Mark Sutton

speaker

695 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Oct 2018 last heard Jul 2020

Mark Sutton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Bookshelf · On T C Boyle's Outside Looking In, Don Winslow's The Border and Simon Cleary's The War Artist · 26 Apr 2019 podcast

And in your non-fiction book about the coroner's court, you really paint the streets, the sickening sort of blood and the alleyways really well.

Were you sort of conscious of framing that kind of place?

Well, yeah, so Kate and I were talking about this beforehand and we were talking about how I'm very much a completist when it comes to reading series, both in crime books and in other genres as well.

I find it very difficult to just pick up the latest if I haven't read

all those before, and sometimes from a recommendation perspective, it's quite frustrating because someone will say, oh, you should read the latest whatever it is, you know, Jack Reacher, and I'll think, oh, I can't read 23 books in order to just read this one recommendation.

Do you find that with your books you tell people, no, you've really got to start with the first one before you move on to the second one?

Less daunting.

I think some of the great series as well, though, for instance, you know, the Le Carre Smiley series, actually reward skipping the first couple because it took him a while to kind of find the voice, find, hit his groove.

So the first couple of novels say, oh, you can come back to them later if you're a big fan.

But if you start with the spy who came in from the cold, then you're going to get Smiley at his full force.

Well, we've just been talking about whether you have to start crime books at the beginning or as part of a series.

And Don Winslow is an American writer of, it's fair to say, hefty thrillers, who's also had a career in film and TV writing.

He's had 20 novels, including The Cartel, The Power of the Dog and A Cool Breeze on the Underground.

Now, The Cartel and the book we're reading today, The Border, is in fact the concluding part of a trilogy about The Cartel.

And you're a big fan of Don Winslow's work before you were asked to come on the show, I understand.

And that blend of real figures that David Simon would have met in the underworld and into the fiction, sometimes using their real names, sometimes not.

So that's another commonality that two works have.

Yeah, that's an interesting part of it.

So there's this list of names at the very beginning of the book, which is something he did in The Force as well.

But in this, it's beginning with Abel Garcia Hernandez and ends with Aldo Gutierrez Solano.

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