Steve Aylett

Interviewed by Barry Forshaw

Steve Aylett, in just three novels, has cornered the market in hip, mordant and highly individual crime fiction - if it's crime fiction he writes. As Phoenix House publishes his latest, Slaughtermatic, we try to find out what's behind the dark glasses.

Is your new book a lampoon of the crime genre?
Yeah, Slaughtermatic is a sort of crime satire. When people ask about it who haven't read my other stuff, I save time by calling it a kind of Catch 22 but about crime and law, rather than war. I mean that it's a similar satire of aspects of authority, of manipulations too extreme to process or even talk about in everyday chat. And there's some nice gunplay in there too, and jokes about dogs and so on.

The guns are quite unusual.
Well I burnt out straight gun fetishism in the course of doing The Crime Studio - that sort of shoot-out just feels like noise now, it doesn't mean anything. So I started to give the guns meanings by inventing software-enhanced guns, fire-by-wires, like the Zero Approach gun which scans the targets aura to see whether they're asking for it, as it were - it seeks their consent. Then there are guns that fire calories, drugs, ideas, charm, guns that ignore the target, guns that can be set for a certain demographic range, guns that can be set for Mexicans, randomizers, glass guns, tantrum guns, all this. So when a shoot-out happens, it means something, it can be like a philosophical exchange. The Crime Bill means people have to design and produce untraceable one-off firearms and that leads to a little bit of inventiveness at least, which is at a premium these days. So you have Hitachis, Mitsubishis, and Macs of course. There are also Microsoft guns, though they take a long time to fire.

Do you read a lot of crime?
A fair bit, but not only crime. A lot of crime readers can be a bit isolationist about the genre, though I think they're not at all precious within it - they'll judge stuff on its merit and not on the author's name, which is good. I've only been duffed up a couple of times for suggesting that Crais improved on Parker's Spenser and Hawk books with his Cole and Pike stuff. I think it's a travesty that Parker was given Poodle Springs to finish. Chandler would have pulled stuff out of the hat as that book went on. They should have given it to Walter Mosley at least - though I suppose he wasn't such a big deal then. But the thing is I think most crime, reported and fictionalised, is flat and uninventive. The thing of some guy with a stocking over his head walking into a bank with a gun - the most interesting thing is the stocking. I think that's why a lot of people get into that game, they're into that. it's the only situation in which it's socially acceptable to wear a stocking over your head - as many of your male readers will know from bitter experience. And even when they wear the mask of some celebrity it's always the same people, you know, Ronald Reagan or Daffy Duck or something. But they don't put the voice on - everyone knows it's not really Daffy. And they should choose a more idiosyncratic celebrity - Alan Bennett, for instance, you know, and do the voice and everything. So anyway in Slaughtermatic these crime impresarios try to art their capers by embedding ideas in them, so it's sort of sarcastic crime. They call it headcrime. A simple example of this, and one which has actually been done, is to break in somewhere and perform an elaborate costume drama for the surveillance cameras, so this silent spectacle is discovered in the morning. But never looking into camera or acknowledging it. A whole frilly-cuffed School For Fops being performed on that nightmare-quality silent video. And that one's quite harmless too. Fiercer crimes may involve taking an authority's argument to its logical conclusion. Taking to heart American military procedure and killing hundreds of people in a pre-emptive strike.

Would you say the satirical aspect is about the individual against society?
It's society against the individual. It seems childish but I think it's important to remember who started it. If society declared a ceasefire with the individual, the individual would say great and abide by it with relief, but if the individual declares a ceasefire with society - and many do every day - society will just keep on battering away at them. I think it's good sense to know who is the aggressor, even if you have no defence at all.

Many people are lucky enough to be able to remember a teacher or mentor who was influential on them. Do you have such a figure? No, I grew up in Bromley.

Is Beerlight based on Bromley?
No, Beerlight's based on a city on the East coast of America. Nothing happens in Bromley. I remember when the Brixton riots happened, I was eleven or twelve or something, and the shops in Bromley High Street were getting boarded up, as if the riots were going to catch on in Bromley, which was a funny idea. There weren't any drugs either except real make-do stuff like solvents, and people would inject lager intravenously. It was all that south-London DIY that kids got into around then. It was actually a nice, if uneventful, place to grow up.

Do you bear your potential readers in mind when writing, or do you write principally for yourself?
I write the kinds of books that I'd like to discover in a bookshop, you know, a real find - and a lot of people out there also thirst for that kind of book, so it works out okay. When I buy a book I invest not just money but hopes and expectations, you know - and when it doesn't live up to it, it's a personal insult. It's personal. And of course they almost never live up to it. I go for stuff that delivers hundreds of ideas on every page, as intense as a fever dream. Most books are dead on arrival, there's nothing there. So that leaves a gap in the market which is the size of the planet.

Do films and music inspire you?
Well, there's a bit of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil character in Henry Blince. Chief Blince is one of my favourite characters to write - he's in The Crime Studio, Slaughtermatic, and a few of the stories in the Toxicology collection that's coming out from Four Walls Eight Windows in America. And the third proper Beerlight book, as well, for 2000 - he's in all of them. And there's a lot of music in the books - all the streets in Beerlight are named after something.

Should a writer be solitary or gregarious?
Well, both. I can't go out clubbing a lot or to the pub or whatever and expect to get anything done, it takes me ages to recover. I turned up in that Disco Biscuits anthology of rave writing but I'm sort of the odd one out in that I wrote about stuff other than just Oh gawd I was off me face and blah blah ... and I also wrote grammatically. I've got great affection for that scene, it saved my generation's lives, but I was never robust enough to indulge like other people did. It's totally dead now, we're heading back into another sterile, early eighties kind of desert. But anyway, the basic answer is I'm mainly a sad hermit and that's how I get stuff done. Mostly I like it that way. There's no concept of privacy or personal space in England. Everything is everyone else's business. In America, people might intrude on you but at least they know they're doing it. I think the personal space thing is why we're a knife culture and they're a gun culture - in the States they keep their distance even when they're killing you.

Is there anything which you find inherently funny?
Trousers, needless to say. Also steam, dogs, lard, hens, and anything spiral shaped which appears in an unexpected location. Nerves are also an important image for me, because they're creepy, funny and painful, and they're on the borderline between the body and the spirit, which also has those three qualities. Bigot Hall had a lot of nerve action, if I recall correctly.

Speaking of nerve, Lee Harvey Oswald is mentioned in both The Crime Studio and Slaughtermatic - do you have an interest in conspiracy theory?
Not in the usual sense, no. For me the interesting thing about the JFK murder is that something weird has happened around it - it's become completely mutable and postmodern - turned to shit, in other words. It's a swamp - anything at all can be argued about it. Evidence can be found to prove any theory at all regarding that. I could prove conclusively that I did it, and I wasn't even born yet. The same thing's shaping up around Mena Airport and Ives/Henry with the dozen or so gag murders, though it's still early enough to revolve only around Clinton and a few others - in another couple of years it'll include Rolf Harris and my mother. Although, admittedly, my mother was involved. But you can see the facts beginning to blur. James Milan was decapitated and the coroner ruled his death as due to natural causes. I hope that's the way I go - in my sleep, natural causes, head flying off, blood everywhere. Ever visit an old people's home? Bang, bang, bang, left, right and centre, like champagne corks. Absolute mayhem. But still for postmodernist bullshit, the law is streets ahead. Anyone who's sat in on an adversarial court case, seen the mechanisms of the law, the subjectivity, the basic disengagement from fact, truth thrown to the wind, it really is like being in the mouth of madness. The person who's in the right might win the case, but not because he's in the right - just for other, quite surreally disassociated reasons. Reality gets the kiss-off at the start. The lawyer Harpoon Specter is great to write, he's a monster who operates in that totally unanchored, mutable alternate dimension. He said right at the start of The Crime Studio The law is where reality goes to die - he knows this. In Slaughtermatic he talks about fractal litigation, where the flapping of a butterfly's wings on one side of the world results in a massive compensation claim on the other. All these characters are very articulate, they'll talk about the manipulations they're working. Even thugs as they die are fully aware and articulate so you get this constant eyes-open effect, nobody ever just goes off into the dark. you're wide awake through the whole nightmare. The book's structured like Dante's Inferno, but it starts off in hell and things get progressively worse. Anyone who's been alive for a while will know what I mean.

You talk about the brotherhood in Slaughtermatic, a merger between the police and the army. Do you believe this will happen?
I think the lines will blur in most places, toward a kind of national guard - I saw one of these blurred-line police at Gatwick Airport a couple of years ago, at WH Smiths, holding an H & K submachine gun. Guns scare me, I don't care who's holding it. So I look at this as I walk past, and this guy accosts me, asking for my passport and so on. It turned out it was just because I'd looked at him. I told him if he wanted to stand around with a submachine gun, he should get used to people looking at him. These people have forgotten what normal responses are, in a way. Mind you, if he didn't have the gun he'd probably stand around with his cock hanging out, so thank heaven for small mercies. Of course like most people who slag off the police, I'll run crying to them as soon as anything happens, because there's no alternative body to run to. If there was a body which was honest and efficient, I'd go to that one instead.

Is there a city that gets your creative juices flowing more than any other?
I like cities that have got places to sit down. Chairs and so on. But without having to spend huge amounts of money to do so. New York's terrible for that. London has places to sit down, on the edge of buildings, but they've usually got protruding spikes. Many buildings in the Strand are like this. I suppose the alternative would be severe slopes, but then people would probably lie back on them, using those inflatable neck-pillows you take on a plane journey. I don't know, the world's gone mad.

What can you tell me about your next book?
In England there'll be The Inflatable Volunteer, where the main character's talking about his encounters with various forms of authority, and their effect on his nerves. In the States there'll be Toxicology, a collection of very concentrated satire stories, including Beerlight stuff. it's all the same to me, I'm just trying to make enough money to buy new ears.

Ears?
Well you can see how ragged these ones are.

We're discussing artificial ears?
The ones I have in mind are about the size of boxing gloves, and made of bronze.

Steve, thanks for talking to CT.
Are we finished?