Author interview - Mark Billingham, talking about crime writing, Tom Thorne, life at 50 and of course his latest book, The Dying Hours

R:  Hi Mark, welcome to the Crime Warp.  It’s great to see you here just as your new book The Dying Hours is hitting the bookshops.  But you’re not just a crime writer are you?

MB:  Thanks for having me. I suppose I’ve dabbled in a few other areas – all part of a concerted effort to avoid a proper job. I tried acting and later became a stand-up which I did for twenty years or so. I’ve always written though – from stories at school to TV scripts later one – so writing books for a living feels like what I should have been doing all along. Crime writing is a far nicer world than comedy anyway. If you want to experience a world of sick and twisted minds and murderous ideas, you should hang out with comedians for a while.

R:  I’ll pass on that thanks!  I did read somewhere that you thought comedy and crime writing have a similar structure and approach.  Could you explain that a bit more?

MB:  Well it’s all about when you reveal information. A joke relies on timing and crime novels are structured in the same way. The moment of that ’reveal’ is crucial. Crime fiction is full of punchlines – they’re just dark ones, that’s all. I do firmly believe that writing a novel is a performance of sorts, so my years as a performer have served me pretty well, I think.

R:  Your big breakthrough came in 2001 with Sleepyhead.  Was the success of this novel what made you concentrate on crime writing?

MB:  It certainly helps if your first book does well. The fact is that in a harsh publishing climate, if one of your first couple of books does not do well, you’re likely to get dropped. I was hugely lucky in that Sleepyhead was published really well and had some very positive reviews. So, I was set from then on, I think. I knew straight away that crime writing was what I wanted to do. It’s always been what I’ve enjoyed reading and I just try to write the kind of books I like to read.

R:  Did you write Sleepyhead knowing that there would be more Thorne books?

MB:  Well I HOPED there would be. I certainly wanted to write a series and, at that time, it was what publishers were looking for. I enjoy seeing a cast of characters grow and develop over a number of books. It gives you a lot of scope. There are drawbacks too, of course; challenges that are unique to those of us who write series…

R:  You’ve talked about wanting Thorne to be a character who would grow and be unpredictable – have you managed to keep to that principle and how?

MB:  This is one of the strengths of a series, I think. I made the decision early on that there would be no plan for Thorne, no dossier that told me everything about him. So, book by book, the reader knows every bit as much about him as I do. I have managed to stick to that, by and large, though it sometimes gets me into trouble. Yes, I hope it has meant that Thorne remains unpredictable but it also means I forget crucial stuff about him. Luckily, readers usually put me straight.

R:  Is Thorne’s unpredictability a mirror of you as a person?  Having hit 50, do you feel Thorne is changing or behaving in the same way as you are?

MB:  I am horribly dull and predictable…thank God. Thorne is certainly nothing like me in any of the ways that really matter. Beyond the taste in music and hopeless devotion to a frustrating football team, we’ve not got a great deal in common. 

R:  You don’t describe Thorne’s physical characteristics in detail, leaving that to the reader’s imagination.  Is that the reason why Thorne is always in the shadows on the book covers?

MB:  I’ve never wanted to do the reader’s job for them. They will each have their own picture of Thorne which is why we don’t want to fix that in terms of what appears on the jackets. That said, many readers now see David Morrissey as Thorne when they read which is understandable considering how great he was in the TV adaptations.

R:  You’ve also written standalone books. Why did you do these rather than just carrying on with more of Thorne?

MB:  Because it’s important to step out of your comfort zone every so often. It’s easy for a series to become stale; for writers to rehash previous books and churn out stuff that is formulaic. One of the ways I try to avoid that is by stepping away for it for a while and doing something else. That way, you return to your series fired up and re-energised. That’s the theory anyway, but it’s worked for me so far. I hugely enjoyed writing my standalones and firmly intend to keep doing them

R:  I quite liked Rush of Blood, particularly the way the characters developed and seeing their personal flaws being exposed little by little.  Did you have a clear plan for each character and a clear storyline or did it all develop much more organically?

MB:  I don’t really plan in too much detail, but I’m also wary about talking about characters developing ‘organically’. It makes it sound a bit mystical for my liking. I can’t stand writers who talk about being taken over by their characters or any of that crap. I’m the one doing the typing. They do what I tell them to do. So, there was no clear storyline, but I did think a lot about the relationships before I began.

R:  I also liked the way you used emails as a narrative form.  Was this a bit of experimentation on your part?

MB:  Well it’s a form we’re all familiar with, isn’t it? The way someone writes an email tells you a lot about them, I think. Do they use smiley face emoticons? If so, they’re almost certainly not to be trusted…

R:  Do you think you could write a crime novel just using e-mails or is that confined to comedy books like “e”?

MB:  I think that would be a bit gimmicky and I think crime readers demand a bit more than that.

R:  That’s a very honest answer.  Can we talk about settings? You’ve always stuck with London as a setting.  Do you think that you could have a change of scene at some point?

MB:  London is a perfect city to set a crime novel in. There are shadows. There is a whole heap of stuff bubbling away beneath the glitzy, tourist-friendly surface. But I’ve also set stuff in Florida (Rush Of Blood) and in Spain (From The Dead) and in fact, the Thorne novel I’m working on right now does not take place in London at all.

R:  I’ve read books based in places like Hull and Whitby, which seem to work well as locations.  Do you think that a good novelist can make any location work?

MB:  Absolutely. You just choose the settings that suit your characters and that suit you as a writer. I could not set stuff in rural locations. I’m sure there’s all manner of beastly stuff happening in the countryside but I’m just not interested. I’m a city boy, through and through and I think cities are WAY more interesting and give me a lot more scope.

R:  So, back to Thorne and your latest book, The Dying Hours, which sees Thorne busted down to uniform.  Can you tell us more about the new book?

MB:  Well Thorne got into a little bit of trouble as a result of what happened at the end of Good As Dead, and now finds himself not only busted down to uniform (albeit still as an Inspector) but working South of the river which is a HUGE issue for him! He thinks there is something deeply fishy about a spate of suicides, but nobody listens to him any more, so he is forced to investigate on his own – or with a little help from some of his friends.

R:  What was the “lightbulb moment” that made you choose this theme for the book’s crime?

MB:  I was out on an overnight shift with two female uniformed officers (who as ‘Christine’ and ‘Nina’ are now characters in the book) who said that they would love to see Thorne back in uniform. I had no idea how to do that, but they told me how it might happen. So, sitting in a grotty Chinese takeaway in Croydon, at three o’clock in the morning, thanks to two amazing police officers, I had the plan for the next book. All it cost me was a bag of prawn crackers…

R:  Can you talk about Thorne and his personal relationships in this book – is this part of his unpredictability or middle agedness?

MB:  He has settled down with Helen Weeks (from Good As Dead) who has an eighteen month old son. The personal relationships have become a far more important part of the books than they used to be. I think as I get older I enjoy writing that stuff more than the crash-bang-wallop scenes. Readers are funny about it. They get in touch asking me to make Thorne a bit happier, then, if I do give him a hint of a settled and contented domestic situation, they demand that I take it away from him again. Right now though, life for Thorne on the home front is pretty good. Well, up to a point…

R:  Finally, can you tell us what else you’re working on at the moment – another Thorne? Another standalone? Something else perhaps?

MB:  As I’ve already said, it’s another Thorne novel. There is a major cliff-hanger (sorry) at the end of the Dying Hours and the new book resolves that. I’m about half way through and there’s no title yet, but I’m really pleased with it. It’s a twisted road trip, with Thorne having to travel to a VERY strange location in the company of the nastiest villain he has ever put away; a character I’ve written about twice before. OK, that’s enough clues, I think…

R:  Thanks Mark.   We appreciate you coming to meet us on the Crime Warp and all our best for the success of the new book.

MB:  Thank you, and long may you stay warped.

PS - A review of The Dying Hours is also on this blog - happy reading

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