RECOMMENDED BY THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE ACADEMY (February 2017)“Occasionally – no, make that once in a blue moon – a book comes along that is so mesmerising and thought provoking that one fears that a review, however enthusiastic, may not do it justice. This is one such book. The quirks of fate, the misplaced word and the unfortunate coincidences that can shape lives, all are described with candour and a sense of compassion. These human twists are woven into heart-breaking descriptions of an England long since disappeared. The sense of loss that hovers over the story is almost palpable. There are no happy endings in this tale, but if you love the English novel and admire fine writing, then put this at the top of your reading list.”David Prestidge (Crime Fiction Lovers website)Fresh Blood Questionnaire (courtesy of Chris Simmons of Crime Squad)1) You’ve come late to the crime fiction world haven’t you?Yes, as a writer I should have got my head down and been published some 40 years ago but I have been immersed in the crime fiction genre for all of those years, first in publishing and then as a specialist crime fiction bookseller, Post Mortem Books.2) What was it that inspired you to write a crime novel now?I had been handling and selling crime fiction ever since Macmillan published their new crime list in 1970 followed by a long stint with Victor Gollancz’s long established “yellow perils”. In 1979 I began buying and selling secondhand books, specialising in crime and in 1984 I became a full-time bookseller with a good mailing list of customers who began to buy new titles as they were published - if I could get them signed. Thus began the core of my business with authors signing thousands and thousands of copies over the years. Dick Francis, Ruth Rendell, P.D.James, Paul Doherty, Reg Hill, Peter Lovesey, Caroline Graham, Minette Walters, Colin Dexter and many, many, others all allowed me into their homes with box loads of new titles for them to sign. This kept me busy for nearly 30 years and it was only when I stopped selling new titles that I suddenly realised that perhaps I, too, could write a crime novel. I had a good idea and I just needed the impetus to get on and do it.3) You did a Masters Degree in Creative Writing at Sussex University. Some are critical of these courses. What is your opinion?I’d already done an English degree at the same university as a 50 year old mature student and had thoroughly enjoyed the experience. When I saw the Masters in Creative Writing advertised some 10 years later I knew that if I was going to write at all I was going to need some kind of carrot and stick device to actually make me get down and do it. For me, it really worked as I had to produce a 15,000 piece of work - the central part of the published novel as it turned out - and this was critically assessed by not only my tutors but also by my fellow students. The stick was the deadline and the carrot was the critical praise received after the work was completed. It worked for me as I had a definite goal in view but I saw people there who were doing the course primarily as a pastime occupation and although that particular year we all gained our degrees only two of us have gone on to be published authors.4) Your crime novel, ‘A Coin for the Hangman’ is unusual in that there is no ‘reveal’ of the perpetrator of the murder at the conclusion. Was this a deliberate ploy?I have always loved the work of Roy Vickers who, in his masterly ‘Department of Dead Ends’ stories, reveals the culprit in the first line as did Francis Iles in ‘Malice Aforethought’. Conversely, Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse novels played cat and mouse with the reader but always whipped the cloth away in the last pages to reveal the real culprit. I wanted to combine those two ends of the genre - and then turn both on their heads so that the reader who had been first led one way and then another is abandoned at the end to try and work out for themselves just who might have done it. It was the concept of author as being unreliable - one of the more fascinating concepts that we worked on at the degree course - that captured my imagination.5) Is this concept of the unreliable narrator why you included yourself in the story?Quite. Here is an author - the fellow with his name on the outside of the book - appearing as a character in the book, within the text. Just who is telling the story? The author? Or the author as a character? He’s a bookseller in real life and he’s telling us about this book collection and the story behind one of those books he finds in an estate sale. What’s true? Is this story real? In the afterword I explain that before the internet I could have passed the ‘novel’ off as a true crime story because I had used real people and real towns and events as the backdrop. It would have taken a determined researcher to uncover that all the characters - bar two - were fictitious. These days it just takes a couple of clicks to find all the information you want. Even so I still had readers who asked me if the story was actually ‘true’ - a perfect accolade for the unreliable narrator. Every author of fiction is a liar - it goes with the territory. I just took the additional step of showing to the reader that not only was I, the author, a liar but so was the character with my name a liar and that the author of Henry’s Diary - the kernel of the book - may well be a liar too. If we are all liars just who can you trust? It’s left to the reader to try and solve the puzzle at the end because the reader will be the one most likely to come up with the right answer. Or not. As we will see in the sequel.6) You are writing a sequel?Yes. It is tentatively entitled: "The Butcher Began to Kill the Ox". The title comes from a traditional rhyme which starts "The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope, The Rope Began to Hang the Butcher..." Readers of crime fiction may well recognize the two first novels by Cornelius Grafton (Sue Grafton's father) in those titles. I was in correspondence with Cornelius shortly before he died, writing that even though the books had been written long ago - some 40 years before in the 1940's- I wanted him to know that I had thoroughly enjoyed them in the 1980's. He wrote back a letter which I still hold and cherish to the effect that he thought his books had long been forgotten and that it had been a real boost to hear that a new reader had come across them. The title of my sequel is a tip of the hat to Cornelius - as well as fitting in perfectly with the plot of the sequel.7) There are a number of allusions to other writers in the novel. Was this deliberate?Yes. The hero - if he can be called that - Henry, is a young man with a voracious appetite for books and he reads many crime novels of the period - Agatha Christie and Freeman Wills Crofts for example. But he would also have been a reader of other, more literary material, novels, poetry and philosophical works that were around at this time in the early 1950’s. While we know for sure that he reads crime fiction and such authors as H.G.Wells, the other authors are hidden not only within the text of the diary he keeps in the condemned cell but also in the main body of the novel. One reader, much to my satisfaction, spotted an allusion to the opening of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (reconfigured in Daffin's discovery of the lipsticks in the box) but missed the passing reference to the same author’s ‘Finnegan’s Wake’. Thomas Traherne, John Donne, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Guy Chapman (author of ‘A Passionate Prodigality’, a first world war memoir), Wilfred Owen, Keith Douglas (a second world war poet) Daphne Du Maurier (‘Rebecca’ as a book and as a film), Dante, Bemelmans, Jacques Brel (the renowned chanteur), etc etc - they’re all in there hiding, waiting to be discovered by the enquiring reader. Their words and phrases are buried in the text but provide an important insight to the mind of Henry Eastman who is - or more accurately - becomes an ‘Outsider’.8) People have mentioned the switching of scenes and times backwards and forwards. Is this a difficult trick to pull off?You have to be careful not to lose the reader in the various switches between real time and that of memory but once the device is recognized it shouldn’t be a problem. I was interested in the experience of the characters in the extreme situations that some of them found themselves in during the Second World War and the effect it had on their present day personae. I have two of my characters be part of the relieving army at Belsen-Bergen and there can be little doubt that the horror of that experience had a devastating effect on their subsequent lives. When they and the rest of the combatants return home after demob there was a huge disconnect between what they had experienced away from home and the world they came back to. Similarly, the women left on the Home Front had experienced loneliness and stress that did not necessarily disappear when the men folk returned. Into this post war Britain I place my five main characters all struggling to come to terms with a world that has changed but their memories and war experiences are never far away from the surface.9) You have mentioned that there are two leitmotifs within the book. What are they?Wagner’s Ring Cycle uses leitmotifs - musical fingerprints if you like - to highlight the appearance of characters or their involvement in the development of the story. The first is railroads The story proper begins at a Bavarian railroad station and it ends on the tracks by a small Wiltshire railroad halt. In between we will encounter trains both physically and as depicted in books and films (‘Brief Encounter’ and ‘The Lady Vanishes’). A traveller peers out of the train window at passing landscapes and can suddenly spot something odd and unusual - and then its gone. The imagination, however, is stimulated and whirrs on long after the image has disappeared.Second are the birds. They appear at moments of crisis and of memory recall and the eagle-eyed reader will spot them in people’s names, on the side of industrial chimneys and in children’s books. They are harbingers of doom and their very presence wraps the reader in suffocating wings.Read more about this authorRead less about this author