Suspense, Mystery, Horror and Thriller Fiction - Suspense Magazine

Linwood
Barclay
Wanted to Write From the
Beginning
SuspenseMagazine.com
Interview by Suspense Magazine
Press Photo Credit: Michael Rafelson
Linwood Barclay was born in the United States, but just as he
was turning four, his parents moved to Canada, settling in a
Toronto suburb. Linwood’s father, Everett—a commercial artist whose
illustrations of automobiles appeared in Life, Look, and The Saturday
Evening Post—had accepted an advertising position north of the border.
As the major car accounts switched more to photography for
their magazine advertising instead of illustrations, Linwood’s parents
bought a cottage resort and trailer park in the Kawartha Lakes region
of Ontario. But when Linwood was sixteen, his father died, and he
essentially took over running the family business (an experience he
wrote about in his memoir, “Last Resort”).
At the age of twenty-two, Linwood left the resort and got his first
newspaper job at The Peterborough Examiner. In 1981, he joined
the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest-circulation newspaper. For twelve
years he held a variety of editing positions, and then became the
paper’s humor columnist in 1993. A few thousand columns later, he
retired from the paper in 2008 to write books full-time.
After writing four comic thrillers featuring the character Zack
Walker, Linwood turned to darker, standalone novels, starting
with “No Time for Goodbye,” which became an international hit.
The novel has been translated into nearly forty languages, was the
single bestselling novel in the UK in 2008, and has been optioned
for film by Eric McCormack. Since then, all of Linwood’s novels
have appeared on bestseller lists, and more of his books have been
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