Linwood Barclay

Ali Karim recently interviewed Linwood Barclay, author of the forthcoming No Time for Goodbye, for The Rap Sheet.

Part of their dialogue:

AK: No Time for Goodbye is an excellent novel, built on an extraordinary premise. Where did that premise come from?

LB: The idea for No Time came to me around 5 a.m., which seems to be when all good ideas show up. I had been thinking about a very tragic case about a young girl who’d been abducted from her home in the dead of night. When her parents got up in the morning, she was gone. And it was like a switch got flipped. What if you turned that incident around? What if the girl woke up at home, and the family was gone?

AK: Did you know how this story would end before you began writing, or did you get some welcome surprises en route?

LB: I need to know where I’m going to end up when I start, but there are surprises on the way -- a lot of them. In all, it took a little over two months [to write]. (The last day I was working on the first draft, I wrote 9,000 words.) But there was some tinkering after that.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue