Origins: Stuart Neville

Once in a while here at Crime Always Pays, I like to hand the reins over to an actual writer who knows what she or he is talking about. ‘Origins’ is a (very) occasional series in which an author talks about the inspiration - character, plot, setting, whatever - for their latest novel, in this case Stuart Neville on Galya Petrova, the heroine of STOLEN SOULS. To wit:

“For every crime, there’s a victim. Sometimes many victims. How those victims are portrayed is a weakness of crime fiction. Too often they are simply cadavers, pieces of meat on which the story feeds. They are rarely human. They seldom have lives that precede the moments of their deaths. They exist only to be crouched over by detectives or dissected by coroners.
  “When I first started writing the character Galya Petrova I was determined she would not be a victim. She would not be a body on a slab. She would not wait passively, in fear, for a man to come and save her. If she was to survive STOLEN SOULS, it would be by her own efforts. The Damsel in Distress is a thriller trope that’s far too easy to fall back on, and I’m guilty of doing so myself in previous books. Galya is indeed a damsel, and in distress, but that trope does not stand without a white knight charging to the rescue.
  “Jack Lennon is no white knight. Galya’s on her own with only her will to survive. Every aspect of her background and personality feeds into her fight for life. I wanted to create a character who might have fallen prey to some despicable people, but who’d never be a victim. I hope I’ve achieved that with Galya Petrova.” - Stuart Neville