Northern Irish journalist Colin Bateman caught the public's attention in 1995 with his award-winning comic thriller Divorcing Jack. Since then he's written a succession of witty adventures featuring sozzled journo Dan Starkey, as well as branching out into television with the hit BBC drama Murphy's Law starring the eternally unshaven James Nesbitt.
You won the Betty Trask Prize for Divorcing Jack, but isn't that for romantic fiction?
Well, Betty Trask was a romantic author, but not the Mills and Boon kind. She left her fortune for the setting up of an award for the best first novel of a romantic or traditional nature. And there was kissing in my first book, which makes it quite romantic. So I qualified with the kissing. I think they interpreted the rules somewhat liberally!
Were you surprised it won?
At that time everything was a surprise. Every agent in London had turned the book down, but eventually friends of my girlfriend got to read it and they told her to send it to the biggest publisher in the world, who at that time was HarperCollins. It went into their slush pile - a rarely visited slush pile - and they had a student who went in occasionally and flicked through it, and somebody happened to pick it up. I think it was the first time in ten years that had happened. So then a photocopy of the original manuscript, which was written in the days before spell check, was entered for the Betty Trask Prize about a year before the book was published. The prize at that time was second only to the Booker in terms of the cash you got, if not the prestige. So when I won, I got six times my advance for Divorcing Jack and suddenly it started the ball rolling and WH Smith picked it up as a fresh talent thing.
How did Murphy materialise?
Well, the character of Dan Starkey in Divorcing Jack - and six others since - was very popular, and the actor Jimmy Nesbitt, who I'd worked with a couple of times, was very keen on my book and was keen to play Starkey. He was desperate to do a film version of Divorcing Jack but at that time, pre-Cold Feet, he wasn't well known enough to get the part. But subsequent to his rise to fame we got together again and thrashed it out. What he really wanted to play was Dan Starkey, but it's very hard to get a series about a Northern Irish character set in Northern Ireland onto network television. What we needed were some of the character attributes of Starkey presented in a different way. So I decided on the idea of a Belfast cop undercover in London, and that was as far as my agreement went. From then on, it was totally wherever they wanted to take it. And as it turned out, the Murphy character was a lot darker than Starkey, with a much darker past. That doesn't always come across in the TV version of it, which is why I was determined to write the books as well.
Like Morse, who's very different in the pre-television books.
That's right. Because when you write for TV, some of the scripts will go through 13 drafts, and that's a tremendous amount of material to write. TV is so relentless at eating up plot. Plot, plot, plot. There's no room for character development. Murphy's personal life is just thrown out. But I recycle very well; I'm a very green author. And also right from the very start you'll notice that between the TV and the books he actually has a different name. He's Tommy Murphy on TV and Martin Murphy in the books. Because I knew I wanted to write exactly what I wanted to write, and when the new series of Murphy's Law starts next month I'm not involved with at all. I'm still the creator of it as such, but we had... if I was a band, you'd say artistic differences. So we've gone our own ways, but it leaves me the freedom to do what I want. I may go back to doing TV stuff, there may be other series, I don't know.
Does the main character directly influence the story?
Oh absolutely yeah, it has to. Before Divorcing Jack was published I was asked if I wanted to be in the crime genre, and that was a hard decision to make. It's the sort of fiction I love, but I also wanted the freedom to write exactly what I wanted to write, so I said, 'No'. So I've never been sold as crime fiction - although a lot of it is - because I feel I'm not good on traditional crime plots, I like to deal with the person.
But nowadays a lot of crime writing is character led.
Oh yes, it really has moved on. With Murphy's Revenge, although Murphy's facing a heartbreaking decision and he's been given the chance to take revenge for the death of his child, he's also obsessed with his hair receding and his weight going up and how many miles he can do on his exercise bike - and where do you put your ashtray when you're on your exercise bike. He's a real Jekyll and Hyde character.
Does the revenge motif have personal significance for you?
Not as such, but it sort of resonates with the whole Northern Irish thing. It's all very well for people to say, 'Oh, it's great, peace is here and you should all get on with each other,' but people forget how small Northern Island actually is. It must be very difficult if you see someone who's killed your brother or your daughter every day on the street. If you were given the opportunity to take revenge and you could get away with it, would you do it? It not only applies to Northern Ireland, it applies to London, it's universal. I don't know where I stand on it really. It's easy for me to say, 'Oh yes, I'm big enough to turn the other cheek,' but if somebody harmed my son and I saw the person doing it, I'd be over there with a hatchet.
Colin Bateman's latest novel, Murphy's Revenge, is published by Headline.
