A.J. Cross, like her heroine Kate Hanson, is a Forensic Psychologist with over twenty years' experience in the field. She lives in Birmingham with her jazz-musician husband.Here Cross dreamcasts an adaptation of her latest novel, Something Evil Comes:
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I’ll get straight to it: I would choose a younger Jeff Bridges for the role of the American police officer, Lieutenant Joseph Corrigan, a man of few but always relevant words, a recurrent character in my books and a member of the Unsolved Crime Unit. Why? You’ve seen Jeff Bridges and you needs to ask? As I bash my keyboard I’m looking at one of my husband’s guitar catalogues, this one for Eastman. Here is Jeff on the cover, gazing direct to camera in black boots, denim and leather coat, a hand resting on an Eastman guitar, his hair long and worn back from his face. A good, strong head. Not a man to waste words. Oh, yes.
Another recurrent character is DI Bernard Watts, Birmingham UK born and bred, now at an age and stage of career when he feels outflanked by the much younger, mostly graduate intake of officers. Inside my head as I developed the Watts character around seven years ago was the sadly now deceased British actor Warren Clarke, who early in his career played the character Dim in the film, A Clockwork Orange. However, the role which made him my choice for Watts was one for television. He played an engineering firm’s manager in the fictional town of Rummidge opposite a feminist university teacher in David Lodge’s novel Nice Work. I’ve only just realised how influential both those roles were in shaping Watts and his professional relationship with the forensic psychologist who assists the Unsolved Crime Unit and is my main character. Let’s get to her, shall we?
Dr Kate Hanson, more recently a professor at the University of Birmingham, arrived inside my head fully formed at the start of my writing career. She was partly inspired by a young colleague of mine at the time who had the unnerving ability to recall on demand the titles, authors and dates of forensic psychology research papers. I just know how to track them down. I’ve never had anyone in mind to play Hanson but I can tell you exactly what she’s like: four books in, she’s thirty-six, divorced, a mother of one. Five feet three inches tall with thick, dark red hair. Somebody to be reckoned with. I haven’t given her mental health problems. You know: drink, communication disorder and so forth. She’s smart and she’s also everywoman. Which doesn’t mean that she’s uncomplicated. Far from it. She has a history of key failed relationships, commonplace enough but which underpins her refusal to commit to one man. So far.
--Marshal Zeringue