Jon Courtenay Grimwood

1. You have stated in many interviews that you do a lot of field research for your books like buying old maps, cooking weird dishes and going to the exact locations of the events. And after reading your books, I can believe you do all that. My question is: how on earth do you do it? You know, you can't just suddenly vanish for a month to another country, or can you? If I understood correctly, you did that kind of thing writing End of the World Blues.

Okay, maybe I can’t vanish for months at a time… But I can usually manage two or three weeks, and if you do that three or four times a year, it adds up to enough time somewhere to be able to write about the smell and the sound and the temperature and culture and politics of a place.

For End of the World Blues I made three trips to Tokyo, staying in different areas and in different classes of hotel, and wandering the city while I tried to get a grip on what life was like there. Of course, you can only write as an incomer to a city. You can’t make your hero someone who has always lived there. But that’s fine. Because in having your hero or heroine discover the culture they introduce the reader to the culture at the same time.