Will Shindler

Will Shindler has spent most of his career working as a broadcast journalist for the BBC. He also spent nearly a decade working on a number of British television dramas, working for both the BBC Drama Series Department, and Talkback Thames Television as a writer and script editor. He has been writing novels since 2020, including the five-book critically acclaimed DI Alex Finn series: The Burning Men, The Killing Choice, The Hunting Ground, The Blood Line, and The Cold Case. He currently combines reading news bulletins for BBC Radio London with his novel writing and has previously worked as a presenter for ITV West, a reporter for BBC Radio Five Live, and as one of the stadium presenters at the 2012 London Olympics. He lives in London.

Shindler's new novel is The Bone Queen.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The book’s title is critical because it needs to work on a number of levels. It needs to accurately represent your story, it needs to work as a marketing tool – and it needs to be pithy. I learnt the latter the hard way, when I tried to give a novel quite a long title once. My publishers were quick to point out the problems. Too many words mean the cover image will get masked by words (not good) and font will also have to be squeezed (also not good) – so a short, sharp title is everything. The Bone Queen was one of the easier titles to come up with because the book really could only be called that. I hope it will intrigue and entice readers in tandem with the cover!

What's in a name?

Names are absolutely critical - I can’t start writing a novel until I’ve nailed down the character names. There’s a practical aspect – you have to vary the initial letters so there’s no repetition as that can confuse the reader (you don’t want a Simon, Simeon and a Simone in the same book for example). Creatively a name cane suggest a lot about character. There’s warm and soft, strong and reassuring, spiky and sharp – it’s a bit like picking a paint colour from a palette! You can also use this to your advantage – picking a warm and reassuring name for a character who then turns out to be nothing but, is a good writer’s trick. You’re also going to spend a long time with them so you want to feel comfortable that their names are the right fit for them.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

The Bone Queen is my sixth book – the previous five have been police procedurals. So, the only question my teenage self would be asking is ‘what took you so long?’ I loved fantasy and sci-fi as a kid and in many ways it gave me a love of storytelling that has endured throughout my life. The question I was asking myself with The Bone Queen was what would those stories that I loved so much back then look like through a 2026 lens.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Great question – they both have different challenges and different jobs. The opening chapter needs to blow people’s socks off, and usually it’s about aiming high, and then seeing if you can go a bit higher still. The opening chapter of The Bone Queen was designed deliberately to be a pacy, scary, visceral chapter that hopefully will make you want to read more. Endings can reflect thematically where the book has been taking you. It’s not just about action, it’s about delivering an emotional pay off too. So sometimes it’s can be a conversation between two characters combined with a great action sequence – a classic example of that is perhaps the Holmes/Moriarty confrontation at the Reichenbach Falls. Hopefully the conclusion of The Bone Queen achieves this too.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

I’m always torn on this one – but I think the honest answer is that there’s a bit of me in all the characters I write. One of the primary challenges I set myself with The Bone Queen was making the two lead characters female. I’ve had male protagonists in all my previous books, which I felt had become something of a comfort zone for me. I wanted to make sure Jenna and Chloe both felt as authentic as possible, so I’m indebted to the women in my life personally and professionally who read the novel and steered me on the right path! For all that, there’s still something of my own world-view in both characters, I think.

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My Book, The Movie: The Bone Queen.

--Marshal Zeringue