The author in my spotlight is ...Cath Staincliffe

I am delighted to welcome back to Jaffareadstoo

Cath Staincliffe

Cath, thank you so much for coming back to us to chat about your latest novel 

The Silence Between Breaths

Constable
May 2017

Where did you get the first flash of inspiration for The Silence Between Breaths?

I was thinking about setting a novel on a plane, ship or train, inspired by some of the disaster stories that I loved to read when I was a teenager. I liked the idea of a closed environment, the company of strangers thrown together in dangerous circumstances. Quite soon I knew that a train would work best for the stories I wanted to tell about life in the UK at the moment, and about how our everyday, mundane and precious lives can be suddenly torn apart.

Without giving too much away – what can you tell us about the story?

Eight people board the same train carriage in Manchester, bound for London Euston. But among them is a terrorist carrying a bomb. The story is about what happens and how people respond to great danger and the aftermath of trauma.

Whilst you are writing you must live with your characters. How did you feel about them when the book was finished? Did they turn out as expected?

Because I was writing with a large number of viewpoints, nine in all, it was really important that I knew the characters inside out, and that they were distinct from each other on the page. I spent a lot of time creating them and getting to know them before I started writing the novel itself. They did turn out as I’d imagined but their fates weren’t always what I thought they might be at the beginning. The characters are still very clear in my head, as if they are real people who I know well – and I guess I did spend months in their company.

Your writing is very atmospheric – how do you ‘set the scene’ in your novels and how much research did you need to do in order to bring The Silence Between Breaths to life?

Thank you. I did a lot of research on that train route, making notes about the journey and thinking about where people would sit and how they would begin to interact. I also researched a particular location which I’ll not name (no spoilers) but which gave me some great ideas for scenes. Most of the rest was really understanding the characters and imagining how they would feel.

When do you find the time to write, and do you have a favourite place to do your writing?

Writing is how I earn a living so I do it everyday and treat it like a job (albeit a very pleasurable one). I write in an armchair looking out of a window, in longhand, and then type up my work on the computer in my workroom.

Can you tell us if you have another novel planned?

Yes, The Girl in the Green Dress comes out in September. It’s about a hate crime, the murder of a transgender teenager at her sixth form prom and the fight to get justice for her and her family.

Huge thanks to Cath for spending time on the blog today and for giving us such a special insight into the writing of  The Silence Between Breaths

You can find out more about Cath and her writing on her website 

or follow on Twitter @cathstaincliffe  #TheSilenceBetweenBreaths

Jaffa and I recently read The Silence Between Breaths - these are our thoughts..

I think that anyone who travels on public transport these days can't help but have a heightened awareness of their surroundings. The Silence Between Breaths shows just how ordinary lives can be stripped bare, with lives lost and irretrievably ruined by a moment of madness.

As the 10.35 train from Manchester Piccadilly starts its fateful journey to London Euston we are introduced to those passengers whose life stories will resonate throughout the book. They're just ordinary people going about their ordinary lives. Some are leaving behind worries, whilst others are taking their worries with them. They all have hopes and dreams. They all have plans for the future, a perfect job, a wedding, an interview, a last holiday by the seaside. Simple pleasures which make us feel human and alive.

Nine very different viewpoints come together and coalesce, with stories that cleverly overlap and intertwine, and which show not just the effect of the journey on the travelers who will ultimately be caught up in the disaster, but also the jitteriness of the bitter young man whose ideology will bring utter devastation to the west coast rail line.

I was utterly engaged by this story from the very beginning, not just because, this is one of those scenarios, which God forbid will ever happen, but because the author has written the story so beautifully that you can't help but be emotionally involved with all the characters. I had my favourites as I am sure other readers will have, but I also had immense sympathy for thirteen year old Kulsoom, who acted so responsibly, and the wonderful, Naz, who tried so hard.

Powerful, heartbreaking, devastatingly sad,  The Silence Between Breaths is written with great insight by an author who knows how to hold the reader in the palm of her hand. 

Holly, Jeff, Nick, Meg, Caroline, Rhona, Naz, Kulsoom.... and Bob, their stories will stay with me for a long, long, time.

Best read with...Bitter coffee, from a paper cup...scalding hot..

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Close to Home ...Cath Staincliffe

As a book reviewer I have made contact with authors from all across the globe and feel immensely privileged to be able to share some amazing work. However, there is always something rather special when a book comes to my attention which has been written by an author in my part of the North of England. So with this in mind I have great pleasure in featuring some of those authors who are literally close to my home. Over the next few Saturdays, and hopefully beyond, I will be sharing the work of a very talented bunch of Northern authors and discovering just what being a Northerner means to them both in terms of inspiration and also in their writing.

Please welcome Manchester Crime Writer

Cath Staincliffe

Hi and welcome to Jaffreadstoo Cath...

WHAT MANCHESTER DOES TODAY THE REST OF THE WORLD DOES TOMORROW

‘Cath Staincliffe moved to Manchester (all red brick and rain) from her home town, Bradford (hills and stone) to start a job. And stayed.’ The biography from my first novel Looking For Trouble. So I’m an incomer but I’ve lived in Manchester longer than anywhere else and it’s home. All my books are set here (even Half The World Away, the one that takes us to China, starts in Manchester). Blue Murder, the television series I created and the radio series Legacy are also based here as are the Scott and Bailey novels I was commissioned to write based on the TV show.

 

  

Looking For Trouble was inspired by the 1980s new wave of private eye fiction, where independent women investigated crime in vividly drawn urban settings. Sara Paretsky's Chicago and Sue Grafton’s Santa Teresa (based on Santa Barbara) feature almost as characters in their books. Wanting to emulate that in my Sal Kilkenny novels, I chose Manchester and not only because I lived and worked here (and am a reluctant researcher). Music and football (and post-industrial misery) may dominate people’s perception of Manchester and it has all that but Manchester has always been cutting edge. Home to the first free public library, the birthplace of the industrial revolution, of the first labour party and women’s suffrage movement, the city where the computer was invented and graphene, the first nuclear free city in the UK. But Manchester is also among the most deprived areas in the country, with reduced mortality, high unemployment and crime. There remains great inequality in the city and the contrast of innovation and creativity with lack of opportunity, of wealth and status with poverty, provides a tension to draw on. Ringed by satellite towns but still in striking distance of the Pennines and the Peaks, Manchester offers a hundred worlds to the writer. You can imagine how delighted I was when the estimable crime author Val McDermid was kind enough to say of that very first book, ‘Cath Staincliffe’s tour of the mean streets and leafy suburbs of Manchester reveals the city as the natural successor to Marlowe’s Los Angeles.’

Manchester and the North West inspire my work in a number of ways. First of all there’s the people here, the grit and humour, the warmth that characterises the way people deal with each other and how they talk. I think characters are shaped by the city and in turn shape it. And my characters are indivisible from their setting.

Locations give me ideas for scenes or for stories. So the stone archway at Heaton Park was the inspiration for a showdown at the end of one book as was the wooded sandstone ridge at Alderley Edge for another. The soulless Arndale Centre car park gave me an idea for the death at the heart of Towers of Silence. Famous landmarks like The Lowry or the Town Hall can provide the backdrop to encounters but so can that back alley off Piccadilly, the warehouses of the Northern Quarter before it was the Northern Quarter or the canal not yet refurbished and lined with luxury apartments. As a reader I love stories with a strong sense of place. I hope my work sparks recognition for people who know Manchester and gives an insight into what it’s like for those who don’t.

Incidents that happen here also inspire stories though I never write directly about real life events. Witness was a response to the tragic (and still unsolved) murder of teenager Jesse James at a time when gang violence made the murder statistics very grim reading. Assisted dying was the theme of The Kindest Thing and to make it as true to life as possible I spent time at the Crown Court watching trials and visited the women’s prison at Styal, speaking with the women there about life inside. Blink of an Eye gave me the opportunity to tell a contemporary story about death by dangerous driving but also to revisit the Manchester of the 1980s, and capture what I found when I first moved here. Like any major metropolis Manchester is in a constant process of change. Regeneration follows degeneration and the cityscape is always evolving, witness the ever-changing Metrolink network, the building for The Commonwealth Games, the development of Media City or the expansion of our three universities. People continue to move to the city, bringing their own contributions with them. Different cultures and communities, new areas of enterprise, are a continuing source of ideas for stories.

     

Over the years publishers and agents have expressed a desire to get me out of Manchester, in a literary sense. Perhaps it's because the publishing industry is so relentlessly London-centric. But why relocate when the North West remains so fertile a hunting ground for the stories I want to tell? Besides, do they not realise, Manchester is the centre of the universe.

Cath's latest novel The Silence Between Breaths is due to be published in paperback in May 2017

Huge thanks to Cath for spending time on the blog with us today.

You can discover more about Cath's writing on her website by clicking here 

or follow on Twitter @CathStaincliffe

I hope you have enjoyed this Close to Home feature

Coming next week: Sarah Jasmon

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