By Margaret Maccoll
Noosaville novelist Bill Sheehy is aiming to add playwright to his list of achievements after the 80-year-old novelist submitted his first play in the 2018 National One-Act Playwriting competition.
Westerns and crime novels are the preference for the USA native who moved to Noosa more than a dozen years ago after retiring from a career in journalism and publishing.
Bill has had 15 books published and has another three before publishers.
He suspects a childhood growing up in California with characters like Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger had a bearing on his interest in westerns.
He said the largest readership for westerns in the US was older men.
A natural storyteller, Bill is attracted to writing crime for the excitement of writing a plot that progresses like a puzzle to its conclusion.
“I know how it’s going to end. I don’t know how I’m going to get there,” he said.
Publishers, he said, like a story where the reader doesn’t know who the killer is and is presented with many possibilities then at the end thinks they should have seen who it was.
And Bill should know as he once wrote an e-book titled How to write fiction that a publisher will like.
It’s not all logic for Bill who has quite a bit of fun writing his murder mysteries.
He has a penchant for killing people, in fiction, and some people he hasn’t liked during his real life have become villainous characters in his books.
“You have to make the victim attractive so people feel sorry for them,” he said.
“I killed five beautiful blonde women and had such fun doing it, and I love women.”
Having acquired a number of duplicate books of his on his bookshelves, he plans to donate several to the Noosa Library.
If you’re looking for Bill’s books you’ll find some have been written under his pseudonyms Carlton Youngblood and JD Ryder.
