The recent release of From the Dead brings Mark Billingham’s hugely successful DI Tom Thorne series up to nine novels. A stand-up comic as well as a novelist, Mark started out as an actor and TV writer. And now that Sleepyhead has just appeared as a three-part dramatisation on Sky 1 (with Scaredy Cat to follow), Mark has the pleasure of seeing other TV writers bring his own novels to life on primetime TV.
Mark’s a very busy man these days, but I finally managed to catch up with him in a private club in London. No, not that kind – and not the kind that’s full of old buffers in leather chairs sipping port. More like a cheerful modern hotel with meeting rooms, brightly coloured prints and cushions – refreshingly welcoming and unpretentious. Like Mark himself, who plonks himself down in one of the big comfy armchairs and gets the beers in.
We’ve got a lot to talk about. Mark’s second-last novel Bloodline has recently come out in paperback, his first standalone In the Dark came out not long before that, From the Dead has just hit the shelves in hardback – and then of course there’s the TV series.
I start with In the Dark, telling Mark how much I admired the way his dialogue leaps off the page. Does having such a finely tuned ear have something to do being a stand-up comic and former screenwriter?
“The screenwriting definitely helped. When you’re writing for TV it’s all you’ve really got to work with. In terms of the novels I know which things I’m not particularly good at, but I’ve always thought that dialogue is my greatest strength. As a reader, it’s always the thing I look for. I don’t care how lush and sensuous the descriptive passages are, if a writer has a tin ear for dialogue, I’m not interested. Dialogue should tell you all you need to know about a character. The best writers can introduce a new character in just a few lines of dialogue.”
To obtain complete authenticity Mark did his research, talking to kids on estates with the same backgrounds as the characters he portrays, finding a middle way between pure transcription (“which would look ridiculous”) and formal English. “Dialogue is the one thing I can’t stand to get wrong. Stand-up has helped – one word out of place can completely screw a joke up up. For me, it’s all about rhythm and knowing when to come in and out of the conversation.”
What about the differences and similarities between stand-up and fiction? One crucial difference, Mark explains, is the speed of response between a reader and a live audience.
“That’s where an editor comes in. With stand-up it’s an instant feedback. Also, comedians are a very dark bunch of people.” And fiercely competitive. “I might be sitting in the dressing room at the Comedy Store, waiting to go on, and even if a friend of mine is on stage before me, a nasty part of me wants him to die on his arse. Comics tend to talk about comedy all the time, but with crime writers, the last thing you want to talk about is work. Most of the crime writers I know are an easygoing bunch.”
They’re also a supportive bunch. “For my first book I had quotes from the likes of John Harvey and George Pelecanos – it meant a lot to me. Crime writers don’t work on the principle that someone has to fail for them to succeed, probably because crime fiction is such a broad church and there’s plenty of room under that roof.” Crime writers have even been known to give each other walk-on parts in their novels – for example, Mark appears as a character in one of Stuart McBride’s crime novels.
Mark’s comedian friends aren’t quite so lucky in how they’re treated. “Naming dark characters after comedians just seems to fit somehow and I’ve only felt the need to ask permission once. I decided to name a child molester after the comedian Steve Gribbin and thought I’d better check with him first. He was delighted!” And of course crime fiction offers plenty of opportunities for vicarious revenge, Mark adding that he’s “killed” a couple of people he’d not have the guts to kill in real life.
But there is one significant similarity between stand-up and crime fiction, and that’s in the way that the set-up is followed by the payoff. “At book signings I like to spend a few minutes telling jokes, then read something very disturbing. If I finish a chapter with something unbearably dark then I’ll start the next one with a joke. You lead the reader down a path then surprise them. It’s also about entertaining and getting the reader hooked very quickly; you can’t afford any dead spots.”
One powerful dead-spot avoidance technique that Mark uses is playing with the story’s chronology. Both In the Dark and Bloodline open with a dramatic scene that occurs late in the timeline, then return to the true beginning and work through the story chronologically. From the Dead, in contrast, opens with a particularly grisly yet compelling prologue (a man being burnt to death in a car) before moving chronologically through the present-time events.
I ask Mark whether with his plotting he’s a meticulous planner (like Jeffery Deaver, who does hundreds of pages of chapter plan before the actual writing) or more like Stephen King, who says he starts with a situation and improvises from there.
“I’m more of a winger. I’ve got a beginning and an end, and something in the middle. With Bloodline there’s the opening scene on the bridge and the rest of the story slowly and teasingly gets you back there. I usually have an opening scene. Something powerful and visual that’s like a pre-titles sequence in a movie – something that will leave the reader asking lots of questions. Who are these people? Why are they here and what are they doing these things for?”
Not planning ahead means that Mark discovers the story at the same time as Thorne. “It’s all about solving a series of problems and I’m every bit as likely to do that walking around the supermarket or driving as I am sitting in front of the computer. When you do solve a problem and figure out how the story needs to move ahead, it’s always exciting.”
In comparison, Mark felt frustrated by the pre-plotted nature of screenwriting. Another by-product of his years as a screenwriter is “… a weakness for describing landscape. But I don’t need to know that it was a windy day or that the man was wearing corduroy trousers. For me, it’s all about what people are saying, letting a three-dimensional character come to life in the reader’s imagination.”
And the key word here is imagination, leaving space for the reader to do some of the work. “You’re giving the reader a nudge into the shadows rather than laying it all out for them. My later novels are less gory, but I think they are actually far darker because of it. Because of a little restraint.”
That darkness also manifests itself in a frequent lack of any obvious redemption or neat endings. I ask Mark whether he thinks this is a characteristic of modern crime fiction, to avoid overly tidy endings because real life’s usually messy.
“The move in that direction began long before I started writing, maybe in the sixties, perhaps even earlier. For me, it’s not even about what happens, so much as the taste left in the reader’s mouth.” Speaking of the death of one character (no spoilers in this interview), Mark says, “I knew she had to die. Anything else would have been soap opera. You have to be true to the story, rather than always do what you think will make the reader happy.”
Another aspect of “truth to the story” is having everyday characters struggling with everyday problems. Both In the Dark and Bloodline touch on impending parenthood, with its struggles and messiness. “Obviously I’m a parent and that changes your approach to pretty much everything. I’m certainly less and less interested in bizarre pattern serial killers and more interested in everyday tragedies. I liked having Helen [from In the Dark] heavily pregnant, trying to solve a dark mystery while having to deal with ordinary stuff like bloating and cramps.”
And regarding Theo, reluctant gang member and teenage dad, Mark says, “My wife pointed out that I tend to write a lot about fathers and sons. I hadn’t really been aware of it, but she’s right. I didn’t become a father until my mid-thirties, so it was very interesting for me to write about a teenage father. I wanted to give myself a challenge.”
I ask Mark whether he enjoyed writing a standalone (In the Dark is his first) and whether he’s tempted to do others. “I loved it. I knew the time was right and if I had to pick one book to take to the grave it would probably be that one. I’m certainly up for writing more standalones.”
Mark’s up for anything that keeps a series fresh and speaks admiringly of Michael Connelly, who also switches foreground and background characters between novels. “He also wrote one Bosch novel in the first person and that was really interesting. Sometimes you have a little voice in your head telling you to shake things up or to go in a different direction and you ignore that voice at your peril.”
In Mark’s latest, From the Dead, that little voice led to Tom Thorne being thrown into totally unfamiliar territory, when he has to fly to southern Spain to hunt down his quarry, an old-school villain called Alan Langford. “Thorne’s always been tied to London. In this book I took Thorne to Spain and thoroughly enjoyed it, the whole ‘fish out of water’ thing, putting Thorne in a pair of shorts!”
Langford was believed to be dead, the carbonised corpse in the burnt-out Jag from the opening scene. That is until his ex-wife, recently out of the nick for having arranged his attempted murder, begins receiving photos showing a grinning Langford on a beach somewhere in that favourite location of old-school villains, the Costa del Sol.
He must have been a fun character to write – and he’s one partially inspired (according to the acknowledgements section) by “the dodgy man who wanted to buy my hat in a bar in Mijas.” I ask Mark about his own visit to Spain and the feria Virgen de la Peña (festival of the Virgin of the Rock) that Thorne attends.
“All the things I saw or experienced ended up in the book. I was staying in this little village and arrived in the middle of this full-on religious festival. It was so rich and beautiful and spooky that there was no way I could deny Thorne that experience. When I visited Ronda I came across an exhibition of torture and another one about capital punishment. All these things found their way into the books. The sights, the smells and definitely the food!”
Any likelihood of further globetrotting for Thorne in future novels? “Absolutely, if that’s what the story demands. We’ll have to wait and see.”
And now Thorne has travelled to TV land, with a thrilling three-part dramatisation of Sleepy Head just out on Sky 1 and with Scaredy Cat to follow, starring David Morrissey as Thorne. I say to Mark that he must be very excited. Yes, he is – and there are subtle changes to the stories so even avid readers of the novels have a few surprises to look forward to.
“It’s directed by the guy who did 24 so he really knows about pace. It’s not set in North London but East London, there’s no cat, it’s Ruth rather than Russell Brigstock and Phil Hendricks doesn’t have a shaved head. I’ve already started getting outraged emails from readers because the TV series is different from the books, but of course it’s different. They’re different animals and it’s a collaborative medium.”
David Morrissey was Mark’s dream casting. “I’d always wanted David to play Thorne and kept dropping his name into interviews in the hope that he would find out about it. Eventually he did when he read one of the books, Googled me and found out that he was the actor I had in mind for Tom. So we met up and got on very well and decided to bring the books to television together. He’s been incredibly supportive of me and the books throughout the whole process. It’s a different process – one that involves collaboration and compromise – but it’s certainly one that I’m keen to repeat.”
Let’s hope that the TV series continues with the ever-growing back catalogue of Thorne novels.
From the Dead is available in hardback from Little, Brown.
Thorne the TV series is on Sky 1 and Sky 1 HD on Sundays at 9pm.
