Jerry Raine

Interviewed by Mark Campbell

Jerry Raine has an interesting CV. Born in Yorkshire in 1955, he was brought up in Somalia, East Africa, the son of a detective inspector in the CID. Returning to Britain in 1961, he was educated in Surrey, before leaving for Australia on a £20 immigration scheme in 1971. There he worked as a farm-hand and a caravan fitter, before making his folk-singing debut in some of Sydney's seediest bars.

As well as a gardener and a fork-lift truck driver, he spent two years in off-licenses (working, not drinking), before ending up in the booktrade in 1983. He spent three years with Sherrat and Hughes, two with Books Etc, nine and a half years as manager of Murder One, and currently runs High Stakes, London's only gambling bookshop.

In his folk-singer persona, Raine has been a support act for Iris DeMent, Christy Moore, Steve Forbert and Gretchen Peters. As well as playing at the Cambridge Folk Festival, he has appeared solo at the Shepherds Bush Empire. In 1986 he was one of six winners of the Mail on Sunday's fiction prize, and was encouraged by Kingsley Amis with these words: "If you want it bad enough, you'll succeed no matter what." With three books under his belt, and more in the pipeline, it seems he has.

Tell me a little about this weird gambling bookshop...

The mastermind behind it was publisher and greyhound owner Ion Mills, who had this idea simmering in his mind for years. All he needed was someone to run it, and when I packed in my job at Murder One, I was available. We opened in Great Ormond Street because it's got a low rent. There's no point being in Charing Cross Road, because you wouldn't get people wandering in to browse - anyone who wants to see you will just seek you out. We've advertised in some of the racing magazines - Odds On is one of the best-known ones - and we've got a website on the Internet (http://www.highstakes.co.uk).

What sort of customers does High Stakes attract?

We get quite a few well-dressed businessmen who are usually poker players - people with excess cash - and then there are those who look like they haven't got much money and spend low amounts on the horses. And we've got a few professional gamblers coming in too. We've had David Spanier, who's a famous poker player and writes for The Independent, but we're still waiting for Martin Amis and Mel Smith - they're into poker.

Do you gamble?

I've played blackjack in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, but I never won anything. If you want to win, you have to keep a running tally in your head of what's been dealt, so you know when some good cards are going to come up, and then you bet more heavily. You have to concentrate, because you've got all these distractions going on around you. And if you get caught, the casino will just throw you out, because they consider it cheating. But poker you can win, because you're playing against other players, not the casino. That's got better odds, and most card players have sussed that out. We sell a lot of poker books, which is quite promising .

Is it a long-term job?

I'm happy to stay here because it's only 6 hours a day, and it allows me to do my writing in the morning. We've got a three year lease, so that's when we'll have to make our decision about it - it depends if they put the rent up. But we're breaking even, which is a start, and once it becomes well-known, it could be quite a comfortable business.

Tell me how you became a crime novelist.

I think it's all to do with reading habits, really. I started off reading fairly serious people like Hemingway and George Orwell and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and then I began reading Hammett and Patricia Highsmith. At that age you don't know that you're reading crime, you're just reading books that are more readable and more exciting. It was only some years later that I realised that I was reading crime books. I've always been interested in writing, but I actually started off with music. When I was 16 I learnt the guitar, and that's when I started writing songs. I didn't start writing prose till I was 20. I went to a creative writing class in Dorking with a view to improving my songwriting, but I started writing prose, and they just loved it - I was an instant hit with all these middle-aged people, so the songwriting receded a bit. But it took a long time to find my style. I didn't write Smalltime till I was 32, so it took 12 years to get a style.

What of things were you writing during those twelve years?

It was just bits and pieces - short stories and general rubbish. Introspective, searching-your-soul, meaning of life sort of stuff. Not very...

Sellable?

Yeah. [Laughs] But it's funny, when I got into crime, I started reading Elmore Leonard and Charles Willeford, my two favourite crime writers, and I got into their sort of style, especially Elmore Leonard, where he has multiple viewpoints from different characters. They're not whodunits, they're whydunits. That was the style I wanted to adopt. Smalltime was my attempt to write an Elmore Leonard novel set in England.

Did it do well?

It got good reviews, but it didn't sell much.

How did you get it published in the first place?

Well, the first time I put it out on the market, Simon Brett read it and he liked it. That was eleven years ago when I was working at Murder One. He passed it on to his agent, who represented it for a while. It got turned down by nine publishers first time round, and I got a bit pissed off with that, so I parted company with the agent. At that time there wasn't much of interest being published in crime, it was very middle-of the road, and Smalltime didn't really fit into any category. So I just stuck it in the bottom drawer.

Then Maxim Jakubowski happened to mention to Jim Driver, who runs Do Not Press and was a customer at Murder One, that I'd written this book a long time ago. Jim asked me if he could read it, and then he took it straight away. It was just the right time for this to happen, because in the eight-year interim period more unusual crime stuff was being published.

Did you have another book in the offing?

After I wrote Smalltime I didn't really write that much, because there didn't seem to be much point. I sort of gave up on it. I don't know what I did with those eight years. So when Smalltime came out, Pam Smith, my agent, said, "You'd better have something ready in case anything happens with this one." I was visiting her house one day, and I came out and said, "My next book's going to be called Frankie Bosser Comes Home." I just thought of it like that. I wrote the first draft in 2½ months and then spent 6 months playing with it. We got some proof copies bound up with all the reviews for Smalltime printed on it, and we started sending it out. We got very positive feedback, and Gollancz bought it.

So in a sense you self-published it before you sent it round?

Only in proof. It cost £250 for 50 proof copies. It's a good way to do it, because it stands out. It had a bright yellow cover, so when it came onto the editors' desks, it stood out among all the boring manuscripts.

So what's the subject of Frankie Bosser Comes Home?

It's about a criminal hiding out in Italy who comes home for the funeral of his father, and when he comes back he finds out that his father was actually murdered, so he hangs around to see if he can find out who did it.

A bit like Get Carter...

Yeah, I didn't actually see the similarity when I wrote it, but I have read a lot of Ted Lewis in the past.

Where is it set?

It's set in Surrey. It's a hard-boiled crime novel set in Surrey.

Is it a two-book deal?

It's a one-book deal, although I've written another [Slaphead Chameleon], which is with them at the moment. My editor likes it, but now Gollancz have been bought by Orion it's going to be a longer process. I've taken the policeman from Frankie Bosser, he's in that book, and there's also a musician from there as well. It's set on a music tour, so it's like a road novel going round Britain. It's about a musician being chased by a psycho, but it's more humorous than my others. The policeman has to go out on the road with the musician as a bodyguard.

And that's presumably based on your own experience, isn't it?

Yeah. It's based on my tour with Iris DeMent last year, although it's obviously heavily fictionalised. But it was good background material.

What do you think of the state of British crime publishing at the moment?

It's a lot better than it used to be. There's a lot more interesting stuff being published and a lot more interesting publishers around, but it's still very hard to make any money out of it. It's easier to be a woman writer. I don't think publishers persist with people any more - you can be dropped like a rock if you don't sell.

What advice would you give an aspiring crime writer?

Well, it's a lot easier if you've got an agent. And you've got to finish a book - I wouldn't bother with a synopsis. I definitely think printing proof copies is a good thing to do, and even if the book doesn't get taken, at least you've got 50 copies of a nice-looking book that you can flog to your friends.