1) So, who are you & what have you written?
My name is Antti Tuomainen. I’m a Finnish author living in Helsinki, Finland. I’ve published altogether six novels. Three of them have been published in the UK, most recently The Mine. Earlier books are The Healer and Dark As My Heart. My books have been translated into 28 languages, I’ve been nominated for the Petrona Prize, have won the Clue Award for the Best Finnish Crime Novel. (There is also a feature film in the works.) I’m most active on Facebook (you can LIKE my page here) and I’m also on Twitter @antti_tuomainen and Instagram @anttituomainen and I have a website at www.anttituomainen.com.
2) Why do you write crime fiction?
I find the crime story a perfect vehicle or a framework to tell the kind of dramatic stories I want to tell. It gives me an ideal opportunity to investigate and explore human beings in all kinds of extreme situations. And I don’t know if I ever made a conscious choice. It came about very naturally. I just started out writing stories the way I wanted to tell them. Also, it has a lot to do with what I liked and still like to read.
3) What informs your crime writing?
The human condition. We’re all so wonderfully flawed and so imperfectly perfect. We can be good and we can be so bad. I’m interested in the way we act in time of crisis, in desperate situations, how we respond in different situations.
4) What’s your usual writing routine?
I like routines and I like to keep office hours. Also, when I’m deep into a book, I like to work intensively every day from morning until evening. I’m a full time writer now which makes some things easier and some things harder. (I never would have guessed this.) When I was a full time copywriter at an advertising agency I wrote on weekends and evenings and on every single holiday. And I still managed to spend time with my wife and family. Somehow that all worked, too.
5) Which crime book do you wish YOU’D written, and why?
There are so many. One book that made a huge impression when I was a young aspiring writer was Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. I realized then that you can make the crime novel into anything, even a literary novel, and you can write as beautifully as you like, even make it almost poetry, and still call it a crime novel.
