How My Love Story Became a Thriller
I took a nervous sip of champagne and did my best to settle into the scooped back of the artfully upholstered chair. I narrowed my eyes, waiting as the piano tinkled from the other side of the lounge. In the soft light, the coral and cream furniture of the Ivy Club seemed to glow rather like the character of an ocean liner from the golden age of Atlantic cruises. Or so I assumed. This then, was it. My agent, David Headley, had summoned me to the pinnacle of literary dinging parlours – home of the £16 asparagus side dish – to give me his verdict on my manuscript for my second novel. A previous novelist had left just as I’d arrived. There was a smile on her face, irritatingly delighted. The pair of them had hugged and told each other how wonderful it all was, basking in the warm embrace of a triumphant future.
Imagine my fixed smile, my envious eyes, my pathetic brow, furrowed with greedy hope.
I knew, you see. The manuscript was good in places, perhaps almost brilliant in fleeting parts, written as it was from the marrow of my bones. But it was flawed, clumsy and slow, flabby and elusive, derivative and pompous, and I disliked it. There would be no easy compliments for my effort. Mollies, my novel about flamboyant gay men existing in the inhospitable world of Georgian London, needed considerable work. Possibly a match.
‘It needs work,’ said David, pushing a side of A4 paper across the table, printed with notes in a font large enough to hang from Tower Bridge. The top line: ‘You’re a brilliant writer, but it’s lacking something.’
‘What is it lacking?’ I sulked.
‘Tension. It’s a thriller.’
I took a long breath, smoothing the rumples from my own corners. I bounced my leg, feeling the patch in the sole of my left shoe where the rubber had been worn thin. A year of walking to and from the London Library from our tiny flat in South London. Hundreds of miles thinking, thinking, thinking how to make the book beautiful, I’d never once considered making it tense.
‘It is not a thriller, David, it is a love story.’
‘It needs a mystery at its heart. Danger, a sense of threat.’
‘There’s no room for a mystery at its heart, there’s already a heart there.’
David poured a new measure of champagne into our glasses and settled back, fixing me with an eye. ‘Go back to it. Start with the danger. Keep the love, add the thrill.’
The next day I was back at the library, grumpy as a child forced to tidy his room. I watched the pages of my manuscript scroll down across the screen so fast the words were a blur. Better that way; I couldn’t bear to see how many of my babies I was about to slaughter. Chapter One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight … they skudded past, tens of thousands of words highlighted by the cursor and then … bang.
One tap of a button and all of it was gone. The first quarter of the manuscript, deleted. No more, the daughter clinging to her pa. No more the nurse caring for them both with rough love and a rolling pin. No more Joy, a lady of the streets with a talent for camouflage. The scenes at Mother Clap’s Molly House all destroyed, then what the heck? Every other chapter too, gone. The manuscript was pretty – perhaps clever in parts, but not thrilling. All of it had to go.
And, so I started again, beginning this time with two murderous justices and their trial of a young sodomite. This was in fact the only chapter I kept from the first draft. It would be the only chapter to survive into the final book, because – little did I know it then – the second draft would also end up in the bin. Still, I was discovering the thriller, buried deep beneath my flabby love story. Here was the danger, and in the absence of so much flim-flam, the tension gripped the story and pulled it stumbling along. This was no family saga, no costume drama, no gravy-thick tale of forbidden love. This story was about friendship and passion, yes, loyalty and terrible risk, absolutely, rebellion and adventure, of course! But now all of it existed in the malevolent shadow of a swinging noose. And then … I could hear him before he appeared, scuttling between the words as I typed them late into the night … he blinked black eyes, twitched whiskers, scuttled his claws, The Rat.
The intoxicating thrill of attraction mixed with the sharp tang of peril as the traitorous Rat drew nearer and nearer with every paragraph. He would betray them all, they would die. I had two men searching for their own hearts – men who don’t love are pathetic, men who can’t love are tragic – and circling them all the while, coming closer and closer as they struggle with their own demons, is their invisible enemy.
Now danger itself was a character, symbolic of the fear anyone suffers when the world is filled with hate.
I had it. Mollies was a thriller after all. It took a year to write a third time now I knew what I was doing and with the help of my editors at Orenda Books and then, another six months to write a fourth draft, pulling the prose tight around the manuscript like the laces of a corset. A change of name to The Betrayal of Thomas True (The reader might ask: Is he doing the betraying or is he being betrayed?), another few edits to sharpen it all up and introduce a chapter from the Rat’s point of view – I discovered for the first time, the thrill of a hitherto forbidden perspective – and I had it. My second novel, perhaps the best story I’ll ever write, surely the most personal.
Now, it is a much-overused term in the literary world, but I truly am thrilled to see the early responses to my second book, and while my readers gasp at the hidden turns of an ever-darkening mystery, for me the greatest thrill of all remains the realisation that I’m a thriller writer after all. Now there’s a twist, and I shan’t be going back.
A.J. West is author The Betrayal of Thomas True, published by Orenda Books on 4th July.
