Given your tremendous success as a novelist, were you nervous about breaking out into a different genre?
Question submitted by Chloe Healy

Tony’s answer:

I was a bit nervous – because I knew how good it would have to be.

I have loved thrillers and crime fiction all my life – so I know where the bar is, I know how good the great writers are. I was keen to make everything as good as it could be – The murder weapon, the killer, the victims, the world of the story, and Max Wolfe himself.

I think if you write in a new genre you have to enter it with all the appropriate humility but also I think you need a very strong sense of the story you want to tell. I was keen to have victims who were not necessarily innocent and a murderer who was not totally evil.

So I thought about it for a year before I even put a pen to paper. And then I gave to my best shot. So I was very nervous, especially when I was getting near the end and I knew I would actually have to show it to the world! But I was excited too. And really what got me through was that I loved every second of writing The Murder Bag, even when I was sick with nerves.