Doug Swanson

Interviewed by Barry Forshaw

House of Corrections (No Exit Press) is something special - in the avalanche of new titles that besiege the offices of CT, this struck us a one-of-a-kind crime novel, with a highly individual authorial voice. We asked the affable Mr Swanson to talk to us about it...

I'm sure there are lucky bastards somewhere whose book ideas spring fully formed and on schedule. Mine arrive inconveniently, vaguely and not to be ignored, something like the early onset of the flu.

A few years ago I used to swim every night in a backyard pool, doing laps, hoping for a swimmer's body that never quite materialized. It's a boring business, back and forth in a concrete pond. Your mind wanders to strange places: I had this vision one night of a young woman swimming as I was, while a fat man spied on her from a nearby tree and took photographs. Who? Why? I tried to work it out in a screenplay. Three months later I found myself lost and out of gas in the middle of the second act. I put the story aside and wrote something else.

Two years after that, I was trying to come up with a plot for the fifth novel in the Jack Flippo mystery series. Nothing was working until I remembered the woman swimming and the fat guy in the tree. I plugged my man Jack into the story, and it took off. Only one other problem remained to be solved: I needed a good, offbeat spot for my protagonist to discover the requisite dead body. I flew to Galveston, the Texas island on which the story is set, and walked around for a few days, searching vainly for a concrete bunker I dimly remembered from a beer-soaked beach trip twenty-five years back. The bunker was gone, replaced by a luxury hotel. But I eventually found my corpse-hiding spot in a weedy, forgotten park with land-locked, rusting Navy vessels from World War II.

Vision explained, corpse stashed - writing the rest of the novel was just a matter of following my map. So that's how House Of Corrections was done.

Now I'm working on a notion that came to me in California, that of a small man being electrocuted at night on a city street. Who is he? How did he get there? What happens next? Don't have the slightest. Ask me in a year or so. In the meantime, I'll be visiting San Francisco often, looking for a place to hide the body.