Thriller Women

A fortnight ago EC Scullion interviewed her Thriller Women co-founder Penny Batchelor on the launch of Penny's second novel Her new Best Friend. Now it's Penny's turn to question EC to mark the publication of Evaders on 19th August. 

Find out whether EC thinks publishing is sexist, her favourite country to live in during a peripatetic career for the Foreign Office, and what she wish she knew when writing her first book! 

Buy the Evaders paperback from Thriller Women's list at Bookshop.org. NB: if you buy books through this link we may earn a commission from bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.

PB: Congratulations on the publication of Evaders, the sequal to Intruders. Did you plan the whole trilogy (spoiler alert, there's going to be another!) before you started writing and how long did it take to write Evaders compared to Intruders?

ECS: Thank you ! When I started writing Intruders back in 2016, I hadn’t written anything for a while so really I was just pleased to be writing regularly again. About half way through, I began to realise that the story had the potential to become a series, but at that point I really didn’t know how. It wasn’t until I consulted an editor for a critique of the story, and when I decided to change the ending as a result, that a larger story arc started to take shape in my mind. Intruders took me about eighteen months to write, which was quicker than Evaders, which took me about two and a half years! As a working mum I found the latter exhausting; I barely slept.


PB: Whilst Evaders is the second novel in the trilogy it also works as a standalone novel, meaning you don't have to have read Intruders. Can you tell me how difficult it was to cater for both audiences and how you thought up the plot?

I think it’s a fine balance. You don’t want to go over old ground but with part two of a trilogy you almost have to summarise in parts, what has come before, whilst avoiding an information dump. So I tried to incorporate the relevant details only, drip feeding them steadily into the story. Plot-wise, Intruders was inspired by the year I spent living in Uruguay with my family. We then moved to Panama City for two years, which is the main setting for Evaders. It helps when writing a book two that the story is a continuation, rather than plotting from scratch, but the real-life locations that I wanted to include in the story meant I had to plot around them, for example the section involving Panama’s Pearl Islands. I wanted to write about the Panama I had experienced, without writing a travel guide.


PB:You write in a very televisual way with lots of action and you transport the reader to the places in South America the novel is set in. Is this deliberate and what are the challenges?

ECS: When I was young I wanted to be a screenwriter. I loved films more than books and I wrote quite a few (pretty dreadful) screenplays before I attempted writing a novel. I remember reading that screenplays were just a blue print, and I came to understand that writing a novel gave an author more flexibility than writing for the screen. That said, writing a novel remains for me a very visual experience and I like to be able to watch the story unfold in my head! Hence the reason why locations are so important to me I think. Plus I still love movies and TV series as much as I love books!

PB: You have a huge cast of fascinating characters in Evaders. Which is your favourite and how on earth did you remember who is who and where they're supposed to be when writing the novel?

ECS: I knew that there were going to be several strands in Evaders, and that these strands had to be interlinked. I knew that they had to come together at the end, and that the overall scope of the novel was going to be quite big. So I think for that reason I ended up with quite a few characters, yes!