by JULIET WATERS

Mystery writer Mark Billingham is more of a name among U.K. mystery fans than he is over here. Think of him as a younger version of Ian Rankin, more likely to quote the Smiths or Lucinda Williams (as he does in his latest book, The Burning Girl) than the Stones or Marianne Faithfull. He was in Montreal last week, fresh from Boucheron 2004, the world's most prestigious annual mystery writers conference, held this year in Toronto. We talked about what mystery writers talk about these days.

Mirror: Would you agree that it's almost part of a formula now for the Brit detective to have strong musical tastes?

Mark Billingham: You know it is… I was at Peter Robinson's house the night before last - with Ian Rankin, actually, and you know the three of us sat around just talking about the new Elvis Costello album.

M: So is Boucheron becoming like a music conference?

MB: Well kind of. I mean it has become a really big thing and I have read a number of reviews that have said, "Enough with the music already." But it can do you a lot of nice favours. It can set the scene in a really nice way. You can deliberately have the music working against the action, and it tells you a little about the character while they're sitting alone reading a case. To not do it would seem to be perverse because we all listen to music.

M: I interviewed Michael Connelly recently and he said, basically, if you're a mystery reader the last thing you ever want to do is start writing them, because if you're successful you're going to have to stop reading mystery books. What have you found?

MB: It's true. Tragically the more you write mysteries, the less you read, for all kinds of reasons - time, not wanting to be influenced. It's awful also because you suddenly get sent books all the time, all these books for free, I mean, how much better can life be? If someone had told me that there would be all these people desperate to send you books to quote and to blurb I wouldn't have believed it. But you have to be careful or you can become a complete blurb whore. You're in a store and you suddenly see your name on the cover of three books and you think, "I've got to stop doing that." But I give quite good blurb I must admit, because I know the kind of blurb I'd like. You just imagine it's you getting it, and you know you want to give the kind of blurb they can use for more than one book. So you blurb the writer rather than the book, so you just know that that's going to be the one they stick on the cover. It's a very, very cheap business.

M: Is this the kind of thing you talk about at the conference?

MB: Oh yeah, you talk about anything but the work. You don't say, "Hey, listen, I loved your last book." There's kind of an unwritten rule that you don't - certainly not with people you know well. You just talk about football or music. You don't get together and talk about plots. Although, there was a really funny moment at the conference when three of us were having breakfast, and this guy starts telling us about this horrible nightmare he'd had the night before. As he told us about it we just all went silent and then somebody said, "That would be the most awesome opening to a book." And he kind of went, "Okay, listen, it's mine. It's my dream." And for the next two days we kept winding him up about it saying, "I'm going to use that," and he'd go, "You can't, you can't. It's mine." And that was the one time that work intruded on the convention.

The Burning Girl by Mark Billingham, Little, Brown, pb, 358pp, $25