My latest book is The Score. The title does not refer to a result of a football game or a purchase of drugs: it’s a piece of music. The protagonist, Welsh detective DS Catrin Price, receives cryptic messages from an old school friend whose daughter has gone missing. Catrin uncovers links to other vanished teenagers and to a prominent drug smuggler, Griff Morgan, who was captured in a high profile bust at Cardiff Marina. Now he has terminal cancer, and is let out of jail on compassionate grounds. Two of the missing girls are found dead, and beside their badly mutilated bodies are clues pointing to Morgan as the culprit. However, as he was in a high security prison at the time and is now too frail to even leave the house unaided, the clues are spurious, possibly malicious. Cat’s investigation leads her from the familiar desolation of the Brecon Beacons to the challenging mean streets of London, where her martial arts and fast motorbike riding skills come in handy. She discovers that all the missing girls submitted cover versions on You Tube of Radiohead’s Street Spirit and that the track bears haunting similarities to The Devil’s Trill, a sonata written by the Eighteenth Century Italian composer Guiseppe Tartini, who claimed it was played to him by none other than the Devil in a dream.. The tune was banned by the Church due to its purported ability to conjure up the Devil. I’ll say no more, as it’s a whodunit, and I’m not giving away any hints.
My previous career seems distant in some ways: I am no longer looking over my shoulder nor seeking anonymity; on the contrary, I now stare straight ahead at an often blank computer screen, and I seek as much publicity as possible. In other ways, the previous career is still part of me and is unlikely to ever go away. My first book, Mr Nice, was simply an autobiographical account of my past career. Everything I’ve ever written has relied heavily on my past knowledge of criminality. My still continuing stand-up shows are merely comic representations of my past exploits. My current social agenda is almost exclusively concentrated on legalisation of drugs. So much of the past is still playing its part.
At first I did not find it the least bit easy to adjust to the discipline required from a crime fiction writer. Mr Nice, my only worldwide best-selling book was entirely non-fiction. There was no plot construction, no character invention, and no creativity. Accordingly, I had no reason to think I could write fiction. However, a number of readers complimented me on my writing of dialogue, which, of course, is invariably fictionalised: it is not an accurate transcription of what was actually said. As a result, I began my crime fiction writing (Sympathy for the Devil) by writing dialogues and letting the plot emerge. By the time I started writing my next and latest book, I had studied crime fiction writing and had familiarised myself somewhat with the tricks of the trade. The plot preceded the dialogue. My general writing discipline, however, has remained the same: I designate days as writing days and stay in front of a screen until I have written at least a thousand words (even if they are crap) and hope and pray that while doing so, I get on a roll of a few thousand words with which I’m satisfied.
I was not conscious of being inspired by any writers during my fledgling efforts to write crime fiction. However, as a young teenager, I read hundreds of books by writers such as Leslie Charteris, Raymond Chandler, Arthur Conan Doyle, Erle Stanley Gardner, Agatha Christie, and Edgar Wallace before I restricted my reading, almost exclusively, to academia. This I did for about ten years before shifting my focus to research topics relevant to drug smuggling (import and export procedures, growing techniques, ancient drug cultures, company law, banking, and financial transactions). This concentration lasted until I was imprisoned at the age of forty two. Then I took up reading fiction again, mainly the works of classical crime writers, including Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, G K Chesterton, Dashiell Hammett, and John Dickson Carr. Despite being unable to pinpoint and specify precisely the influence these writers had, I would be daft to think they had none.
I regard my writing peers with awe and admiration and yearn to emulate them. My current favourite is Norwegian Jo Nesbo, and I’ve read virtually everything he has published. His writing is brilliantly different and relentlessly innovative. His best, in my view, and one of his most recent, is Phantom, which is about drug smuggling but begins from the point of view of a rat smelling its young through a comatose body smothering the rat and preventing it from fulfilling its maternal duty of feeding the little ones.
I don’t believe there is, or should be, a rule about how to deal with violence in one’s writing. Some writers revel in its gory glory, get properly stuck in to the messy and bloody details, and produce excellent literature as a result. As a peace loving hippie, I tend to avoid giving graphic details of the violence and concentrate on its subtle menace and effects. I’m more comfortable that way. Violence is often preceded by threat, and the essence of threat is never to fulfil it.
Sexuality, also, is not bound by rules. I have always preferred discretion to frankness in most things, particularly sex, and I’m sure this is evident from my writing. Sex generally follows from attraction, which has far more longevity and versatility as a writing device than a quick bang in the sack.
A crime writer’s duty is to produce an entertaining and engaging piece of work. There is no requirement to write about the society in which the writer lives. It might be interesting; it might not. But it is essential to concentrate on the narrative, the driving force of the book that must propel the reader from the first to the last page without faltering, stuttering, or losing momentum.
So far my fiction has been straightforward whodunits – chess games between the author and the reader. If the reader guesses who did it before the end, the author has, quite simply, lost the game.
I can’t say much about my next book, mainly because I’m about a third of the way through writing each of my two next books, and I don’t know which one to finish first. However, I’ve dropped the concentration on satanic stuff, put in much more crime, and ruthlessly draw on my experiences and my connections with both law enforcement and law breakers.
The Score is published by Harvill Secker
