Katherine Howell

Damien of Crime Down Under put a handful of questions to Katherine Howell, author of Frantic and The Darkest Hour.

Their first exchange:

Your first novel FRANTIC has been a big success and congratulations on an engrossing read. The story features 2 very strong female characters in Sophie Phillips and Ella Marconi, both put under extreme pressure. Were you consciously aiming for this powerful dual lead or is that the nature of their jobs? How closely did you draw off your experience as a paramedic for Sophie?

I always wanted to use the paramedic angle, but I also wanted to develop a series. Having a paramedic protagonist as the ongoing character was going to be a problem, though, because it wasn't plausible to have her rush about the city solving crime or going through some incredibly difficult and traumatic experience in each book. Detective Ella Marconi was the answer: she could give the procedural angle on the story, she could provide access to information about the case that the paramedic could never have, plus she was another point of view so allowed the reader a break from the shellshocked mind of Sophie.

I drew from many of my experiences as a paramedic for Sophie, mixing and matching elements of what I'd been through so her cases are not lifted entirely from real life but do stem from there. I like to use the little things that only a paramedic could know: what it's like to crouch in the backseat of a crashed car, caring for the trapped passenger while the driver sits dead behind the wheel and rain pours down outside, for example, or how blood flows off the stretcher and onto the ambulance floor and out under the back door as you're rushing a dying patient to hospital. How you feel about the ones you can't save.People are fascinated with what goes on behind the ambulance's darkened windows, and the books let me show them.

Read the full Q & A.

Visit Katherine Howell's website.

Last year Howell introduced herself to American readers at Sarah Weinman's "Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind."

The Page 69 Test: Frantic.

The Page 99 Test: The Darkest Hour.

--Marshal Zeringue