Patrick Arrasmith’s Scratchboarding Secrets Revealed!

Earlier this month, I met Patrick Arrasmith, the illustrator for Joseph Delaney’s The Last Apprentice YA fantasy series, and got him to share some of the techniques behind his atmospheric drawings. It’s a fun video—give it a look!

16 November 2008 | interviews |

Louis Bayard’s Secret History of Crime Fiction

In the last five years, since the publication of Mr. Timothy, Louis Bayard has become one of our leading authors of historical thrillers—but, he told me when we met in Washington, D.C., last month, “It’s not a niche I ever defined for myself. I just walked right into it.” After writing two contemporary gay romantic comedies in the 1990s, he had a literary itch that he simply couldn’t resist scratching: “All I know is that I wanted to write about Tiny Tim, and I wanted to do bad things to him.” After the success of that book, Bayard turned to one of crime fiction’s founding fathers, Edgar Allen Poe, for The Pale Blue Eye, and now, in The Black Tower, he has turned to Eugène François Vidocq, who rose to prominence as one of post-revolutionary France’s first criminal investigators.

“I was toiling through an idea for a novel about Franz Mesmer that wasn’t going where I wanted it to,” Bayard explained, when his editor at William Morrow, Marjorie Braman (who has since become the editor in chief at Henry Holt), suggested Vidocq, a name that Bayard had first encountered during the research for The Pale Blue Eye—he’d been curious that Vidocq was apparently so familiar to 19th-century readers that his name could be dropped without any explanation. “The more I learned about him, the more he intrigued me,” Bayard continued, until he decided Vidocq “should be put in the genre he helped create.”

(more…)

20 October 2008 | interviews |