When Zoë is not writing about Charlie Fox, she and her husband Andy run a busy freelance agency producing articles and photographs for the specialist motoring press. This article, which appeared recently in Crimespree, the leading American crime-writing magazine, vividly illustrates what Zoë calls 'the day job' and how it contributes to her creative writing.
The article is introduced by Lee Child, best-selling author and creator of hard-guy, lone-wolf Jack Reacher. Lee comes from the same part of northwest England as Zoë, where she set her first Charlie Fox book, Killer Instinct.
Lee Child writes:
I lived in Cumbria for seven years and spent the last three writing the first three Reacher books. I looked out over a thousand-year-old church to ancient hills beyond and thought how weird it was to be writing tough-guy stories there. I thought I had to be the only one for a hundred miles doing that. But I was wrong. About as far away as Yankee Stadium is from Shea, Zoë Sharp was starting to do the same thing. I knew nothing about her.
I wish I had. Because Zoë is cool, in the same kind of way that Barbara Seranella is cool. There's an authenticity about her. She's been there and she's done that. She rides big bikes and looks great in leather. And best of all her tough-guy books are tough-girl books.
I love tough women in thrillers and hate tearful decorative sidekicks. I try to make my own women characters live up to those ideals. But Zoë puts her own tough woman front and center − Charlie Fox. Charlie goes way beyond the Warshawski/Millhone paradigm. She's a genuine brawler. An equal-opportunity killer. Jack Reacher wouldn't be afraid of her − can't allow that − but he would recognize a kindred spirit. He'd team up with her in a heartbeat.
I twist a 24-70mm zoom lens onto my Canon digital camera and look across at the kid with the 850 horsepower Toyota Supra.
'OK,' I tell him, 'this is what we're going to do now. We'll be driving both cars alongside each other. I need you to hold position so your front wheel is level with our rear wheel. I'm going to have our passenger door open and I'm going to be hanging out taking pictures of your car as we drive along, from about four inches above the road surface. OK?'
The kid looks dubious.
'Trust me,' I say, smiling. 'It'll look great. We're only going to be doing about twenty miles an hour, but when you see the pictures in the magazine, it'll look much faster than that.'
'OK,' he says.
I zip up my Scott motorcycle jacket − the one with the extra padding in the sleeves. The one I always wear because I know that to get the shots I need I'm going to be scraping my elbows on the blacktop pretty soon, and I know how much it hurt when I tried it in just a T-shirt.
'Oh, one last thing,' I say as he cranks up the motor to get into position.
'Yeah, what's that?'
'If I fall out, try not to run over me . . .'
Welcome to my day job.
I never set out to be a magazine photographer. It just grew on me a bit like mould! Some people think it's going to be glamorous. They think they'd like to give it a go. That desire normally fades right about the time they see me leaning out over the sill rail doing those low-angle car-to-car moving shots. The last guy who watched me do it said, 'Damn, Zoë, you've got balls . . .' I knew this short haircut was a bad idea.
I've been working as a freelance writer and photographer in the motoring field since 1988. If people ask me what I do I usually tell them: 'I lie in the middle of ploughed fields in the rain taking photographs of cars.' That seems to just about cover it − especially in England in the winter.
I suppose I've always been a bit of a car nut − rebuilding and repainting my early Triumph Spitfires and experimenting with different suspension settings so the damned things would actually go round corners. The second date I ever had with my husband we spent in his workshop changing out the universal joints in the back axle of my car. Ah, it must have been love.
For me, working as a freelance got me into writing by the back door. The Spitfire gave me an 'in' with the classic car magazines and that's where I started. I wrote numerous features on everything from micro cars and Rolls Royces to Churchill tanks − and everything in between. It taught me the craft. It taught me the importance of writing to a length and a deadline, and ruthless sub-editors taught me not to be too precious about my 'art'. It taught me something else that was important, too, although I wasn't aware of it at the time. As a woman in a very male-dominated field, I had to fight just that little bit harder to survive. I had to give as good as I got without losing sight of who I was.
Then I moved on to the magazines for the 'tweaked and tuned' boys with impossible amounts of horsepower from engine rebuilds that cost more than our first house. Early on, my editors asked me to supply pictures to go with the words and so, with an old Yashica I borrowed from my father, I just went out and got on with it. I think if I'd been through the normal educational system it would have been ingrained that you can't do something like that without having been to college first and learned how. But I left school when I was twelve and I learned early on to ignore the rules.
The desire to write fiction had always been lurking around in the background and the spur I needed came from a regular column I was asked to write in one of the mags. Whenever my picture appeared with the column, somebody sent me death threats. Serious ones with the words made up out of cut-out-of-newspaper letters. They told me I was filth, that they knew where I lived and that my days were numbered.
Dealing with that brought me full circle to wanting to write fiction again. And, in particular, wanting to write crime thrillers. So Charlotte 'Charlie' Fox took shape. Someone who was very capable, who could take care of herself when she came under that kind of a threat. Someone who'd been struggling to get along in a man's world and against the resentment that sometimes caused.
So that gave Charlie her Special Forces army background, her awkward relationship with her highly respectable parents, her love of motorcycling. And it gave Charlie her dark side − her damaged past and her ability, under the right provocation, to kill.
And for Charlie's first American adventure, the day job came in useful once again. I remember coming to Daytona Beach in Florida a few years ago to cover the annual Spring Break Nationals tuned car show there. As I stood on the main drag with my camera, taking pictures of the kids cruising up and down in their tricked-out pickups, I thought, 'If you were a stranger here, on the run, with a teenage kid that you needed to protect at all costs, this would be a great place to hide.'
But the day job doesn't just provide inspiration. It keeps me sane. It keeps me level. And it keeps providing me with experiences that help make Charlie Fox the person she is.
So, would I give it up to write full time? Well . . . maybe. One day. When the day job starts to interfere with the writing instead of complementing it. Until then I'll keep hanging out of cars, dragging my elbows on the road. Why not? I have to admit, it's kinda fun!