Meg Gardiner - Writing Career

Writing Career

Writing is her "third career," says Gardiner. "In earlier incarnations, I practiced law in Los Angeles and taught writing at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After living in California most of my life, in the early 1990s, I moved with my family to the United Kingdom."

It was during her freedom in those early years in the UK that she wrote her first novel, completing a task she'd set for herself a decade earlier. "I always wanted to write a novel. And it was time to put up or shut up."

Initially, she began documenting her travels in a journal, titled Hitchhiking in Lion Country, or Stupid Things I Have Done in Zambia. Entries include "Damn, That Cliff is Steep" and "With the Kids at the Cobra Petting Zoo." She lacked the insurance to keep this up, however, and so she sought new thrills. Too squeamish to rob convenience stores, she took up crime writing. Her first novel, China Lake, was published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2002. Since then, Gardiner has written full-time and published six additional titles. "It's a job I'm immensely lucky to have."

Gardiner says that she writes crime fiction because it "gets to the heart of the human condition. It's about people facing a severe danger, or confronting an evil that has invaded their world. It's also fun. I get to slingshot readers into situations they would hate to face in real life. A kid in danger? Bring it on. Sadistic killers? Here, have another helping. My book gave you nightmares? Thank you, that's wonderful."

She likes thriller fiction "because it grabs readers, takes them on a menacing ride to places they'd hate to go in real life and returns them safely, feeling thrilled. And especially because crime writing is about morality: finding justice, restoring order out of chaos."

As the daughter of an English professor, "I was obviously in a home where books and reading and writing mattered," Gardiner told the Santa Barbara Independent newspaper. At Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta, California, she reported for the Charger, the school paper, but her father urged caution to his budding writer. "He said I could write novels after college and be another novelist who waits on tables or I could become a lawyer who writes novels." She heeded his warning, but later left the law behind and began writing. "I decided I didn't want to argue for a living," she said. Instead, as the title of her blog "Lying for a Living" implies, she now lies for a living.