Alan Johnson is a former MP for Kingston Upon Hull West and Hessle. His memoirs have won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Specsavers National Book Awards "Autobiography of the Year”. The titles of his four memoirs all come from the titles of songs that the Beatles have either written or performed.
When I once told a book festival audience that I wanted to write fiction some wag responded by suggesting I write my Party’s next election manifesto. I was still an MP and thick-skinned enough to withstand the gentle humour of someone who’d paid good money to hear me talk about my four volumes of memoir.
The desire I’d expressed was genuine. Apart from the fact that I’d practically exhausted all the available material, I was sick of writing about myself. My memoirs had done well but I didn’t feel entitled to consider myself a proper author until I’d done the really difficult bit; developing plot and character.
I was already enamoured with the actual process of writing. Politics doesn’t involve much in the way of creativity and it’s practitioners rarely have the luxury of seeing an idea through to fruition. Former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, when asked by a journalist to identify the greatest threat to his administration, famously answered “events dear boy, events”.
I was always buffeted by events as a politician and to an even greater extent as a trade union leader before that, which is why I so valued the almost complete control that writing gave me. I say “almost complete” because, although I was solely responsible for the way I told my story, the story itself was preordained. I could describe the characters but not invent them; follow the plot but not create it. Writing fiction is much harder but infinitely more satisfying. Suddenly I was the dictator I’d so often wished I was in my previous life (although I’d have been a benign one - obviously).
So, I wanted to write fiction but why crime fiction? I’ve devoured a lot of mysteries, particularly in my formative years. It began with a battered paperback copy of a Georgette Heyer detective story that somehow found its way into my bedroom. It wasn’t very good. Heyer’s forte was, of course, the Regency novel but the book was good enough to encourage me to further explore the genre.
Before long I was taking my precious collection of ‘Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly’ magazines to the Popular Book Shop in Shepherds Bush to swap them for a bagful of paperbacks by inter-alia Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Ngaio Marsh, Leslie Charteris and Margery Allingham.
By the time the Beatles released their twelfth single in June 1966 I really did “wanna be a Paperback Writer” (but only if I failed in my bid to be a rock star). I was a sixteen years old shelf stacker at Tesco having left school the year before. In a way school stayed with me because my brilliant English teacher, Mr Carlen had given all his pupils a list of 40 books they should read. The actual list hasn’t survived but I remember Bleak House (with the wonderful Inspector Bucket) being on it along with Rogue Male and The Moonstone. Dickens, Geoffrey Household and Wilkie Collins wrote thrillers that seemed to escape narrow categorisation. They were just good books.
It wasn’t until about five years ago that I read my first Maigret, ‘Inquest on Bouvet’, a slim, green Penguin Crime paperback which could easily have been in that Popular Book Shop selection. Published in 1963 with the price (2’6 in old money) printed on the cover, I picked it up in another second hand bookshop whilst on holiday. Like almost all Maigret books it’s more novella than novel running to just 152 pages. I read it on the beach in one day and I’ve read about five Maigret’s a year since. All 75 are newly available, reprinted and retranslated, in a wonderful initiative by Penguin/Random House. It is Georges Simenon’s creation, rather than Conan-Doyle’s that I consider to be the greatest of all fictional detectives.
I hope ‘The Late Train to Gipsy Hill’ carries at least a modicum of what I learnt from so many great crime novels (although I also hope it’s not derivative of any). I’m not hoping for the Nobel Prize that Simenon so bitterly resented failing to win. I just wanted to write a book that is as pleasurable for it’s purchasers to read as it was for me to write.’
The Late Train to Gipsy Hill by Alan Johnson is published in hardback by Wildfire Books on 2nd September 2021
Gary Nelson has a routine for the commute to his rather dull job in the city. Each day, he watches transfixed as a beautiful woman on the train applies her make up in a ritual he now knows by heart. He's never dared to strike up a conversation . . . but maybe one day. Then one evening, on the late train to Gipsy Hill, the woman who has beguiled him for so long, invites him to take the empty seat beside her. Fiddling with her mascara, she holds up her mirror and Gary reads the words 'HELP ME' scrawled in sticky black letters on the glass. From that moment, Gary's life is turned on its head. He finds himself on the run from the Russian mafia, the FSB and even the Metropolitan Police - all because of what because this mysterious young woman may have witnessed. In the race to find out the truth, Gary discovers that there is a lot more to her than meets the eye...
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