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| @Nick Lockett |
It’s on the first page of Moby Dick,
possibly in the first paragraph — Ishmael saying how he has circumambulated the
‘Isle of the Manhattoes’ and once
more found himself nurturing a yen to go to sea.
I get that a lot. As I can’t swim, it’s
always been worth resisting the impulse. Most of the time I wouldn’t even set
foot in a paddling pool. But what I identified with was Ishmael’s desire to
kick the dust off his shoes and move and in moving to reject the where, what
and who. Hit me like a sack of spuds
dropped from the loft in 1983. I was getting nowhere … Ph.D stalled,
relationship collapsed, health dodgy, work all but extinct, country four years
in the grip of a madwoman from Grantham.
I moved to Spain. Tended orange groves. Painted villas. Lived in the shadow of the Rock. Startled the locals with the whiteness of my skin. 'Yes, the sun does shine in England, just not, when I'm around'.
I moved to Spain. Tended orange groves. Painted villas. Lived in the shadow of the Rock. Startled the locals with the whiteness of my skin. 'Yes, the sun does shine in England, just not, when I'm around'.
I was writing nothing — I saw myself as
a playwright/screenwriter in those days, but after about a dozen none had been
staged or filmed, and I’d had but one commission which fizzled out without me
getting paid. I was reading, and, slow as I am at reading, within a month I’d
read everything I’d stuffed in the backpack. So I got on the bus to Fuengirola
where I had heard there was an English language bookshop, and when I found it I
soon realised that it was probably stocked with books tourists left on the
beach.
I bought Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith. Shook the sand from the pages. Cliché it may be but … I couldn’t put it
down. A wonderful central character in Arkady Renko, a rich setting in Moscow
under Brezhnev. It occurred to me, and I was right, that it would spawn a
sub-genre of cold war fiction set in Russia, focusing off the war onto life and
crime in Russia.
I decided my own approach had better be
more oblique. I got back to England to find it was 1984. The most anticipated year
in history — as though we’d been told the date of the second coming well in
advance. I wondered when London might ever have resembled Moscow, and the
answer I came up with was 1944. Not only was that winter as cold as Moscow, the
wartime regulations on just about everything had turned England, effectively,
into the benign version of a totalitarian state.
I wanted a traditional detective,
traditional in that he would be at Scotland Yard in the days
when it was on the Embankment, a stones throw from Big Ben, and coppers still drove Wolseleys.
Traditional in that he would be unarmed. And then I got fed up with tradition.
The stalled Ph.D was lame product of me having studied Russian language and
literature once upon a time … to make my copper of Russian descent wouldn’t be
difficult.
I ran it by my agent.
“A
screenplay with that plot? It’d cost the earth. It’s not a play it’s a novel.”
But I wasn’t a novelist. So I shelved
it. Got myself a job — the only time in my life when I’ve worked in an office
(dire) and been on salary (not as reassuring as you might think), and if anyone
is remotely interested my novella Bentinck’s Agent is a fairly accurate
depiction of two years as a London literary agent in the 1980s. Read and
despair.
I still needed a name for my hero.
I spent the next few years at Channel 4
– or as we used to call it Chanel No.4 — and if the book world was staid and
lazy, television was anarchic, chaotic and about a thousand times more fun. You
might die from lack of sleep, but that’s by the bye. You learnt to keep your
passport in your back pocket. One year I worked out I’d got on a plane every
ten days. No matter. During the 1988 C4 Russian Season I found myself propping
up a bar in Soho with the Moscow rock critic Artemy Troitsky … and at last I
had a name, Troitsky became Troy.
In what gaps there were I wrote a couple
of chapters. At some point in the early 1990’s I showed them to Ion Trewin at
Hodders.
“Marvellous
seventeenth chapter. Where are the preceding sixteen?”
I admitted I hadn’t written them. Yet. Television
had ruined me for linear narrative. I wrote the way I filmed. I wrote what was
in me head at the time and ‘edited’ it afterwards. I still do.
“Come
back when you have.”
I took him at his word. About thee years
later I dumped the finished Black Out (not a title I had chosen, I am indebted
to Ariana Franklin for that — in those days she read what I wrote ahead of
agent and publisher) on his desk. The desk was now at Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
He bought the book as standalone. I disappeared into the heat haze of
Mississippi for Chanel No.4. When I got back … things had changed. I must have
set the controls on the Tardis wrongly and materialised in a parallel universe.
I was one of the winners of WH Smith’s Fresh Talent … and a sequel was
anticipated, expected. But I wasn’t writing a bloody sequel.
Troy has now made eight appearances in
his own right, and two as cameos in my Wilderness books.
Do all series begin this way?
Friends and Traitors by John Lawton (Published by Grove Atlantic on 5 April 2018)
It is 1958. Chief Superintendent
Frederick Troy of Scotland Yard, newly promoted after good service during
Nikita Khrushchev's visit to Britain, is not looking forward to a Continental
trip with his older brother, Rod. Rod was too vain to celebrate being fifty so
instead takes his entire family on 'the Grand Tour' for his fifty-first
birthday: Paris, Siena, Florence, Vienna, Amsterdam. Restaurants, galleries and
concert halls. But Frederick Troy never gets to Amsterdam. After a concert in
Vienna he is approached by an old friend whom he has not seen for years - Guy
Burgess, a spy for the Soviets, who says something extraordinary: 'I want to
come home.' Troy dumps the problem on MI5 who send an agent to debrief Burgess
- but when the man is gunned down only yards from the embassy, the whole plan
unravels with alarming speed and Troy finds himself a suspect. As he fights to
prove his innocence, Troy discovers that Burgess is not the only ghost who has
returned to haunt him...
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