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I’ve been introduced to Scotsman writer Christopher Brookmyre by The Earl and Gauche. Difficult to find his books here so I’ve ordered one from Amazon. In researching the lad I came across this very interesting and informative interview (from ‘Writer's Block’ magazine, 2003). Gauche suggested I post it cos Brookmyre answers many questions oft’ posted on the AH. I’m editing it for length but the full interview can be read here at Brookmyre’s website (which also includes extracts from his books, and more). - Perdita
Unlike in the music or film industries, the writing world seems to have a lot less exposure. If you’d made a successful album you would have had interviews with everyone. Books do not receive the same exposure. How do you feel about that?
It probably suits me. I did a promotional tour in Australia and New Zealand last year and they were talking about that and saying, how well are you known at home? The thing is that the highest profile novelist will have a lower profile than the lowest profile soap star. I don’t think we’re, as a breed, particularly keen to be thrusting ourselves into the limelight. We would tend to be on the outside looking in. I think there’s something of the sniper about some of them.
Quite Ugly One Morning was in fact your fourth novel, but the first to be published. What has happened to the other three?
For one they weren’t very good and they’ve just been put down to experience with the exception of the last one which was far too serious really and it didn’t really match my style. But it was not a bad story with some interesting characters. A few years ago John Hannah’s company wanted Quite Ugly One Morning and it was actually at the time optioned by another company called Catalyst, who are the most inappropriately named company working in television and film. I didn’t have that available but he said, have you got anything else? Unfortunately all I had at the time was Country of the Blind which was covered by the same option. So I said, well I’ve got this unpublished novel. Ironically my wife and I had years before wondered who would be great for the role. We didn’t know and then we saw “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and we both said, my God, that guy would be perfect! [laughs] He really liked the idea and over about two and a half years the project was developed and I wrote six or seven drafts of a screenplay, but it kind of ran out of momentum really. I got money for writing the screenplay [laughs] but I don’t think anything’s ever going to happen to it.
You aren’t afraid to say what you think, even if it may not be to everybody’s taste. Do you worry that you are alienating possible readers?
Not in the least. I never worry about that. There’d be no point in putting pen to paper if you were worried about what would appeal to everybody. I also think that the type of person who’s gonna be offended by what’s likely to be in my books is probably the type of person least likely to pick one up in the first place. I do usually make it fairly obvious from the off. With most of my novels there’ll be something right at the start that let’s people know what they’re in for.
Do you see your writing as a political tool, or do you just want to write down your opinions and see who shares them?
They’re not always my opinions. Sometimes it’s just the opinions that are appropriate to the character that I’m creating. Sometimes I write down opinions that are exaggerations of my own or a diametric opposite of my own. It’s whatever works with the character. I don’t really see it as a political vehicle because I don’t consider myself as overtly political or ideologically aligned in any way. I think it’s an indigenously Glaswegian thing. Glaswegians tend not to miss and hit the ball. We don’t go in for subtly hinting at our beliefs and opinions, we tend to be fairly unambiguous. I think it was P. G. Woodhouse who said, “It’s seldom difficult to distinguish between a ray of sunshine and a Scotsman with a grievance.”
Your novels can be quite graphic as well as being controversial. Is there a line you will not cross or a topic you will not cover?
I doubt it. There might be things that I wouldn’t go into because I didn’t feel sufficiently qualified or that just seemed inappropriate for the tone. I have no idea what I’m likely to write about in the future, so I can’t say that there’s anything I wouldn’t write. I found that while I was writing A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away that I was actually liberated to be able to use allusions, images and metaphors that I might not have been able to write in the past. I was writing from the point of view of Simon Darcourt who is just such a monster. He will say all the inappropriate things. At one point he talks about a situation being like a mass rape at a prisoner of war camp, which is the kind of metaphor that you just wouldn’t be able to get away with under another context. It might alienate the reader and the thing with Simon is that he is supposed to gradually alienate the reader. Having said that, my wife’s reading the new book and she always objects to something. There’s always one line or something and she says, you can’t say this, and it’s usually the one line everybody talks about later! In fact my editor had already remarked on being particularly keen on the line. [laughs] It’s just talking about the last time that Aberdeen won at Ibrox was back when Fred West could have fielded a full team for Family Fortunes...!
Do you have people who read through your first drafts and say, look I think that might be going a bit far? Or the opposite, saying I think you should bring out this theme a bit more?
My editors very seldom cut anything out, only just occasionally cut things out if they, as you say, think I’ve gone too far into a subject. With the last book they suggested I cut down some of the computer game stuff and there’s a lot more 1980s music stuff. Often they say, we like this character, we like this idea, can you get stuck in and give us some more. One Fine Day they wanted more satire on British tourists morays and also they wanted more of the kind of drunk guys at the back of the bar. [laughs]
One Fine Day was the first book I read and it was the film references in particular that caught my attention. Do you worry that these references might date your novels quickly, or do you like having a shared knowledge with the reader?
I like that. I like the fact that there’s something that can be communicated through that like a kind of cultural short hand. I think novels will be dated anyway, but I don’t think these references will date them really. They’ll date them in a more immediate sense. Somebody reading the novel in ten years time will enjoy most of the same things, I think, and have a little nostalgic chuckle.
Your heroes are all relatively normal, everyday Joes. They tend to be in Die Hard situations with one man against the world. Is that an intentional thing you did?
Yes. “Die Hard” was my favourite action movie. I think the first time I saw it I was blown away by it. The whole idea was familiar, as I’d written a short story at school along the same lines, you know, of terrorists taking over a building at the same time as one person gets away. The reason it works, the reason it stood above all the other action movies was simply that it wasn’t your kind of superman Schwarzeneggar-Stallone figure. I think that shows the vulnerability and, even though you knew he was a cop, you still felt that the odds were against him. With One Fine Day, and a lot of my books, I like to come up with a massive scale concept and throw in very ordinary characters because I think if you have a massive scale concept with massive scale characters they tend to cancel each other out. People have more fun if they can imagine how either themselves or the type of people they know would react in a bizarre situation. It’s a bit boring if you know how some highly trained soldier is going to react to a situation. It’s not very interesting compared to how someone who is an electrician or a schoolteacher might react to a situation.
Do you find that the characters you create are amalgams of people you have known, or are they fictional?
A bit of both. You do find that perhaps certain traits of individuals might creep in here and there but not always in the most obvious or predictable way. There might be aspects of people that you like that creep into the villains and vice-versa. But sometimes the characters do just create themselves and aren’t like any people you have known.
Does the written form allow you certain freedoms you do not find elsewhere?
Yes, there’s a certain, what the French call “the spirit of the staircase”, by which they mean all the things that you wish you’d said when you’re going down the stairs after the argument. When you’re writing you get to do that. You get to give your characters all the lines that – it’s not even a question of whether you’d have the balls to say them – the lines that you don’t even think of. I think that’s part of the escapism. People get to read the things that sound best in the situation. There’s a great freedom in that respect and obviously the freedom to put down your ideological opinions or your little cultural peccadilloes.
There are many different trains of thought regarding where best to physically write. Do you have a specific place and time in which you are most comfortable and productive when writing?
I tend to write best in office hours, really. I’m not much of a one for burning the midnight oil. I used to get a very good creative burst at some time around the hours of four and seven o’clock, but after my son came along that kind of buggered that up. [laughs] Usually four o’clock was getting him from nursery, plus he gets you up at six o’clock every morning and so I’m not feeling particularly creative come seven o’clock anyway. I wrote most of my novels in the kitchen. I’ve always had big kitchens. I’ve moved around a lot in recent years. The place I’m in just now that I’m renting in Glasgow, it’s not a big kitchen, but it’s got a fairly spacious room that I’ve set all of my stuff in and I find that quite conducive. We’re just about to buy a house so I think I’ll have my own kind of office-cum-study, so I don’t think I actually need to be in the kitchen to write, [laughs] it’s just the way it has been.
When you begin writing do you have a plot idea first or is it normally a couple of characters that you’ve thought of that then lead to it?
No, it’s usually an idea for a plot. It’s usually to do with the high concept kind of thing, or the idea of some scam that the villain is up to. I don’t always know how that’s gonna be unravelled, because I think that it’s important that as you learn about your character, that your character unravels in a way that is appropriate to him or her. I hate it when you read a novel that’s got a great idea, a great plot and a great scheme going on, but the way the character resolves it, it could have been anyone, you know, rather than something specific to that character. I think the character has to learn about themselves and change perhaps in the course of resolving the story.
When you finish a first draft, do you find yourself going back and adding humour to ease the often-intense subject matter, or does the humour come first time?
It tends to come as I’m writing when I’m most acutely aware of what the situation is that I’m putting my characters in, or how they’re thinking at that moment; what would be a particularly appropriate or inappropriate thought or remark. I can’t imagine trying to add humour to situations once the moment has gone. I think the first time you live this experience is with your character. That’s when all these thoughts and ideas mostly spring to mind. I do occasionally think about a one liner after the fact and realise, oh yeah, that would work. I just stuck one in to the copy edit last week of the new book because it was one of those things that I realised that I’ve missed an open goal for a very obvious and revolting joke, so it had to go in. [laughs]
You use the Glaswegian dialect quite a lot. Is that just because it’s what you know and so comes easily, or is there a specific reason for it?
Obviously it’s what I’m familiar with, but I think dialects aren’t just slang words. Dialects often encapsulate a type of attitude that maybe is indigenous to a city. The Glaswegian dialect tends to be, I suppose, fairly streetwise and it does have an attitude about it in the same way, for instance, that however unfairly, someone who’s got a Brummie accent is always gonna be made out to be daft, or someone who’s got a very rural accent isn’t going to be seen to work well in some urban thriller. I think there are certain accents that align themselves to certain genres.
Would you say that the swearing comes under that as well?
I suppose the Glaswegian dialect does tend to be a bit liberally peppered with expletives. [laughs] Often the swearing just goes in the way I would imagine natural rhythms of speech. You can tell sometimes when a writer who isn’t particularly familiar with swearing puts it in because it’s always in the wrong places. I don’t put it in there for impact, I just think that’s how I would imagine the character would speak or think. There’s a character in the new book and some of it’s narrated from his point of view. He’s a kind of American mob enforcer and he swears way way too much because that’s how he thinks. He’s the kind of guy who would just throw the word “fucking” in here all the time [laughs] so they start to mount up after a while. He’s always wanting to use foreign terms, so he talks about “raison-fuckin’-d’etre”.
I think often you get more of an idea about the character. You can laugh at the character and derive more of an understanding of that character as a person.
Yeah. I get very disappointed when I get the impression that people read my characters completely straight or haven’t realised that I was commenting on the character in the way I’ve depicted. There was a lot of people took Simon Darcourt and the kind of things he was saying as being things that I must believe, which I found quite incredible. [laughs] He’s supposed to be someone who, I suppose at first you might find quite seductive and think, yeah I’ve thought that too, but as you get to know him and his opinions and ideas get more and more bizarre to the point of homicidal I think he becomes almost like a kind of warning sign for people. If you don’t reign in your unworthy and intolerant thoughts, you’re gonna turn into something of a Nazi.
i]One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night[/i] is, the cover says, based on a true story. It’s a pretty bizarre turn of events, so how much is based on truth?
Absolutely none. That was a kind of two way joke. The first side was that in some of the responses to the previous novels the critics seemed to be aghast at just how implausible all these things were, as if that hadn’t occurred to me. Again it’s an over the top escapist fiction. So I put in “the following is based on a true story” so that you read that and the first thing you read is this guy getting drenched in a mix of blood and masonry and once you’ve read that juxtaposition you shouldn’t really be under any doubt as to the tone of what you’re about to read. Also, in a book completely full of film references, that is the first one. It’s a reference to the Coen brothers and Fargo, which they told everyone was based on a true story and really they made it up. It was a great marketing idea, but there was a Japanese woman admitted to hospital in... where was it... up there in Minneapolis with severe hypothermia. She had been out digging trying to find the buried money because she had thought the film had been based on a true story, so therefore this money must be buried somewhere along that highway. She was out digging in the snow.
How do you research your novels? A lot of them are very detailed in the ways of the police. Do you have a contact?
[laughs loudly] No! I always feel self-conscious about what the police would make of the procedural aspect of my novels, because I make zero research into that! [laughs] I know Ian Rankin does a lot more of that. He wings it a lot too. He said that he was surprised himself when he was complemented by police officers on the accuracy of it. He said, well he knew nothing. He hadn’t even been inside St. Leonard’s police station until about three years ago and he’d been writing about it for ten. On the whole I am a great believer in the MSU Institute of Research, which stands for Making Shit Up. It’s more a question of just sounding authoritative than actually knowing anything. I tend to write about things that I do already know about rather than try and research it. The only time I really did a lot of in-depth research was into tidal waves in Not the End of the World, which led me down a lot of very strange and crooked paths, and that’s where I found out all this stuff about the destruction of Thera. I actually had a twenty thousand words subplot about that in the original draft of the book, which was just massively overcomplicating an already complicated story, so it ended up getting cut out. I put that down to “researchitus”. You can get fascinated by what you’re researching and forget that you don’t really need that much about it. You don’t need to go into that much detail.
So you are a believer in “write what you know”, then?
Yeah, definitely. I think unless there’s something you need to research, on the whole it’s best to go with something you’re already familiar with.
How do you come up with the titles for your books? They are almost all common phrases which apply perfectly to the stories. Have any of your novels ever stemmed from such a phrase?
Well I always wanted to write a book called One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night. Ever since I was a kid and I heard that rhyme, the notion was in my head. I remember a few years back deciding I was gonna write a book called that and it was gonna be set over twenty-four hours. That was before I had the notion for the novel. When I came up with the idea for that novel in terms of the plot, it had a working title of Good Guys Get Shot in the Shoulder. I decided that One Fine Day was gonna be better. A lot of the titles were stolen, really. [laughs] Quite Ugly One Morning was a song by Warren Zeehorne. Country of the Blind, obviously, is H. G. Wells, via the Faith Brothers – a 1980s politically motivated band. Not the End of the World was on two levels: that phrase “not the end of the world”, but also someone once said, I can’t remember who, about Los Angeles, “it’s not the end of the world but you can certainly see it from here.” Because it was set in LA I thought that it was appropriate. The new one’s stolen again. It was appropriate, called The Sacred Art of Stealing. I stole it from a friend of mine who’s a songwriter who wrote a song called “The Sacred Art of Leaving”.
You say that you don’t like to read while you’re writing. Is that because you’re worried that you might see an idea and take it?
No. I just find it too distracting. When I’m writing a book I have my spare moments thinking about the characters and the story. If I was reading a book, I’d start thinking about the characters and the story in someone else’s book. I really need my head to be exclusively dealing with what I’m writing.
Do you get a buzz when you see your novels in the shop charts, or being read by someone?
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone reading one. All my friends and family keep telling me about all the people that they see on trains or on holiday, and I’ve not yet ever seen anybody reading one of my books. [laughs] That could be because I spend so much of my time cooped up in the house writing! Every time I do a promotional tour I particularly enjoy doing the bookshop events and hearing the audience react when I’m reading the stuff out. Until people read it, it might as well not exist. The most frustrating thing for me is when I’ve just finished writing a book and nobody’s read it yet. I might even be waiting a week or so for my editor to get back to me. That’s really difficult because you want to hear people say that they liked this bit or that they were thrown by that bit. It’s a very solitary pursuit and it’s great when you see the other side.
Do you find that you can start something and that it can get out of hand without you even knowing how? The idea develops so far beyond what you were expecting...
Oh definitely. A lot of my books have ended up far larger in concept than what I envisaged on the first day I started writing.
Do you like to plan before you start, or do you just let it come when it’s ready?
I used to plan almost nothing. I would know roughly what the scam was and work my way along from there, but the last couple of books have been a lot more planned just simply because of my domestic situation. I’ve had a few delays in writing them, or I’ve had more time to consider how they were going to be put together. The new book, for reasons that will be obvious, I had to be very intricate. I had to know from the start how it was gonna end and what was really going on, but nonetheless there was a lot of scope in the middle for things where I could really let my imagination run riot. And I did! [laughs] That’s why I enjoyed it so much. I wanted to start with a bang and take the reader in really quickly into some action rather than wait for the story. I thought, have the bank robbery and then move on. The bank robbery ended up taking up just slightly under half the novel, because it just becomes more and more bizarre and more outrageous.
How did you get started? Was it just sheer persistence that got you there, or contacts?
It was sheer perseverance and a determination that that was what I wanted to do. I was young and... stupid, basically [laughs] and I didn’t really know an awful lot about what I was doing. I suppose I had enough... I wouldn’t call it wisdom... awareness to know that initially I wasn’t getting published because I wasn’t good enough, rather than to think, I’ve channelled myself into this novel and how dare they not publish it? I realised with each novel that I was getting better. Equally, while I was getting better I was becoming more aware of what was required, and therefore how far away I was from it, you know? When I wrote Quite Ugly it was a complete change of tone and it was far more comfortable in terms of the style and I realised that I had something that was very different and was more me, I suppose. It wasn’t about contacts. I got a contact. A guy I was working with had a cousin who was an agent, and also he knew someone at Canongate as well. At that time I had two novels for them to show – one of them was the one that ended up a screenplay, and the other was Quite Ugly – and the agent got Quite Ugly and Cannongate got The Sin Garden, as it was called. They quite liked it but thought it wasn’t really gonna fly. The agent saw Quite Ugly and had three publishers bidding for it within the fortnight. It was more a question of perseverance and learning the trade, to a certain extent.
What would you say to someone who is trying to get started in writing?
Stubborn perseverance. That’s what worked for me. Be honest with yourself in terms of what you’re writing. Is what you’re writing really what you want to write, or what you think a publisher wants to read, because that was the mistake I was making for a long time. Crucially, the honesty to ask yourself whether what you’re doing is any good. Be prepared to improve or even have the patience to realise that it might take years to improve.
Unlike in the music or film industries, the writing world seems to have a lot less exposure. If you’d made a successful album you would have had interviews with everyone. Books do not receive the same exposure. How do you feel about that?
It probably suits me. I did a promotional tour in Australia and New Zealand last year and they were talking about that and saying, how well are you known at home? The thing is that the highest profile novelist will have a lower profile than the lowest profile soap star. I don’t think we’re, as a breed, particularly keen to be thrusting ourselves into the limelight. We would tend to be on the outside looking in. I think there’s something of the sniper about some of them.
Quite Ugly One Morning was in fact your fourth novel, but the first to be published. What has happened to the other three?
For one they weren’t very good and they’ve just been put down to experience with the exception of the last one which was far too serious really and it didn’t really match my style. But it was not a bad story with some interesting characters. A few years ago John Hannah’s company wanted Quite Ugly One Morning and it was actually at the time optioned by another company called Catalyst, who are the most inappropriately named company working in television and film. I didn’t have that available but he said, have you got anything else? Unfortunately all I had at the time was Country of the Blind which was covered by the same option. So I said, well I’ve got this unpublished novel. Ironically my wife and I had years before wondered who would be great for the role. We didn’t know and then we saw “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and we both said, my God, that guy would be perfect! [laughs] He really liked the idea and over about two and a half years the project was developed and I wrote six or seven drafts of a screenplay, but it kind of ran out of momentum really. I got money for writing the screenplay [laughs] but I don’t think anything’s ever going to happen to it.
You aren’t afraid to say what you think, even if it may not be to everybody’s taste. Do you worry that you are alienating possible readers?
Not in the least. I never worry about that. There’d be no point in putting pen to paper if you were worried about what would appeal to everybody. I also think that the type of person who’s gonna be offended by what’s likely to be in my books is probably the type of person least likely to pick one up in the first place. I do usually make it fairly obvious from the off. With most of my novels there’ll be something right at the start that let’s people know what they’re in for.
Do you see your writing as a political tool, or do you just want to write down your opinions and see who shares them?
They’re not always my opinions. Sometimes it’s just the opinions that are appropriate to the character that I’m creating. Sometimes I write down opinions that are exaggerations of my own or a diametric opposite of my own. It’s whatever works with the character. I don’t really see it as a political vehicle because I don’t consider myself as overtly political or ideologically aligned in any way. I think it’s an indigenously Glaswegian thing. Glaswegians tend not to miss and hit the ball. We don’t go in for subtly hinting at our beliefs and opinions, we tend to be fairly unambiguous. I think it was P. G. Woodhouse who said, “It’s seldom difficult to distinguish between a ray of sunshine and a Scotsman with a grievance.”
Your novels can be quite graphic as well as being controversial. Is there a line you will not cross or a topic you will not cover?
I doubt it. There might be things that I wouldn’t go into because I didn’t feel sufficiently qualified or that just seemed inappropriate for the tone. I have no idea what I’m likely to write about in the future, so I can’t say that there’s anything I wouldn’t write. I found that while I was writing A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away that I was actually liberated to be able to use allusions, images and metaphors that I might not have been able to write in the past. I was writing from the point of view of Simon Darcourt who is just such a monster. He will say all the inappropriate things. At one point he talks about a situation being like a mass rape at a prisoner of war camp, which is the kind of metaphor that you just wouldn’t be able to get away with under another context. It might alienate the reader and the thing with Simon is that he is supposed to gradually alienate the reader. Having said that, my wife’s reading the new book and she always objects to something. There’s always one line or something and she says, you can’t say this, and it’s usually the one line everybody talks about later! In fact my editor had already remarked on being particularly keen on the line. [laughs] It’s just talking about the last time that Aberdeen won at Ibrox was back when Fred West could have fielded a full team for Family Fortunes...!
Do you have people who read through your first drafts and say, look I think that might be going a bit far? Or the opposite, saying I think you should bring out this theme a bit more?
My editors very seldom cut anything out, only just occasionally cut things out if they, as you say, think I’ve gone too far into a subject. With the last book they suggested I cut down some of the computer game stuff and there’s a lot more 1980s music stuff. Often they say, we like this character, we like this idea, can you get stuck in and give us some more. One Fine Day they wanted more satire on British tourists morays and also they wanted more of the kind of drunk guys at the back of the bar. [laughs]
One Fine Day was the first book I read and it was the film references in particular that caught my attention. Do you worry that these references might date your novels quickly, or do you like having a shared knowledge with the reader?
I like that. I like the fact that there’s something that can be communicated through that like a kind of cultural short hand. I think novels will be dated anyway, but I don’t think these references will date them really. They’ll date them in a more immediate sense. Somebody reading the novel in ten years time will enjoy most of the same things, I think, and have a little nostalgic chuckle.
Your heroes are all relatively normal, everyday Joes. They tend to be in Die Hard situations with one man against the world. Is that an intentional thing you did?
Yes. “Die Hard” was my favourite action movie. I think the first time I saw it I was blown away by it. The whole idea was familiar, as I’d written a short story at school along the same lines, you know, of terrorists taking over a building at the same time as one person gets away. The reason it works, the reason it stood above all the other action movies was simply that it wasn’t your kind of superman Schwarzeneggar-Stallone figure. I think that shows the vulnerability and, even though you knew he was a cop, you still felt that the odds were against him. With One Fine Day, and a lot of my books, I like to come up with a massive scale concept and throw in very ordinary characters because I think if you have a massive scale concept with massive scale characters they tend to cancel each other out. People have more fun if they can imagine how either themselves or the type of people they know would react in a bizarre situation. It’s a bit boring if you know how some highly trained soldier is going to react to a situation. It’s not very interesting compared to how someone who is an electrician or a schoolteacher might react to a situation.
Do you find that the characters you create are amalgams of people you have known, or are they fictional?
A bit of both. You do find that perhaps certain traits of individuals might creep in here and there but not always in the most obvious or predictable way. There might be aspects of people that you like that creep into the villains and vice-versa. But sometimes the characters do just create themselves and aren’t like any people you have known.
Does the written form allow you certain freedoms you do not find elsewhere?
Yes, there’s a certain, what the French call “the spirit of the staircase”, by which they mean all the things that you wish you’d said when you’re going down the stairs after the argument. When you’re writing you get to do that. You get to give your characters all the lines that – it’s not even a question of whether you’d have the balls to say them – the lines that you don’t even think of. I think that’s part of the escapism. People get to read the things that sound best in the situation. There’s a great freedom in that respect and obviously the freedom to put down your ideological opinions or your little cultural peccadilloes.
There are many different trains of thought regarding where best to physically write. Do you have a specific place and time in which you are most comfortable and productive when writing?
I tend to write best in office hours, really. I’m not much of a one for burning the midnight oil. I used to get a very good creative burst at some time around the hours of four and seven o’clock, but after my son came along that kind of buggered that up. [laughs] Usually four o’clock was getting him from nursery, plus he gets you up at six o’clock every morning and so I’m not feeling particularly creative come seven o’clock anyway. I wrote most of my novels in the kitchen. I’ve always had big kitchens. I’ve moved around a lot in recent years. The place I’m in just now that I’m renting in Glasgow, it’s not a big kitchen, but it’s got a fairly spacious room that I’ve set all of my stuff in and I find that quite conducive. We’re just about to buy a house so I think I’ll have my own kind of office-cum-study, so I don’t think I actually need to be in the kitchen to write, [laughs] it’s just the way it has been.
When you begin writing do you have a plot idea first or is it normally a couple of characters that you’ve thought of that then lead to it?
No, it’s usually an idea for a plot. It’s usually to do with the high concept kind of thing, or the idea of some scam that the villain is up to. I don’t always know how that’s gonna be unravelled, because I think that it’s important that as you learn about your character, that your character unravels in a way that is appropriate to him or her. I hate it when you read a novel that’s got a great idea, a great plot and a great scheme going on, but the way the character resolves it, it could have been anyone, you know, rather than something specific to that character. I think the character has to learn about themselves and change perhaps in the course of resolving the story.
When you finish a first draft, do you find yourself going back and adding humour to ease the often-intense subject matter, or does the humour come first time?
It tends to come as I’m writing when I’m most acutely aware of what the situation is that I’m putting my characters in, or how they’re thinking at that moment; what would be a particularly appropriate or inappropriate thought or remark. I can’t imagine trying to add humour to situations once the moment has gone. I think the first time you live this experience is with your character. That’s when all these thoughts and ideas mostly spring to mind. I do occasionally think about a one liner after the fact and realise, oh yeah, that would work. I just stuck one in to the copy edit last week of the new book because it was one of those things that I realised that I’ve missed an open goal for a very obvious and revolting joke, so it had to go in. [laughs]
You use the Glaswegian dialect quite a lot. Is that just because it’s what you know and so comes easily, or is there a specific reason for it?
Obviously it’s what I’m familiar with, but I think dialects aren’t just slang words. Dialects often encapsulate a type of attitude that maybe is indigenous to a city. The Glaswegian dialect tends to be, I suppose, fairly streetwise and it does have an attitude about it in the same way, for instance, that however unfairly, someone who’s got a Brummie accent is always gonna be made out to be daft, or someone who’s got a very rural accent isn’t going to be seen to work well in some urban thriller. I think there are certain accents that align themselves to certain genres.
Would you say that the swearing comes under that as well?
I suppose the Glaswegian dialect does tend to be a bit liberally peppered with expletives. [laughs] Often the swearing just goes in the way I would imagine natural rhythms of speech. You can tell sometimes when a writer who isn’t particularly familiar with swearing puts it in because it’s always in the wrong places. I don’t put it in there for impact, I just think that’s how I would imagine the character would speak or think. There’s a character in the new book and some of it’s narrated from his point of view. He’s a kind of American mob enforcer and he swears way way too much because that’s how he thinks. He’s the kind of guy who would just throw the word “fucking” in here all the time [laughs] so they start to mount up after a while. He’s always wanting to use foreign terms, so he talks about “raison-fuckin’-d’etre”.
I think often you get more of an idea about the character. You can laugh at the character and derive more of an understanding of that character as a person.
Yeah. I get very disappointed when I get the impression that people read my characters completely straight or haven’t realised that I was commenting on the character in the way I’ve depicted. There was a lot of people took Simon Darcourt and the kind of things he was saying as being things that I must believe, which I found quite incredible. [laughs] He’s supposed to be someone who, I suppose at first you might find quite seductive and think, yeah I’ve thought that too, but as you get to know him and his opinions and ideas get more and more bizarre to the point of homicidal I think he becomes almost like a kind of warning sign for people. If you don’t reign in your unworthy and intolerant thoughts, you’re gonna turn into something of a Nazi.
i]One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night[/i] is, the cover says, based on a true story. It’s a pretty bizarre turn of events, so how much is based on truth?
Absolutely none. That was a kind of two way joke. The first side was that in some of the responses to the previous novels the critics seemed to be aghast at just how implausible all these things were, as if that hadn’t occurred to me. Again it’s an over the top escapist fiction. So I put in “the following is based on a true story” so that you read that and the first thing you read is this guy getting drenched in a mix of blood and masonry and once you’ve read that juxtaposition you shouldn’t really be under any doubt as to the tone of what you’re about to read. Also, in a book completely full of film references, that is the first one. It’s a reference to the Coen brothers and Fargo, which they told everyone was based on a true story and really they made it up. It was a great marketing idea, but there was a Japanese woman admitted to hospital in... where was it... up there in Minneapolis with severe hypothermia. She had been out digging trying to find the buried money because she had thought the film had been based on a true story, so therefore this money must be buried somewhere along that highway. She was out digging in the snow.
How do you research your novels? A lot of them are very detailed in the ways of the police. Do you have a contact?
[laughs loudly] No! I always feel self-conscious about what the police would make of the procedural aspect of my novels, because I make zero research into that! [laughs] I know Ian Rankin does a lot more of that. He wings it a lot too. He said that he was surprised himself when he was complemented by police officers on the accuracy of it. He said, well he knew nothing. He hadn’t even been inside St. Leonard’s police station until about three years ago and he’d been writing about it for ten. On the whole I am a great believer in the MSU Institute of Research, which stands for Making Shit Up. It’s more a question of just sounding authoritative than actually knowing anything. I tend to write about things that I do already know about rather than try and research it. The only time I really did a lot of in-depth research was into tidal waves in Not the End of the World, which led me down a lot of very strange and crooked paths, and that’s where I found out all this stuff about the destruction of Thera. I actually had a twenty thousand words subplot about that in the original draft of the book, which was just massively overcomplicating an already complicated story, so it ended up getting cut out. I put that down to “researchitus”. You can get fascinated by what you’re researching and forget that you don’t really need that much about it. You don’t need to go into that much detail.
So you are a believer in “write what you know”, then?
Yeah, definitely. I think unless there’s something you need to research, on the whole it’s best to go with something you’re already familiar with.
How do you come up with the titles for your books? They are almost all common phrases which apply perfectly to the stories. Have any of your novels ever stemmed from such a phrase?
Well I always wanted to write a book called One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night. Ever since I was a kid and I heard that rhyme, the notion was in my head. I remember a few years back deciding I was gonna write a book called that and it was gonna be set over twenty-four hours. That was before I had the notion for the novel. When I came up with the idea for that novel in terms of the plot, it had a working title of Good Guys Get Shot in the Shoulder. I decided that One Fine Day was gonna be better. A lot of the titles were stolen, really. [laughs] Quite Ugly One Morning was a song by Warren Zeehorne. Country of the Blind, obviously, is H. G. Wells, via the Faith Brothers – a 1980s politically motivated band. Not the End of the World was on two levels: that phrase “not the end of the world”, but also someone once said, I can’t remember who, about Los Angeles, “it’s not the end of the world but you can certainly see it from here.” Because it was set in LA I thought that it was appropriate. The new one’s stolen again. It was appropriate, called The Sacred Art of Stealing. I stole it from a friend of mine who’s a songwriter who wrote a song called “The Sacred Art of Leaving”.
You say that you don’t like to read while you’re writing. Is that because you’re worried that you might see an idea and take it?
No. I just find it too distracting. When I’m writing a book I have my spare moments thinking about the characters and the story. If I was reading a book, I’d start thinking about the characters and the story in someone else’s book. I really need my head to be exclusively dealing with what I’m writing.
Do you get a buzz when you see your novels in the shop charts, or being read by someone?
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone reading one. All my friends and family keep telling me about all the people that they see on trains or on holiday, and I’ve not yet ever seen anybody reading one of my books. [laughs] That could be because I spend so much of my time cooped up in the house writing! Every time I do a promotional tour I particularly enjoy doing the bookshop events and hearing the audience react when I’m reading the stuff out. Until people read it, it might as well not exist. The most frustrating thing for me is when I’ve just finished writing a book and nobody’s read it yet. I might even be waiting a week or so for my editor to get back to me. That’s really difficult because you want to hear people say that they liked this bit or that they were thrown by that bit. It’s a very solitary pursuit and it’s great when you see the other side.
Do you find that you can start something and that it can get out of hand without you even knowing how? The idea develops so far beyond what you were expecting...
Oh definitely. A lot of my books have ended up far larger in concept than what I envisaged on the first day I started writing.
Do you like to plan before you start, or do you just let it come when it’s ready?
I used to plan almost nothing. I would know roughly what the scam was and work my way along from there, but the last couple of books have been a lot more planned just simply because of my domestic situation. I’ve had a few delays in writing them, or I’ve had more time to consider how they were going to be put together. The new book, for reasons that will be obvious, I had to be very intricate. I had to know from the start how it was gonna end and what was really going on, but nonetheless there was a lot of scope in the middle for things where I could really let my imagination run riot. And I did! [laughs] That’s why I enjoyed it so much. I wanted to start with a bang and take the reader in really quickly into some action rather than wait for the story. I thought, have the bank robbery and then move on. The bank robbery ended up taking up just slightly under half the novel, because it just becomes more and more bizarre and more outrageous.
How did you get started? Was it just sheer persistence that got you there, or contacts?
It was sheer perseverance and a determination that that was what I wanted to do. I was young and... stupid, basically [laughs] and I didn’t really know an awful lot about what I was doing. I suppose I had enough... I wouldn’t call it wisdom... awareness to know that initially I wasn’t getting published because I wasn’t good enough, rather than to think, I’ve channelled myself into this novel and how dare they not publish it? I realised with each novel that I was getting better. Equally, while I was getting better I was becoming more aware of what was required, and therefore how far away I was from it, you know? When I wrote Quite Ugly it was a complete change of tone and it was far more comfortable in terms of the style and I realised that I had something that was very different and was more me, I suppose. It wasn’t about contacts. I got a contact. A guy I was working with had a cousin who was an agent, and also he knew someone at Canongate as well. At that time I had two novels for them to show – one of them was the one that ended up a screenplay, and the other was Quite Ugly – and the agent got Quite Ugly and Cannongate got The Sin Garden, as it was called. They quite liked it but thought it wasn’t really gonna fly. The agent saw Quite Ugly and had three publishers bidding for it within the fortnight. It was more a question of perseverance and learning the trade, to a certain extent.
What would you say to someone who is trying to get started in writing?
Stubborn perseverance. That’s what worked for me. Be honest with yourself in terms of what you’re writing. Is what you’re writing really what you want to write, or what you think a publisher wants to read, because that was the mistake I was making for a long time. Crucially, the honesty to ask yourself whether what you’re doing is any good. Be prepared to improve or even have the patience to realise that it might take years to improve.
