How’s this for cool? I dropped Mark Billingham an email about CSI:NY, and I got a reply back this morning:
Thanks very much for getting in touch and for your comments about CSI. My attention to the “similarities” between this episode and my novel SLEEPYHEAD was first drawn a few months ago when it was first shown on US TV…
I have looked into things legally and it would be an understatement to say that it is a VERY tricky area to go into…
I have been in touch withy the programme makers who claim not to have read the book. They DO claim that they’ve since read it, think it’s brilliant and that it would be great if I could go and write for the show!! All very nice of them wouldn’t you say?
We’ll wait and see what happens.At the very least I hope to be writing an article about the whole experience around the time when the next book comes out.
Thanks again for the heads-up and I hope you continue to enjoy the books.
I wish I got job offers when I wrote letters of complaint to TV companies. Hmm. Anyone know the address to write to at Playboy TV?
As an aside, read the books. I’ve read the second one and am partway through the first – yes, yes – and they’re very good thrillers. The second one definitely reads better than the first, so it seems Mark’s improving as he goes on, too.
Incidentally, Mark’s the fourth author I’ve received email from. Stephen Leather sent me an unsolicited “thank you” email from a cybercafe in Hong Kong (!) in response to a review I had on my old web page for The Long Shot; Douglas Adams was kind enough to reply a few times when I was trying to organise something with student radio; and Terry Pratchett I think replied to all the emails he got before everyone in the world started mailing him!
*impressed* Mark Billingham AND Stephen Leather. you should have borrowed some of my books while you were here…..
don’t you find it deeply unsettling when you go to someone’s house & find they have NO BOOKS at all on shelves – I don’t necessarily notice straight away but register a vague feeling of something being wrong…
It’s not normal I tells ye!
How can you have that many to read? I have no idea how many of either of them I’ve read – need to sort out my books! And I’ve read all but a very few of them – and then only the ones I started and were so bad I couldn’t finish them – very rare I don’t finish one I’ve started!
I compulsively buy books and haven’t had the time to read them for years. I used to get through 3-5 novels a week when I was at school. I just don’t have the spare time any more *sigh*
Doesn’t stop me buying them though.
*goes back to the coursework*
I’ve got all of Billingham’s (fifth one’s out in a couple of months) and I’ve read all of Leather’s bar the most recent that I’ve not spotted in affordable-back yet.
As it stands, I’d guess I have in excess of 150 books to read. No point in borrowing more!
Sounds like me and make-up – I compulsively buy it, yet hardly ever wear it! And craft magazines. And cookery books.
Fiction books I also compulsively buy, but them I read. God, I’d be lost if I didn’t have anything to read.
Worse is once Sexy Eric came to my apartment, and looking with horror at my bookcase asked in a hushed whisper, “Have you really read *all* those books?” “Erm, Sexy Eric, there are another 4 bookcases in the bedroom all full, and I’ve read them all, some of them several times.”
Weird.