With the recent paperback release of Sorry by Zoran Drvenkar, a book that each member of the Killer Reads team has been hooked on at some point over the last year, his editor decided it was about time to spend a few extra minutes at the end of a meeting with Zoran to ask him the questions that the KR team have been wanting to know. Below is the result. So, if you’re a fan of Zoran, you’ve recently read Sorry or you just want to know how crime thriller authors manage to come up with such spine-tingling plots then delve into the following Q&A.
1. What prompted you to write your first novel?
There were so many books and ideas and plot twists planted in my brain, that I had to do something – rob a bank, start a cooking class, climb a mountain. I never finished school and hated the time it stole from me as much as I hated the thought to be interested in things you cannot be interested in when you are 12 – like chemistry and mathematics and why a curve does this and that and why worms have their heads next to their asses. After reading every book that came close to me I turned very fast onto the road of writing. I was allowed to think and write and express what I wanted, without limits, without rules. I could bleed out my heart or I could be cruel as hell. It was possible. You can’t say no to that.
The first novel was beautiful trash. It was a fantasy plot, full of naked women and men hunting with swords and bad guys with names like Darkian and Komor. The novel was called WITCHHUNTER and it was written on a typewriter on very thin paper that felt like papyrus. I still have it and the world will never see it.
2. Where did the inspiration for your novel, Sorry, come from?
In the beginning there was a dream. A rather boring one. In the dream I met three friends. We were standing around and no one was very happy with life. Suddenly I had this idea. Why not open an agency that apologizes to people? And why not call it Sorry.
When I woke from this dream it was around 3 in the morning and I was really tired and I thought about the dream and decided it is really not worth thinking about. But as a writer you learn never to dismiss sentences or ideas. If you dismiss them, you can be sure they will hang on in your mind and you will try to grasp them and they will not let you because you already ignored them once. So I took a pen, didn’t turn on the lights, wrote Sorry into the palm of my hand and fell asleep again. That’s how it started.
3. In what ways was writing this psychological thriller different to your other works?
It wasn’t. For me there is no great difference between a children‘s book or a thriller. The characters are always in front, and sometimes they are just eight years old, a little crazy and hungry for life. And sometimes they are thirty, very crazy and as hungry for life as an alligator. There is no switch in my head seperating how the story is told as I am not writing for an audience and not trying to please a readership. It is very satisfying to move from one genre to the other, telling the stories that bother me and espescially the stories of my characters.
4. Which writer or writers have kept you hooked throughout their works?
There are so many, I could fill a country and let them make babys and build houses and by the end of the day there still would not be all of them in that country. Their number is growing all the time. When I was young I learned a lot from William Goldman, Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut and John Irving. Later I fell in love with Mark Helprin, Richard Laymon, Richard Brautigan, Joyce Carol Oates, Evan Hunter/Ed McBain, Charles Bukowski, Lars Saabye Christensen, Hubert Selby, Larry McMurtry, Andrew Vachss, the early Michael Crichton, John Sandford and a hundred more.
5. When writing, what quirky habit/s do you have?
The only one unusual thing is that I am totally lost in time. The days melt into each other and I am always waiting for snow. The silence outside makes me sigh, the darkness wakes me up. My writing needs a lot of coffee and tea, a lot of movies and music, even more books and there have to be candles – no cats and dogs, no fish looking at me. Just me and life and good friends dropping by and my muse. You can’t write without a muse. And mine is a star.
6. How did you feel when Sorry entered the bestseller list almost immediately after release and was placed on the prestigious best of crime list, Krimi-Welt-Bestenliste, in Germany?
I was smiling.
7. What were the challenges you faced while writing Sorry?
I planned a novel about four friends who have a great idea and turn it into business. It should have been a critical novel about our social life and the way we behave with each other. I knew there was more behind the story, but I didn’t expect it to be so much more. After 150 pages I got scared by the story, as two young characters that were never planned stepped into it. They popped up while I was writing, I let them loose and the story turned on me and I was scared of my own writing. I put the book away for two years, wrote three children‘s books in-between to let the steam out. But a writer has to be loyal to his books and espescially to his characters. So I came back and I turned one winter into a long dark night. I hope I have not to do this again.
8. What should a new reader expect from Sorry?
Forgiveness.
The reader has to forgive me for the beginning.
So let’s talk to them directly:
Dear Reader,
I am a nice guy. I hate torture, I don’t mutilate people to put you on edge and I would never hurt you. I love to scare you, to make you feel uncomfortable, so that you start to doubt reality. I really love this. But honestly – you will never see me being unfair to you, all the way along I will try to gain your trust. And if you think my novels starts mean and ugly there are some surprises along the way that I really hope will blow your mind. And I can promise you, the further you get into the novel, the more you will understand why I did the mean and ugly act and I am sure you will forgive and understand me.
