Skeleton at the Feast is the seventh in my series about DCI Thackeray and the local newspaper reporter Laura Ackroyd with whom he has a somewhat on-off relationship. Normally my books are set in West Yorkshire which is where I was born and brought up, but as I live in Oxford now I've always had a yen to set something down here. What's put me off is the thoroughness with which Colin Dexter has explored the territory, but in this one I've been brave enough to bring Thackeray back to the college where he was a very unhappy northern undergraduate. Quite topical as it's turned out, but I didn't know that when I was writing it. There is still a strong Yorkshire element to the plot but the Oxford college strand also allows me to explore some issues around class and regional conflicts and the Establishment's timeless and utterly ruthless ability to obscure what's really going on. Thackeray is not popular when he starts uncovering what the college mandarins would rather stayed well hidden. Another theme is the damage that the older generation routinely does to the younger - both in a privileged setting and also in the 'other' Oxford, where the tourist buses don't go - and against my more usual backdrop of grimy Bradfield and its sink estates.
I'm not sure who has influenced my style of writing. I guess I write like a journalist and, like Alice, I like lots of conversation. As far as content is concerned, you assimilate ideas over years. I started reading crime fiction as a child at the Agatha Christie end of the spectrum, and have worked steadily deeper and darker. But what I always demand as a reader - having a butterfly's attention span, like most journalists - is a plot which moves along at a cracking pace. In that department I don't think you can beat Dick Francis, who I gobbled up in his early career, although I know he's not fashionable now. But plot is just the bones of a novel and I think that what I needed as a fairly late starter in the field was some feeling that the crime novel could actually accommodate what I wanted to say. I think the two people who gave me the confidence to have a go myself were Reginald Hill and Sara Paretsky. Hill because of his humanity and humour (how I wish I could do that!) and his ability to explore complex issues with enormous subtlety within the confines of the genre, and Paretsky because she gives us strong, active women who make things happen and play a full part in the action. And both writers share the ability to present a society which seems to me totally real, full of fallible people and moral dilemmas and astonishing gulfs between the privileged and unprivileged living cheek by jowl. I came to other writers I admire like Val McDermid and Ian Rankin too late for them to be an influence. But you'll gather from all this that I aspire to being a humble member of the 'realist' school of crime fiction - no country houses and no fantasy mean streets either.
It would be difficult, I think, for a crime writer not to be aware of the genre on film and TV, particularly as in this country so much of the latter's output comes from novels anyway. I'm waiting with all fingers crossed to see what will happen to an option on my own series which has got as far as a script. Cross-fertilisation is inevitable, I think, though I guess that how creative that is varies from one writer to another. Personally I use The Bill to check up on the latest police procedure because the experts tell me it's pretty accurate. But there's no way I want to write a police soap. I don't think I'm particularly influenced by film but that's because my books are in the British tradition not the American, which tends to dominate film. I'm as fond of The Big Sleep as anyone and can get my mind round Tarantino, but I don't think either says much about policing the multiracial mean streets of West Yorkshire. They are more relevant perhaps to the men who write 'noir' - and it is usually men, isn't it? I love music, from jazz to opera, but apart from making my DCI a Billie Holiday fan, I don't think there's much connection with my fiction.
Though I started late as an adult novelist, my first effort at a crime story, with which I attempted to enliven one rainy and very boring holiday when I was about sixteen, went in the bin soon after. For the next twenty odd years I wrote fact not fiction as a journalist (don't laugh), and didn't have another go at fiction until the late eighties when I produced a novel which was just as ruthlessly disposed of on the grounds of sheer embarrassment. The next (The Poison Pool, 1991) was accepted by the first publisher I sent it to. Which astonished me because, although I'd always earned my living by writing, I discovered when I'd completed The Poison Pool that I really had no idea whether it was any good or not. If I write an article for the Independent I know whether or not I've done the right research and put the argument together logically. With fiction I was too emotionally involved to make any judgement and I couldn't bring myself to let anyone I knew read it. My family had no idea - if mother was glued to the word processor no-one ever bothered to look at what was on the screen! So off it went under plain wrapper. But once I had the letter back accepting it, of course, I was hooked. I started the next one the very next day. I was hooked, and still am, though the money's a joke.
I still read a lot of crime fiction, which I think is a bit like a bran tub - you never know what you're going to pull out next. When I meet or listen to someone new at Dead on Deansgate or Bouchercon I always try to give their work a whirl. On this basis I've been bored too often, revolted occasionally by vomit on the pavement excesses, made hopping mad by the snobbery of the English middle classes who still haunt the genre, and sometimes made some very good new fictional friends. Musts for me are Reg Hill, Val McDermid, Ian Rankin and Sara Paretsky and I've enjoyed all the John Harvey books. Before I got involved myself, I was never a fan of historical fiction but I've been converted by Lindsey Davis and Gillian Linscott, who was a former colleague at The Guardian. I like Judith Cutler's books very much. We write about the same sort of multicultural urban landscape and I always think our heroines would get on well together. I do try to keep up with so-called literary fiction too, although I think the standard of writing in crime is superior far more often than the critics are willing to admit. I hate Martin Amis, like Graham Swift and Roddie Doyle, and over the years have taken in the major women writers like Fay Weldon, Penelope Lively, Angela Carter, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. I have a go at the Booker shortlist every year and am often disappointed.
People you meet often ask how you can be so hooked on reading violence and writing about crime. I dislike censorship of any kind, except where children are concerned, but as a writer I am fairly pragmatic on these issues. If we are writing about murder we are writing about violence. That is a given. How you approach its description depends on what sort of crime novel you are trying to write - it is a very broad church and what is appropriate in a comic novel may be very different from what is appropriate in something heavily 'noir'. You need to be aware of who your audience is likely to be. Personally I take a middle course. I want to be realistic but I don't want the reader so repelled by the detail that s/he stops reading. I take my family as a barometer: my mother in her eighties reads my books without getting too upset, though she hates some of the language, and my streetwise sons in their twenties seem to like them too, so I reckon I'm getting it about right for the sort of audience I'm likely to have. But this is not just a pragmatic question, is it? The Greeks produced moving drama without any violence on stage at all. For my taste, the best crime fiction isn't the novel with the most graphic descriptions of blood and guts on the street or post mortem examinations in the lab, it's the novel which explores the effects of violence on the victims, the criminals, the police and everyone else caught up in events. On other words, I'm a character rather than a plot or sensation person.
The same arguments apply to the treatment of sex - and to 'bad' language for that matter. If it's essential to the story, then fine: if it's gratuitous, then not. But you tread a particularly fine line with sexually explicit description anyway, to avoid tipping over into soft porn. I expect there's a market for soft porn crime but it's not what I want to read or write. My two main characters - and others - have a fairly energetic sex life, but when they get down to it I tend to leave it to the reader's imagination.
Then there are the other taboos of polite dinner party society - politics and religion. I am a 'personal is the political' woman. I find it almost alarming how clearly people's political attitudes jump off the page when they write fiction, even if their opinions are never overtly expressed. England is still a class ridden society, whatever Tony Blair thinks, and the way characters are portrayed, the way lifestyles are taken for granted, the part women or ethnic minorities or gays play in the story, speaks volumes. I'm sure my views are as obvious as anyone else's: I don't see how you can avoid it, especially if you are writing about crime, the police, law and order, punishment and the rest. All these are highly emotive issues and your characters must stand somewhere on the political spectrum. There are some overt political threads running through my books anyway. Laura Ackroyd is the granddaughter of a very Old Labour campaigner who lives in hope of Nye Bevan's resurrection. Laura is more sceptical than her gran but still more liberal than her lover, the somewhat puritanical copper, and that occasionally leads to tension. Then there's the inevitable conflict between openness and secrecy with a journalist involved in the stories and ethical issues about methods and corruption within the police force. I don't think there's any such thing as apolitical.
Religion, morality, ethics, they are all in there, inevitably. I was brought up in the Church of England, my husband as a Catholic, so we have that background though neither of us is a churchgoer now. I think when you are writing about crime and punishment, right and wrong, you need to be aware of the fact that people have been debating these issues for millennia and that what may appear morally abhorrent to one person may not bother another. So I suppose for a crime writer a sense of a moral dimension rather than of the trappings of religion is important. That doesn't mean being crudely judgmental and there are excellent writers who seem to offer a totally amoral perspective, but I find that a bit unnerving.
I genuinely don't believe crime novelists are any different from any other sort of novelist. I refuse to get uptight about the borderline between genres or between 'mere' entertainment and 'art'. A good novel is a good novel and should expand the mind, but if it's not enjoyable to the reader it won't expand anything except the box of junk going to Oxfam. This obsession with genres is quite a modern phenomenon. No-one told Dickens that because Our Mutual Friend is a mystery story it could only have a five line review six months after publication. So on the whole I think the appeal of what I write is the same as the appeal of any other kind of fiction: the creation of an imaginary world where the reader is entertained and hopefully learns something new about life. Whether it's any good or not is an entirely different question.
Place is very important to me. I do get out and about - to Oxford in the new novel, to Docklands in London in the one before that, Dead on Arrival - but essentially I write about the part of Yorkshire where the old industrial towns surrounded by the glorious Pennines are pulling themselves up by their boot-straps. People ask whether my fictional Bradfield is in fact Bradford and the answer is not quite. Because I haven't lived there for a while - though I still visit regularly - I don't want the hassle of readers writing to tell me that the pub Thackeray visits on page sixty-seven closed three years ago. And I wanted somewhere a little bit smaller and more incestuous than Bradford, which is a city not a town. But a lot of the places I describe are real - just transposed a bit. I love the wild moorland countryside and the old stone towns and villages which are struggling to find a new role now the traditional industries have almost gone. And the tensions inherent in industrial decline and regeneration and a multiracial population, are, as Bob Barnard once said about one of my books, fresh out of yesterday's newspaper.
How do I work? In purely practical terms, I am devoted to my word processor. In fact I don't think I would ever have written a novel at all without it. As a journalist I was using the technology anyway, but for nothing much longer than 2000 words. 70,000 or more seemed really daunting and I'd never have made it on a typewriter. Once under way I aim to write a chapter a week - though that's not always possible as I'm still a working freelance journalist. When the first draft is complete I revise and revise until I'm happy, and then do a last check to make sure the logic of the actual mystery is sound and all the loose ends are tied up. The whole process usually takes about nine or ten months, leaving me two months a year to mull over the next. In terms of constructing the novel, I start with the plot because that, for me, is the most difficult. I can't begin Chapter One without at least a sketch of where the novel is going and how it is going to end. For ideas I rely on what's going on around us. I quite often pick up the germ of an idea from a newspaper story. So successfully at times that it's almost creepy. My last book had a group of illegal immigrants found dead in a lorry. The current one deals with northern kids going to Oxford. Both were written long before either issue hit the headlines. The plot outline is not sacred. Very often it gets changed during the actual writing and sub-plots or digressions get added, often character led. But the characterisation is what I really enjoy. A group of the characters go with the series, and I feel now that I know them very well. But creating the one-off characters (which usually includes the main villain) is interesting too. I don't think you can easily sideline plot in this genre. I'm not against an ambivalent ending. I don't need every last sub-plot tidied up or villain clapped in jail. But on the whole I think resolution is the name of the last chapter and this is a genre mercifully free of post-modernists more interested in style than substance.
I write essentially because I have to. I've been doing it since I was about eight. But since I was eighteen and went to work on a newspaper for the first time, almost every word I have written has been published, so I can't really imagine not having readers. So, although I don't consciously write for the readers, the whole process for me is very much about communication. There are things I want to say, stories I want to tell, and I want someone to read them - the more the better. I don't know what happens when you get older and maybe the publishers give up on you. Perhaps the urge to write becomes less acute. I hope so because I would hate to be left talking to myself.
A bit of monastic solitude is essential for the actual writing process for me. I hate to be interrupted in mid-flow. But for the content of my books I really want to be in touch with what's going on in the world, so my journalistic work comes in useful, and I read a lot of newspapers and magazines and watch TV to try to keep in touch with the zeitgeist, and I visit Yorkshire and other places for the local colour.
In spite of new technology, I'm optimistic about books so there may be hope for me in my dotage. I think fiction will survive in book form. Factual stuff will transfer to the Internet or CD Rom or the mobile phone. But none of that technology is any good in bed, or in the bath, or on the beach or the plane, or any of the other places people choose to read fiction. I am even fairly optimistic about the younger generation. The twenty-somethings I know do still read. I share books with one of my sons, although the other is much more a film and video person. And Harry Potter has to be a good thing, doesn't he?
I'm well into the next book now. It's the next in the series and takes the characters back to Yorkshire where a series of demonstrations outside an abortion clinic ends in violence. Again I started writing some time before anti-abortion campaigners announced this summer that they were importing more militant methods into Britain from the US and Ireland. With guns, you wonder? Premonition plays a part in the story too. There are plenty of moral dilemmas and a nasty shock for DCI Thackeray.
Titles
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