May 2003
Talking books: Sue Rann

Looking for Mr Nobody is set in the Amsterdam underworld amongst down-and-outs, young travellers and others who have somehow drifted to the city. But more sinister forces are at work...

The story focuses on two people, a vagrant called Wolf who can remember nothing before the hospital where he was treated for gunshot wounds and Robin, the 30-something daughter of a US general who works as a martial-arts instructor and part-time bouncer.

Soon their paths cross as, from their very different starting-points, they become aware of a shadowy project involving black ops and designer drugs.

Surprisingly, because the book has a strong sense of place, Sue Rann had finished Looking for Mr Nobody before she visited Amsterdam. She says: "I made huge problems for myself because everybody says, 'Write what you know' and at that time I was living in Stafford and, although it has many fine qualities, it is not a terribly interesting place. I thought I'm going to set it in Amsterdam and I had to do so much research. I read guide books until they came out of my ears and as many photo guides as I could find, and I got an enormous street map of Amsterdam and pored over it until I knew the centre like the back of my hand."

The novel is set in Amsterdam although Sue Rann had never been there.

But why Amsterdam? Sue thinks it may be because she has fond memories of the TV police series Van der Valk: "I used to love it. It was so exotic and funny and I'd never been to Amsterdam."

Sue used to be a graphic artist but has always wanted to write: "I was planning to become a freelance illustrator but I'm not just organised enough to run a proper business. I still do the occasional job but really writing is the only thing I've ever wanted to do.

"I've never been very good at finishing anything. Mr Nobody was the first thing I've actually written although while I was doing it I wrote a short story for a competition and won. Before that I was always writing things but never finishing them."

The short story was a ghost chiller, a sort of follow-up to the The Hitcher, the horror movie classic starring Rutger Hauer. Sue says: "I got to thinking about where a strange figure like that (played by Hauer) might come from and ended up with a ghost story.

"Science fiction has always been sort of my first love. As soon as I got let loose on the library my Dad introduced me to Lord of the Rings and then I found this whole rack of shelves full of science fiction. That was my first love affair with books."

There is already a follow-uo to Looking for Mr Nobody in the pipeline

Sue believes her love of science fiction shows in her crime writing. Asked if she feels any writer has particularly influenced her work she says: "When I first started writing Mr Nobody it was a stylistic mess because I was greatly influenced by William Gibson at that point. It was full of terribly short sentences and disjointed grammar and it was sort of Gibson but without being very good. He is a crossover between mainstream and science fiction."

Virtual reality also features strongly in this novel. Sue comments: "It is the coming thing - pharmaceutically-induced experiences when you are in virtual reality. I've never tried it myself, just read other people's books and watched the Matrix. Virtual reality is just an adaptation of current technology so you don't have to have all sorts of wires leading everywhere."

Despite the sinister goings-on in Looking for Mr Nobody Sue says that while she is deeply cynical about large governments she isn't really a conspiracy theorist but feels, especially in the United States, there is a mythology about "men in black" as shown in programmes like the X Files. She is hopeful the FBI will not be knocking at her door.

Now Sue who lives at Upperthong, just outside Holmfirth, writes while her children are at school and a follow-up to Mr Nobody is already in the pipeline because she feels "a lot is still to be resolved" about one of the characters. It might give too much away about the first novel to say which character this is. Read it and judge for yourself.

To win a copy of Looking for Mr Nobody GO HERE