Mandasue Heller

I wrote my first book when I was taken ill and had to quit singing for a while. I based it in the Hulme Crescents, where I had spent 10 of some of the best and absolute worst years of my life. It was a squatters paradise when I moved in, and a notorious no-go zone for the police. Violent crimes were commonplace and drugs were rife. I saw a fair few friends get sucked into the hell of addiction - and lost too many of them because of it. Those were the bad times, but then the musicians and artists started moving in. A friend once described it as being like Glastonbury all year round, and it really was. I wanted to capture the spirit of the place in my writing - the good and the bad; but I quickly discovered that I couldn't write about real people. I'd start, but then I'd become conscious of what they might think of it and that would inhibit me. So I decided to take a stab at inventing characters instead, using the Crescents as the backdrop for their stories. And, guess what? It worked! The Front, Forget Me Not and The Game were all set in the Crescents, but I expanded into different areas after that; some areas real, others fictitious. I took Brutal even further afield by setting it in a farmhouse in a remote part of Yorkshire. But I'm back on the mean streets of Manchester with the one I'm working on right now. So that's me . . . From professional singer to full-time writer, with various other jobs in between: TV extra, barmaid, waitress, pharmacy assistant, phone-line tarot card reader, to name just a few. My children and grandchildren are my world, and my books come from the other-world that lives and breathes inside my twisted mind.