1 When did you first consider yourself a writer?
A When I came back from watching Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea when I was about nine and wrote my own book about a harpoonist like Kirk Douglas fighting a giant squid. I bound my story in cardboard, illustrated the cover, and sold it to my best friend for a penny. That was my first royalty!
2 What is the hardest part of writing?
A Continuously thinking about plot developments night and day. The world inside a writer’s head is just as real as the world outside it.
3 How did you feel upon publication of your first completed project?
A I was a newspaper reporter before my first book was published and so loads of articles and features had been published with my byline every week for years, so not particularly thrilled.
4 In addition to writing, what else are you passionate about?
A Poland. I didn’t find out until I was married to a Polish woman that my great-great-grandfather was Polish, and when we first travelled there (before the end of Communism) I felt an affinity with the country that I feel even more strongly now. I have travelled all over Poland and five years ago I started to organise an annual short story writing contest for Polish prisoners, in order to help their rehabilitation.
5 If you could ask any author, living or dead, one question, what would it be?
A James Herbert: Why did you hate my dining-room wallpaper so much?
GRAHAM MASTERTON was born in Edinburgh in 1946, and at the age of 17 he joined his local newspaper as a junior reporter. He was appointed deputy editor of Mayfair at the age of 21, and at 24 he became executive editor of Penthouse. After leaving Penthouse, he wrote The Manitou, a horror novel that became his first bestseller and was adapted into a film starring Tony Curtis.
Graham spent twenty-five years as one of the world’s bestselling horror authors before he turned his talent to crimewriting. Inspired by the five years in which he and his late wife lived in Cork, he created a series of novels featuring Katie Maguire, the first female superintendent in the Irish police force. The first book in the Katie Maguire series, White Bones, was published by Head of Zeus in 2012 and became a top-ten bestseller. Graham continues to write thrillers and horror novels alongside the Katie Maguire crime series, which has now sold over a million copies worldwide.
Richard Schiver 