Spooks, spies and private eyes. Why I chose to write about the secret world by Caroline Carver

As a child, I’d pretend I was a spy.  I dreamed of having a powerful secret that nobody else knew about, that would help save my family and eventually save the world.  Even then I knew that secrets were incredibly powerful and it’s that word “secret” that drew me to write about the spying world.

It’s not just keeping secrets or giving them away, selling them or trading, it’s the danger it can put you or someone else in.  The stakes in the spying game are huge, because the consequences if you get caught ranges from being fired to being executed.  It’s a terrifying place.

Being a very open, straight-talking person, I know I’d struggle being a spy myself.  I share too much, for a start.  Yes, I’m imaginative, curious and open-minded (all good traits for an author) but to be honest, I’m the Labrador who bounces in the room, wagging their tail.  Spies are the quiet Spaniel in the corner, lying there with one eye open, ready to be called upon at any time, but generally unobserved.

Most people will never know when they’ve met a spy.  They could be chatting to a member of the SIS in their local deli, at a party, on the train, oblivious that this apparently “normal” individual leads a double life and it’s this duplicity that I find fascinating.  How to be genuine, flexible and confident under pressure.  How to keep your integrity, which is probably one of the most important of all attributes needed.  Lives will be at stake, and those trusted with our nation’s secrets must be above reproach.  If my character is struggling in this area it can create a fantastic conflict within the book.

Even more importantly, the officers and their agents have to keep safe.  I’m very careful about the information I impart on the page, whether it’s a new weapon being developed by QinetiQ or SIS trade craft.  Careless talk costs lives.  Any knowledge I pick up from my sources I get checked before publication to make sure I’m not giving anything vital away.

Spies are the unsung heroes in our wars.  They risk their lives for their beliefs, for what they think is right.  Their handlers weep if they get caught.  The emotions are as high as the risks.  A spy may be a heroic myth, an urban legend, but I’m addicted to them.  That’s the good ones I’m referring to, of course.  The good spooks.

I was brought up on a diet of Eric Ambler, Le Carré, Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, so I guess it’s not surprising all this led me to create Dan Forrester, ex-MI5 officer, who now works for a private firm that gets hired to do the jobs that governments don’t want to give their spies.  He’s a larger than life character with extraordinary skills that help him get out of some really dangerous situations.  He’s taciturn and quietly reserved, nothing like me, let alone anyone I know, which is why I rather like him.

Know Me Now by C J Carver Published by Bonnier Zaffre

A murder. A conspiracy. Digging up the past can be deadly. . . A thirteen-year-old boy commits suicide. A sixty-five-year old man dies of a heart attack. Dan Forrester, ex-MI5 agent, is connected to them both. And when he discovers that his godson and his father have been murdered, he teams up with his old friend, DC Lucy Davies, to find answers.  But as the pair investigate, they unravel a dark and violent mystery stretching decades into the past and uncover a terrible secret. A secret someone will do anything to keep buried. 

Technique & Talent: converting life into a powerful reading experience by C J Carver

When I first started writing, I was advised to “write what you know.”  I remember being a bit baffled at the time, thinking, what do they mean?  What do I know?  I wasn’t a lawyer like John Grisham, able to write spectacular legal thrillers.  I wasn’t a crime reporter like John Connelly or a forensic scientist like Kathy Reichs.

My career covered roles such as sales rep, telesales and, more excitingly, working in the complaints department of KFC.  Hmmm, I thought.  How can I translate life into something people would want to read?

I wanted to set my first book Blood Junction in Australia but even though I’d lived there for ten years, I didn’t dare make my protagonist Australian.  The Aussies can smell BS a mile away, so I made my character India Kane English, just like me.  She looks at Australia askance, just like me.  She hates their xenophobia, their misogyny, but loves their generous spirit and laid-back attitude to life – just like me.

That said, India isn’t like me AT ALL.  She’s smarter, brighter and far braver than I am. With nine thrillers under my belt, I can now see how my personal experiences inform my writing, because they make up who I am, and they determine what I write.  Specifically, with regard to the Dan Forrester series, I drew on my own experience as a long-distance rally driver to give Dan a job teaching high-performance driving.

As writer’s we have to dig deep to produce a work that pulls at a reader’s emotions. We have to put ourselves into our character’s shoes and really feel what they’re feeling, from their point of view.  I quite literally picture myself as Dan Forrester, for example, when he’s sitting in his car and looking at the rain dribbling down his windows, and my stomach drops as his does when he hears his wife has been kidnapped.

I call on a multitude of life experiences in my writing, from my childhood on a dairy farm to sibling rivalry with my brother.  Everything goes into my author’s pot.  Including the time when I was sent away to boarding school at eight years old.  I was badly bullied and ended up running away.  It was a pretty horrible experience but as a writer, I can call upon a myriad of aspects of that period and put them into my novels – where the bullies always get their just desserts!

Inspiration for me invariably comes from real life.  Like one Tuesday morning, just after dawn, when I heard two men climb through the window of my basement flat and start stripping the place.  My phone was in another room so I couldn’t call for help.  I tiptoed back to my bedroom, pulled my duvet over my head – sweating, heart hammering – and pretended to be asleep until they left.

This horrifying experience made me explore the nature of fear and my response to it, and became the basis for The Honest Assassin, where Jay McCaulay is terrified for her life when she is hunted by a professional assassin.  Where I sweated buckets listening to those two men tearing up my flat, Jay sweats even more.

All my novels contain personal, real-life incidents and emotions.  Which is probably why I’m usually wrung out at the end of a writing day!

Tell Me a Lie by C J Carver

A family in England is massacred, the father left holding the shotgun.  PC Lucy Davies is convinced he's innocent.  A sleeper agent in Moscow requests an urgent meeting with Dan Forrester, referencing their shared past. His amnesia means he has no idea who he can trust. An aging oligarch in Siberia gathers his henchmen to discuss an English accountant.  It's Dan's wife.

Published by Zaffre, 12th January 2017, paperback, £7.99.  eBook published 12th January, £4.99

@C_J_Carver

Sam Carver - Blowing up bankers: however did I think of that?

Today’s guest blogger is Tom Cain the pseudonym for an award-winning journalist, with 25 years experience working for Fleet Street newspapers, as well as major magazines in Britain and the US. Carver is the fifth book in the series to feature Samuel Carver as he takes on financial terrorism.

The story that became my latest book Carver began with a simple thought. A modern day Auric Goldfinger, who wanted to become insanely rich and screw the system while he was at it wouldn’t go to all the trouble of nicking the gold from Fort Knox. Why waste time and effort trying to kill the guards, break into the vault, remove and transport all the bullion and then flog it on the black market? These days it’s much easier to steal gigantic amounts of money just sitting at a computer terminal.

I had this thought at a time when the bankers of London and New York were doing precisely that. The Eighties, Nineties and Noughties were decades in which grossly overpaid, shamelessly greedy, utterly unprincipled men in suits carried out a series of gigantic frauds whose sole purpose was to generate false profits from which they could derive undeserved bonuses. The simple truth is that in recent years governments have spent far too much money bailing out banks. And not nearly enough jailing bankers.
Bernie Madoff was the most blatant billion-dollar criminal, if only because his particular fraud was an old-fashioned Ponzi Scheme – using new investors’ money to pay bogus returns on previous investors’ deposits – and he didn’t have the wit to try anything more modern.

Others weren’t so dumb. They created financial derivatives - notably those based on ‘sub-prime’ mortgages taken out by people who couldn’t afford the repayments, buying properties that weren’t worth the sale-price – that were patently unsound, and were recognized as such by the few punters brave enough to bet against them. Then they sold them to idiots (the fact that the fraudsters who created these products and the idiots who bought the belonged to precisely the same banks was crucial: they were all making money at both ends of the deal). Then they treated these sham transactions as if they represented genuine creations of added value, accounted for them as such, and paid themselves gigantic bonuses based on entirely imaginary turnover and profits.

These bonuses represented the only actual cash anywhere in the process … apart, of course, from the huge amounts of money extracted from ordinary taxpayers whose future prosperity was raped to pay the bills run up by these boardroom and trading-desk criminals. There has been a massive transfer of wealth from the poor and middle-class to the very richest members of society, a transfer that has seen a chasm open up between the decreasing living standards of the great majority and the pampered privilege of the tiny, pseudo-meritocracy of bankers, commercial lawyers, senior corporate executives and top-ranking State employees. And you don’t have to be left-wing to feel that this is an outrage. When a multi-billionaire like Warren Buffet says that it’s wrong that he should be the least-taxed employee in his company, then even the doughtiest of capitalists has to admit that something’s going badly wrong.

I saw this coming a fair way off. Unfortunately I wasn’t nearly smart enough to profit from my insight. I didn’t have the first idea about the ways in which I could have placed bets on the inevitable collapse of the whole rotten house of cards. And even if I had known, I wouldn’t have had the guts to put down my stake (assuming I had the spare cash to fund it, which I didn’t, not being a banker). Instead, I did the one thing I know how to do. I wondered how to make a story out of this appalling whole situation.

This was back in late 2006 and early 2007. I was rushing to finish my first Sam Carver book, The Accident Man, and coming to terms with the requirement to come up with a sequel. So as I was finishing one story I was trying to decide what to do for the next one. And because I was obsessed by this gigantic con-trick I could see being played out all around me, I thought that maybe I could place Carver in the middle of it somehow.

But how? Carver is an old-world kind of hero. What he does is physical. He actually kills actual bad guys with actual weapons. He uses fists, guns, wrenches, poisons, and slabs of plastic explosives. He doesn’t just sit at a terminal, clicking the keys. So he’s like a metal-bashing factory worker in a virtual, digital, online world.

Plus, there weren’t too many potential readers who shared my weird obsession. In 2007, there wasn’t a lot of interest in sub-prime mortgages, short-selling or shady financial derivatives. Then 2008 came along, Lehman Brothers collapsed, and the whole global banking system went tits-up and suddenly there was a lot more interest.

But I still didn’t have a story. And to be honest, I’m not quite sure precisely how I found one. Normally I can point to ‘Eureka!’ moments when I see a picture in my head and know I’ve got the key moment in a book; or when I encounter the person who inspires a crucial character. But in the case of Carver, it was much more amorphous. There was a story in Vanity Fair about the way in which Lehman Brothers demanded total devotion not just from their executives, but also the executives’ families. There were conversations with friends who knew about how the City really worked. Having had a grossly misshapen, malevolent villain in my previous book, Dictator, there was a sense that I wanted one this time who was actually likeable, a an who might seduce readers into seeing things from his point-of-view, just as he seduces the fictional characters around him.

From this came the character of Malachi Zorn, a financial genius who hates the system that has made him rich, because (for reasons revealed in the book) it also made him an orphan. He wants revenge on the institutions that destroyed his family and he really doesn’t care who else has to suffer n order to help him get it. Naturally, the specific form of revenge he seeks is financial: he knows that there is no blow as painful to a rich man as one that hits him in the wallet. So far, so good … even I found myself rooting for Zorn at this point. But then he started behaving very badly. People started dying in large numbers and it was time for Sam Carver to sort him out. But do the financiers who populate Carver get away entirely unscathed? Ah, well, you’ll have to read it to find that out …

David Hewson and The Killing

Shots Ezine were delighted to receive this wonderful news, following the hotly contested world rights acquisition last week for the literary publishing rights of the BAFTA-winning Danish crime TV series, THE KILLING, Pan Macmillan is delighted to announce that crime writer, David Hewson, will be the author to novelise the series.

Highly respected, and much admired for his popular Rome-based Nic Costa detective series, and three other thrillers set in Seville, Venice and the USA, Hewson’s particular skill for female characters and passion for writing and researching novels set in a foreign country make him perfect for translating THE KILLING to the page.

David Hewson says:

“It’s a great honour to be asked to turn the best crime series on TV – and the fascinating character of Sarah Lund – into books, alongside my own novels set in Italy. The richness, innovation and complexity of THE KILLING have captured the imaginations of TV viewers around the world. I’m flattered to know that it’s going to be my task to bring this acclaimed classic series to the printed page. Rome and Copenhagen are very different places, but both wonderful stages for compelling crime fiction. I can’t wait to start work with my first trip to Denmark in a few weeks.”

Acquiring editor, Trisha Jackson, says:

“We believe that David is the perfect author for this project. Apart from being a wonderful writer, his particular strengths lie in atmosphere, sense of place and female characters. And we trust him implicitly to create a brilliant thriller from this wonderful series.”

Pan Macmillan plan to publish the novelisation of series one in the autumn of 2012.

David Hewson is the bestselling author of more than sixteen books published in more than twenty languages. His popular Costa contemporary crime series is now in development for a series of TV movies in Rome. His latest novel, The Fallen Angel, was published by Pan Macmillan in February this year.

Incidentally talking of Danish Crime Thrillers, we’d strongly recommend Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Mercy from Penguin, out currently in the UK and due for release in the US this August as ‘The Keeper of Lost Causes’.

Photo © 2007 Ali Karim taken at the Theakstons Harrogate Crime Writing Festival 2007 “David Hewson and Caroline C.J. Carver