Natasha Cooper
Natasha Cooper became a crime writer by accident. But when she discovered the scope the genre gave her, she was hooked. With each novel, she's become more interested in real crime, but she also treasures the genre's capacity for absorbing and expressing rage.
She wanted to write from the age of about six (much encouraged by her grandmother, whose novels were published by Hutchinson in the 1920s and 30s), but undiagnosed dyslexia held her back. It wasn't until she was working in publishing that she realised she wasn't as thick as she'd thought. Starting her career as an editorial assistant at Chatto & Windus, she went on to various departments within Hutchinson (when she won an award that sent her to Knopf in New York for six weeks), and on to Quartet as editorial director.
Eventually deciding that she couldn't bear to go on dealing with authors, she looked around for something else to do. The alternatives seemed to be working for an MBA or writing the novel she'd always fantasised about. She picked the latter as the cheaper option and has never looked back, although she has switched genres and pseudonyms since then. She has also been infinitely luckier than her grandmother, whose literary agent was imprisoned for embezzling his authors' royalties. Natasha is now represented by Jane Gregory of Gregory & Company.
To meet Natasha for the first time, you might be misled into thinking that she's as conventional as she looks and sounds. Others have made that mistake before you. In fact, despite her irredeemably middle-class upbringing and voice (which other crimewriters have described as being 'like melted chocolate') she's a seething mass of contradictory and often furious opinions.
She detests injustice, but she loathes the rush to litigate. She admires barristers beyond measure, but she is horrified that so much money finds its way to lawyers when a less antagonistic system of resolving disputes might result in quicker redress and more money for better public services. A passionate and committed feminist, she can't bear the way some women demand special privileges simply because they are women - or because they have chosen to have children. She would defend any woman's right to choose to give birth or to terminate her pregnancy, but she is horrified by the idea of school-age parents. Detesting male violence and arrogance, she has strong views on the subject of date rape, about which she has written in 
Those Whom the Gods Love, her latest psychological suspense novel published under the name Clare Layton.
She thinks NHS rationing is inevitable and would stop all NHS-funded IVF treatments, tattoo removal, breast-augmentation and so on in favour of joint replacement, cataract surgery, the proper provision of best-quality drugs for disease, and infinitely more - and better - mental health services. Care in the community strikes her as being one of the unkindest and most dangerous social experiments there have been in recent years.
Prison reform is high on her personal agenda, too. She once spent a night on A Wing in Brixton Prison and was shocked to discover how small a cell feels when you're locked in it with someone else. The old days of slopping out must have been terrible, but even now the two inmates of a cell have to use an unscreened lavatory, installed only about three feet from their bunks. There is absolutely no privacy. It was during that uncomfortable night that she came up with the plot for 
Prey to All, wondering how a middle-class woman like herself might have ended up in a cell like that for real.
Despite her interest in prison reform, she is also exceedingly keen on the proper punishment of those who commit crimes. That may be because of the number of burglaries she and her family have suffered, both in London, where she was brought up, and in the depths of the Dorset countryside, to which her family moved. She is distressed but not surprised at the statistics showing how many offenders in prison cannot read and adamant that education should be a priority in all prisons. It surprises her when other people object that that would give criminals greater advantages than their honest counterparts. Natasha's view is as much self-interested as generous: unless offenders are given the means to earn a living and the stimulus to understand imaginatively the damage they have done to their victims, they are unlikely to change their ways on release.
Food is of huge importance to her and she is horrified at the growth in fast-food and added-value pre-prepared meals. It shocks her that children can leave school without being able to cook or to understand how food (and additives) can affect mood and health - and save or cost a fortune. She is outraged that there are quite so many urban areas where it is impossible to walk to shops that sell fresh fruit and vegetables. Even worse is the suggestion that some supermarkets may charge higher prices in deprived areas than in rich ones.
She has many interests outside her work, but music is something of a blind spot. The one thing, she says, that would transform her life would be being able to sing. She loves singing but sounds so like a tuneless corncrake that she can only do it in the bath - where she also comes up with her most gruesome murders. She doesn't think she could ever kill anyone herself, but she has plenty of murderous feelings, particularly about experts who demand their clients' trust and then provide a shoddy service or make unnecessary mistakes. She loathes people who make promises they can't fulfil, and all bullies, whether institutional or personal.
During her year chairing the Crime Writers' Association, she lectured and wrote on many aspects of crime fiction, from the perennial questions of whether American crime writing is superior to British and how much violence is legitimate in mainstream fiction, to an analysis of what makes some people cross the boundary between fantasies of revenge and actual murder. She has been heard to say that the enormous appeal of crime fiction may have much to do with the way it allows male readers to explore emotion without feeling soppy and female readers to experience the kind of powerful rage they are still not permitted in real life.
On a less sexist note, she believes that one of the great delights of crime fiction is that it can tackle big themes while still entertaining readers. There is almost nothing that cannot find its place, although writers who have attempted to construct their novels from the point of view of paedophiles have been heavily criticised. The genre covers an immense range of issues, as well as bridging the gap between literary and popular fiction.
Crime writing, she says, has something for everyone. There are the intriguing crossword-puzzle type of mysteries, brilliantly constructed by authors like Colin Dexter, whose Chief Inspector Morse manages to make all his devotees feel that they, too, have a foothold in his world of dons and opera. And there are the serial-killer thrillers, which now bore Natasha nearly as much as cosy village mysteries because of their predictability. Many readers still enjoy them, possibly because they serve the same purpose as fairytales, scaring readers only to reassure them that order will always be restored and the guilty punished. These days Natasha herself favours character-based novels, in which psychologically realistic individuals battle with life-and-death dilemmas she can imagine happening to people like her. They do not always have neat or happy endings.
In spite of all her fury she is, like most crimewriters, a pleasure to work with. Dealing in her novels with the dregs of humanity, she is continually delighted with the real people she meets, and believes most mean well, even when they trample or get things wrong. She is not romantic enough to believe in human perfectability, but she is passionately committed to the idea of human progress.
Having just reached the age of fifty she has discovered that her instinct was right all along: the best kind of life is that of the post-menopausal woman. With just enough testosterone to give her an edge, but not enough to cause trouble, and without all the tiresome practical and emotional handicaps of her fertile years, the middle-aged woman is spectacularly free. Natasha intends to make the most of that.
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