Robert Wilson

Robert Wilson is the author of seven novels, including A Small Death in Lisbon, which won the Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel of 1999 from Britain's Crime Writers Association. A graduate of Oxford University, he has worked in shipping, advertising, and trading in Africa, and has lived in Greece and West Africa. He lives in Portugal and Oxford, England.

From his Q & A with Julia Buckley:

Your novel THE IGNORANCE OF BLOOD is the fourth and last in the Javier Falcón series. Is it difficult to say goodbye to a character that you’ve gotten to know so intimately?

As you now know from The Blind Man of Seville Javier was not in a good mental state when I first met him. He was divorced, struggling with his father’s death, tending towards the introspective and not getting on well with his homicide squad. He also had this terrible sense of being on the edge of a great abyss, something in his mind that he knew but did not know, a feeling that a monstrous revelation was about to surface and break him as a human being. By the time he finishes his four book journey I believe that he is in a much better place. He has been dismantled, put back together, re-equipped and revived. So I leave him with no sadness on my part, but with a feeling of a job well done. It had always been important to me, in a reversal of the normal series character, that my protagonist would change. And he does, for the better.

Your biography reveals that you are an extremely well-traveled man, and as a result, you say that “I realised that there were other ways of thinking and doing things that were just as valid as my own.” Does this objectivity affect the way that you create characters?

That realization was...[read on]

Visit Robert Wilson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue