Many of my books – just like, I suppose, many children – were conceived on holiday. Why might this be? I think the causation is as follows. I like being on holiday, and I aspire to be a successful writer of crime fiction in order to be on holiday more often – for half the time, say, which I took to be Ken Follett’s covetable situation when he explained to me in an interview that he alternated between a year of researching (always abroad and never in, say, Birmingham) and a year of writing in his London home.
Or why shouldn’t I be on holiday all the time, like Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene, whose royalties (including some from books classifiable as crime fiction) bought them homes in the South of France? Being on holiday reminds me of this ambition so I tend to be dreaming up plotlines – or brainstorming them with my wife – when I sit on a beach.
The places I have most often holidayed in are Scarborough and Paris. I grew up in Yorkshire, and, as a boy, I went to Scarborough about three times a year. Scarborough – with its huge beaches, zig-zag walks through vertiginous gardens, funicular railways and monumental Grand Hotel – represented escape, otherness, imagination. I have featured, or at least namechecked, it in almost every novel I’ve written, and I fantasise that somebody will one day write a PhD entitled, ‘The recurrence of Scarborough in the crime fiction of Andrew Martin’. But for that to happen, someone will first have to notice all these mentions of Scarborough which, so far, no-one has.
The Last Train to Scarborough, one of my novels featuring the early 20th Century railway policeman, Jim Stringer, is my main Scarborough novel. When I discovered that train drivers and firemen working late ‘turns’ to seaside towns would often be accommodated in ordinary guest houses with which the railway company had an arrangement, I had two thoughts: first, the town had to be Scarborough; second, the scenario must be that a couple of railwaymen would have checked in, only to disappear. Atmospherically, the book was informed by an off-season visit, when I watched the sea wildly encroaching on the rainswept town from the misted-up windows of a small guest house, overheated and luridly illuminated – seemingly in compensation for what was going on outside.
Paris has also come up a lot in my novels, principally in The Winker, set in the 1970s. An upper middle-class British man with a guilty secret lives in Paris with his controlling, elderly mother: a Simenon-like scenario, I thought. He is historically entangled, unfortunately for him, with the Winker himself: a failed popstar, turned narcissistic murderer, who winks at people, then kills them. The climax occurs in Nice, where I have often been on holiday, always staying at the Art Deco Palais de la Meditérrannée on the Promenade des Anglais (albeit never for more than three nights because it’s a five-star hotel, and pricey).
Just around the corner from the hotel is a fascinating, gloomy and hot grotto-like shop, stacked with dusty paperbacks and piles of old postcards, including many of Nice in the 1970s. These gave me the idea for the book and became my principal research tools: they showed, for instance, that there were a lot of white cars in 1970s Nice and that the palm trees along the Promenade des Anglais were much scruffier and more variegated than they are today. The Winker, incidentally, features a historical howler. When I wrote that my Paris-based character liked to visit the Musée d’Orsay, I was forgetting that, in the early 1970s, that was still a fading railway station and not yet an art gallery. A reader wrote to me pointing out the error, but since he prefaced his correction, ‘Let me say first of all that I loved your novel…’, or words to that effect, I forgave him his exactitude.
My latest novel (written as A.J. Martin) is set in Venice, a city I have visited almost as often as Paris and Scarborough, and I think one reason that Venice haunts me is that my dad visited it several times before he met my mother. I know this from a substantial number of old photographs of him in St Mark’s Square and on the Lido, dating from the late 1940s, when he would have been in his late 20s. I have never quite got used to the Venetian streets being full of water, and I remember being fascinated to see, behind the main hospital, a marina full of ambulance boats. Venice is also the city in which I’ve been both hottest and coldest – and the only one where I’ve been genuinely lost in a fog.
I find Venice dreamlike, so I made dreams central to the novel, which is set in 1911. The protagonist is a highly imaginative 14-year-old girl, prone to vivid dreams. She wakes on the first morning of a holiday uncertain as to whether she killed her guardian in the night, or merely dreamt it. She can’t bear to seek the truth, so she flees the rented palazzo and begins wandering the Venetian ‘streets’.
Scenes and episodes from holidays in Blackpool, Whitby and the Scottish Highlands have also found their way into my books, and looking over them again is, for me, the equivalent of flicking through those albums of holiday snaps that people used to compile. The associations are happy ones, mainly. So it is strange, I suppose, that these memories should be preserved in the murderous context of crime novels.
The Night in Venice by A.J. Martin is out now from Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
