Need a cheat sheet on Joe O’Loughlin before you dive into the just-released Mulholland Books paperback edition of SHATTER or the upcoming BLEED FOR ME? Curious how a series writers keeps all the those character traits in order? Check out the below dossier on the principle characters from Robotham’s acclaimed psychological thrillers.

Name:            Professor Joseph O’Loughin (commonly known as Joe)

Profession: Clinical Psychologist

Born:            November 29, 1960, at Penrhyn Bay, Wales.

Height:          6’1”

Weight:          175 lbs

Eyes:             Brown

Joe’s own descriptions of himself:

(BLEED FOR ME) I am not handsome in the conventional sense. I am tall and pale with watery brown eyes and when I look at myself naked I am reminded of a winter animal that sheds its fur in the hotter months and looks out of place until the cold returns. That’s one of the reasons that I don’t wear shorts or T-shirts or flip flops which Australians call thongs. I wonder what they call G-strings?

(SUSPECT) Not even my mother would call me handsome. I have curly brown hair, a pear-shaped nose and skin that freckles at the first hint of sunlight.

(SHATTER) Sadly, I inherited my father’s tangle of hair. If it grows half an inch too long it becomes completely unruly and I look like I’ve been electrocuted.

Early Education:

Joe was sent to boarding school from the age of eight, attending the exclusive Charterhouse School in Surrey, England.

A single memory comes back to me, with all the light and shade of reality. I am standing on the front steps of Charterhouse as my father hugs me and feels the sob in my chest. ‘Not in front of your mother,’ he whispers.

He turns to walk away and says to my mother, ‘Not in front of the boy,’ as she dabs at her eyes.

At Charterhouse he excelled academically but not on the sporting field.

Saturday mornings and soggy sports fields seem to go together like acne and adolescence. That’s how I remember the winters of my childhood – standing ankle-deep in mud, freezing my bollocks off, playing for the school’s Second XV.

God’s-personal-physician-in-waiting (my father) had a bellow that rose above the howling wind. ‘Don’t just stand there like a cold bottle of piss,’ he’d shout. ‘Call yourself a winger! I’ve seen continents drift faster than you.’

Tertiary Studies:

Joe did three years of medicine before changing courses to study psychology and behavioural science at London University. In 1985 he obtained his Masters degree in Clinical Psychology.

I stayed on at university determined to sleep with every promiscuous, terminally uncommitted first-year on campus, but unlike other would-be Lotharios I tried too hard. I even failed miserably at being fashionably unkempt and seditious. No matter how many times I slept on someone’s floor, using my jacket as a pillow, it refused to crumple or stain. And instead of appearing grungy and intellectually blasé, I looked like someone on his way to his first job interview.

Career:

Trainee psychologist, West London Health Authority, London

Merseyside Health Authority, Liverpool

West Hammersmith Hospital, London

Royal Marsden Hospital, London

Private Practice, London

Lecturer Behavioural Science Bath University Continue reading ›

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Today marks the on-sale date of Mulholland Books’ paperback edition of SHATTER by Michael Robotham–the first time the acclaimed psychological thriller has been published in the format. To celebrate the release, Michael Robotham has written an essay about the origins of series protagonist Joe O’Loughlin that looks back on his debut in SUSPECT and returns in SHATTER and BLEED FOR ME, coming from Mulholland Books in February 2012. Check it out below!

When I began writing my first novel I had no idea it was a psychological thriller. I wasn’t even sure it was a crime novel. I wrote in the first person, using the voice of clinical psychologist, Professor Joseph O’Loughlin, who was perched on the roof of the Royal Marsden Hospital in Chelsea, London, trying to talk to a teenage boy who was threatening to jump.

‘This is some view,’ I say, glancing to my right at a teenager crouched about ten feet away. His name is Malcolm and he’s seventeen today. Tall and thin, with dark eyes that tremble when he looks at me, he has skin as white as polished paper. He is wearing pajamas and a woollen hat to cover his baldness. Chemotherapy is a cruel hairdresser.

There was no hint of a crime in SUSPECT until the second chapter and depending upon which version you read (the US edition is slightly different to the rest of the world) Joe O’Loughlin doesn’t get involved in the investigation until page 65.

When the novel came out, the first question I was asked was: ‘Why crime?’

To be honest, I couldn’t answer it. I had no idea. To start with I didn’t read much crime fiction. My fascination as a reader and a writer has always rested with the characters and their motivations. The plot is important, but only as a vehicle to explore the human condition.

All crime is psychological. When a university graduate in urban preservation flies a passenger plane into a skyscraper killing thousands of people; or when a student barely out of his teens sprays a university campus with bullets; or when a teenage mother give birth in a toilet and leaves the baby in the wastepaper bin, it all comes back to some aspect of human behaviour and interaction. Everything we think we know and understand – the good, the bad and the inexplicable – is produced by four pounds of grey matter between our ears.

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