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Child 44 Book
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About the Author ~ Tom Rob Smith
Tom Rob Smith was born in l979 to a Swedish mother and an English father and was brought up in London where he still lives. He graduated from Cambridge in 2001 and spent a year in Italy on a creative writing scholarship. Tom has worked as a screenwriter for the past five years, including a six-month stint in Phnom Penh storylining Cambodia's first ever soap. .Exclusive Amazon.co.uk Interview with Tom Rob Smith
What is
about?Child 44 is a thriller set in the terror of 1950s Stalinist Russia, a brutal regime that executed anyone who disagreed with its dogma. It proclaimed to be a perfect society. So, when a series of brutal murders take place, no one is permitted to say that these are the work of a serial killer. In a perfect society there can be no crime.Child 44 One man, Leo Demidov, a State security agent, a man who has spent his entire career arresting innocent men and women, decides to redeem himself by catching this killer. To do so, he must buck the system, risking his life and the life of everyone he loves.
What inspired you to write it?
It was inspired by a true story, a killer called Andrei Chikatilo who murdered over sixty children, girls, boys, over a period of ten years. Reading about the case I realized this wasn’t a criminal mastermind who’d evaded capture through devious skill. He’d gone on killing for so long because the system refused to admit he even existed. He should’ve been caught on numerous occasions but the prejudices of the State got in the way and, as a result, tragically, many children died. I felt such a tremendous sense of frustration reading about the events that I saw its potential as a piece of fiction.
The real killer murdered in the 1980s. In
I moved the story back to the 1950s, when the stakes were much higher for someone who dared to risk opposing the State.Child 44 Who are your literary influences?
In one sense, any book that I’ve ever read, good or bad.
To answer the question more usefully authors who have directly influenced
areChild 44 ,Graham Greene ,Robert Louis Stephenson andThomas Harris .Arthur Conan-Doyle is as much an adventure as it is a detective story.Child 44 If you could recommend just one "must-read book" to anyone, what would it be and why?
There are so many wonderful books. However, connecting to
, I’d sayChild 44 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Whenever I’ve mentioned the book to people who haven’t read it, they understandably presume it to be melancholy. Much of it is brutal but he is also brilliantly witty, slicing up the absurdities of the regime. It’s an incredible book – or, rather, three books, but there is an abridged edition published by Harvill.The Gulag Archipelago What top tips do you have for anyone looking to write their first book?
There’s a lot of advice already out there. One issue is being able to recognize which advice is good and which is bad, advice that works for one person, might prove disastrous for someone else.
- 0446509256
- 9780446509251
- Tom Rob Smith
- 29 April 2008
- Grand Central Publishing
- Hardcover (Book)
- 736
- Lrg
- Large Print
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