WHEN DAVID HEWSON was a boy growing up in the small coastal town of Bridlington, England, entertainment options were few. He ended up spending lots of time at the local library, which had a surprisingly strong collection of American authors, from John Steinbeck to John Dos Passos, Ray Bradbury to Ed McBain.
'American writers gave us this pace, the feeling of a lot of narrative drive,' says Hewson, 51, who was in Hong Kong last week on a publicity tour for his latest thriller, The Villa of Mysteries (Pan Macmillan). 'It was very gripping writing. The school of American fiction seems to get it - you get complex ideas served in an accessible way.'
Hewson resolved to convey those same qualities in his own work. Now, eight years after the publication of his first mystery novel, that decision may be about to pay off in a big way. Random House has just released Hewson's sixth mystery, A Season for the Dead, and will bring out three more of his books. For a British author, cracking the US market, whose yearly sales are roughly four times those of England, is a huge and potentially lucrative coup.
Hewson's timing is right. There's a growing interest in foreign settings among American readers and editors. The four novels Random House is publishing are set in Venice and Rome, and Hewson spent a couple of months in both, meticulously researching.
'What I loved about David's writing was that instant immersion into a place and time,' says Kate Miciak, executive editor of Random House's Delacorte imprint, under which Hewson's books will appear. 'He beautifully integrates history and mystery in a tense and fresh and utterly compelling way. I think, too, that what drew me will be precisely what the American reader will find irresistible in these novels.'
Along with suspense, American readers will get a good dose of travelogue from Hewson, a former reporter for The Times of London who now writes a technology column for its sister publication, The Sunday Times. In the 80s, he started his career as a book author writing travel guides.