Tony Strong

Interviewed by Mark Campbell

Tony Strong was educated at Winchester and Oxford and went straight into the advertising business. Writing in his spare time, he produced the chilling psycho-frightener The Poison Tree in 1997 ("A début to die for," said Marcel Berlins of The Times). He followed it with the equally well received The Death Pit. Now he's taking the reader on another nightmare journey with The Decoy, a book that scales the heights of the thriller genre in its graphic tale of an actress hired as a decoy to a killer. I spoke to him recently about his books and just what it is that makes them so successful.

What made you want to write psychological thrillers?

Well, the biggest influence was probably Ian McEwan, because his short stories showed that evil, obsessive people are actually just like the rest of us, only a bit more so. Then there's people like Thomas Harris, for showing that serial killers can turn the traditional murder mystery into something more closely resembling a thriller. And a bunch of writers in the 1990s who took the crime novel and tried to do something more interesting with it - Donna Tart, Peter Hoeg, Minette Walters, people like that. Oh, and of course Hitchcock. He was the first one to spot that love stories can so easily become twisted.

Was it hard to get The Poison Tree published? Funnily enough, no. I had a friend in publishing who gave me the names of a few agents. But in fact she showed the manuscript to an editor who offered to publish it even before I had an agent.

Was a follow-up more difficult than the debut? Or had you planned it already?

I hadn't planned it, no. And in fact the book I wanted to write was turned down by my US publisher. It was set in a prison, with the hero being a cop who was inside for murder, but it was just too dark for them. After that, The Death Pit just popped out of nowhere.

Plot and characters, the whole shebang?

More or less. I had the character Terry from The Poison Tree, who's kind of an off-on lesbian, and I thought witch trials might be an interesting thing to get her involved with, because so many of the aristocratic 'witches' were actually strong women, rebellious women, even some lesbians, who were being cut down to size. Then I discovered that witch trials were more a feature of Scotland than England, so that gave me my location. The present-day Wiccan thing then seemed fairly inevitable. And the pig-farming stuff was because my wife was, at the time, a pig-farmer. I found it much harder to sort out the plot for The Decoy though, partly because it's a more plot-driven book and partly because I was dealing with Hollywood as well as publishers. It's just been bought by Arnold Copelson, the producer who made Perfect Murder, Seven, and The Fugitive.

How does that feel?

Great, except that I've been given absolutely no indication whether or not the project will actually happen. But yes, I kind of wrote the book with a film in mind - not just because films are where the money is, but also because it's a very visual story; by which I mean that you never know what's really going on in the characters' heads, you have to guess from their actions. Usually, of course, books tell you what a person's thinking as well as what they're doing but in this case that would have given too much away. That's partly why it's written in the present tense - it's less reflective, more action-orientated.

How important to you is to grounding the plot in reality?

Well, I have a tendency to go horribly over the top! For instance, with hindsight the ending of The Death Pit should have been a little less melodramatic. But with The Decoy I actually tried to keep all the sex and violence out, at least to begin with. I wanted it to be very mainstream and accessible. But the story just seemed to demand a certain amount of darkness, so I added most of the sex scenes in the last few drafts. I did take out a lot of irrelevant poetry, though!

So tell me about your writing process - early morning starts, a set word count every day?

Well, I have a day job in advertising and a young family to support, so I only write one day a week. But I set aside a couple of mornings where I get up early and make notes for an hour or so. That's why I only produce a book every few years.

Ever wanted to chuck in the day job and write full-time?

Not really. I couldn't bear to sit at home all day and stare at a computer screen, week in, week out. Advertising is full of bright, likeable people who really care passionately about doing something good - honestly! Although, admittedly, it can get a bit tiresome having work rejected for stupid reasons. But I'd like to have more time to write than I do now -currently I work at advertising agency Abbott Mead Vickers four days a week. And I'd also like to write in different genres - I've written a comedy film script that's been optioned, for example. In my day job, comedy is what I do most - stuff like Utterly Butterly, Walkers crisps etc.

How long did it take you to write The Decoy?

It took six months to write the synopsis, nine months to write the book, and a year to rewrite it. I did about fifteen drafts, and I cut out nearly as much as is in the finished book. I decided it was going to be action and nothing else. Every scene, every description, every line that wasn't essential got stripped out. I even re-translated Les Fleurs du Mal, using a shorter meter and condensing whole verses of Baudelaire into single lines. Purists will probably kill me.

What comes first - characters or plot?

In The Poison Tree, it was definitely the former - I created this woman character who I loved, but then found a lot of people disliked her. She's an academic - her subject is detective fiction! - and she's actually quite arrogant intellectually, she's convinced she's right even when all the evidence says otherwise. But she's also gutsy and passionate. When the book starts, she's divorced and has somehow drifted into a gay relationship with an old friend, which she's busy extricating herself from. So she buys a little house in Oxford which is going cheap, and then later she discovers that it's cheap because a student was murdered there. I had no idea when I started writing where that plot idea was going to take me. But in The Decoy, it was the idea. How do you catch a serial killer with a decoy? Would you tell the decoy everything or would you manipulate her? How do you get round the problem that covert taped material is inadmissible? What sort of person might agree to become a decoy in the first place? So I worked back from there to this young actress in New York - Claire - struggling to make ends meet by acting already as a decoy for a detective agency. I know a few actresses and they're interesting people - quite neurotic sometimes, even needy, but also brave and impulsive and watchful. Again, not everyone liked Claire. After I'd written the book, my US publishers turned it down. They didn't like her or any of the other characters enough; they said she wasn't someone you could cheer for. I don't agree. I think you cheer more for someone who's a bit mixed up. So I decided to leave her as she was. Which was quite an expensive decision!

In The Decoy, the whole notion of pretence is fascinating - no-one is quite who they seem. What made you choose this as a theme?

Again, the idea came first and then everything else followed. If the central idea is deception, then what can be done with that in the subplots, in the minor characters, in the individual scenes? So, starting with the opening, almost every major scene has some kind of twist or deception in it. Maybe there are too many - there's a great big twist at the end of the book that would probably have had more shock value if I hadn't bombarded the reader with so many other twists. But I liked the idea of the construction echoing the central idea. I think of it as being like a series of Russian dolls - each revealed plot seems entire of itself, but is just one step closer to the truth. But the reader doesn't have to think about that, of course. Hopefully, they'll just sense that the writer is in control of his material and they can relax and enjoy the ride.