly, I realised that I particularly enjoyed the challenge of plotting and planning different genres of work. Now, my short stories vary between contemporary romance, memoir, mystery and historical. I also write comic flash-fiction and have drafted two one-act plays that have been recorded for local radio. My full-length novels are set in France where I like to spend as much time as possible each year.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Wow that’s a tough question! I read very widely – anything from romance to sci-fi to the classics, mystery, comedy, non-fiction – just about anything really. I suppose authors such as Conan Doyle,
Agatha Chrisite, Dorothy L Sayers, Allingham and more recently, Peter James, Michael Connelly and C J Sansom have influenced my writing a lot because murder mystery/crime is my favourite genre to read. But my own books are set in France and the scenery, the culture and the history are very much a part of my own writing too.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
Set in the Cévennes, in south central France, Merle (book 2 in my Jacques Forêt series of mysteries), begins with a body being found in a suburb of the city of Mende. The time frame and the action then moves back about 3 weeks and Jacques – a former gendarme turned investigator – finds himself being asked to undertake an internal investigation at a large commercial organisation, the Vaux Group. In this story he delves into the murky world of commercial sabotage – a place where people lie and misrepresent, and where information is traded and used as a threat. As he works through the complexity of all the evidence, he finds more than he bargained for, and his own life is threatened.
Jacques is steely and determined and an absolute joy to write, and he always gets the culprit. However, this story, because of its business context – and I am using my own expeirence of working in a large office organisation to create the reality of the Vaux Group – was much more difficutl to write than book 1 and it took nearly 18 months to complete. It was published in July and I’m currently working on the next story in the series.
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