Backstory

  244

  Backstory

  Graham Hurley

  In memory

  of

  Bob Franklin

  1945 - 2012

  Look hard at a grain of sand and one day you’ll figure out

  the shape of the whole coastline.

  - James Lee Burke

  Introduction

  This is a book that sort of happened by accident. On speaking engagements and through my website I started meeting readers with a genuine interest in finding out a great deal more about Joe Faraday and his world. The books themselves, of course, are littered with clues but the nature of these questions hinted at something else, something extra: where did all this stuff come from? How come it feels so real, so accurate? And what kept you going from book to book once you’d started?

  In a way, this kind of curiosity was deeply flattering. It meant, at the very least, that the books were working. But the more I thought about those conversations, the more they aroused my own curiosity. Every book is a journey. A series of twelve can take you places you’ve never dreamed of. So why not write about that journey? If only to try and understand its real implications?

  And so began Backstory. As a born hoarder, I’d hung onto all my research notes. Just the act of re-reading these scribbled impressions – of people, of procedures, of active investigations – took me back to my first faltering steps into the sharp-elbowed world of crime fiction, and as I got deeper into the first chapter I began to enjoy myself. Not only that, but as the shape of the journey started to emerge, I realised something else: that I’d spent the last decade in the company of characters that had become both real and important. I owed these people not simply my living but something else I could only hope to capture, or even understand, by writing a book length account.

  Part of this discovery, of course, has to do with being a writer, working the rough clay of real life into what publishers love to call “page-turning drama”. Not for a moment would I minimise the difficulties of a challenge like this, and I hope that Backstory turns out to be a useful read for aspiring writers as well as committed fans. But the truth is that the Faraday books matter to me in personal ways I could never have suspected when I embarked on the journey and it’s only now that I’m beginning to understand why.

  People I respect tell me that novelists should never use their own work, consciously or otherwise, to resolve tangles and bewilderments in their own lives. Having completed Backstory, I can only say they’re wrong.

  One

  Yonks ago, when I was still in my twenties, I spotted an ad in Screen magazine. The ad had been placed by a company called Crawford Productions, in Australia, and they were looking for writers to join their long-running series, Homicide. At the time, I’d just spent a year or so making TV documentaries – one film every three weeks – and I fancied a break. I posted off some TV drama scripts I’d done, attended an interview in London, and got the job.

  By mutual agreement, the contract was for six months. Crawfords flew me out to Melbourne, found me an apartment, and assigned me a desk on their production floor. The salary was generous because umpteen people were waiting on your script but if you got to final draft a week or two early, you scored a handsome bonus. That was fine because I happen to work very fast but the real challenge was the so-called “super bonus”. This was a prize that awaited the scriptwriter who came up with a totally novel murder. After five hundred plus episodes, it was reckoned that Homicide had pretty much exhausted all the available options.

  And so I spent a very happy couple of months sitting on the tram into work trying to fathom how to kill the guy, or the woman, or the child across the aisle in a way that had so far eluded dozens of Homicide screen writers. This turned out to be a tougher assignment that you might expect but then I met a Kiwi my age who’d just returned from three years in the jungles of New Guinea, working as a patrol officer. We got drunk one night and he started telling me about the Sanguma Palm thorn.

  Despite industrial helpings of Guinness, I knew at once that this was the super bonus. It works like this. One tribe falls out with another. The feud centers on a particular guy. His enemies invite him to a feast, get him blind drunk on spirits distilled from wood bark or piri-piri fruit or whatever else they drink in New Guinea, and then – while he’s sleeping it off – they insert the needle-like thorn of the Sanguma Palm tree in that little triangle of softness at the base of the neck. The thorn is so thin it leaves no entry mark. Over the coming weeks, it works its way deeper and deeper into the chest cavity until it punctures the lung. Infection sets in. Nothing can be done. Days later, your enemy dies in agony. Perfect.

  Next morning, hung-over, I headed for Melbourne’s botanical gardens. From documentary-making, I knew already that nothing resists the determined researcher. I made friends with one of the gardeners who led me to a Sanguma Palm tree and lent me his ladder. The thorns, as promised, looked like the business end of black hypodermics. I broke one off, wrapped it in a page from my notebook, and headed back to work. Six weeks later, Upcountry went into production. The super bonus, sadly, turned out to be Oz street rumour.

  This, as it happens, was my first real encounter with crime fiction but it happened on the other side of the planet. As a writer on Homicide you stepped into a ready made cast of characters and dreamed up ways of keeping them busy enough to sustain the umpteen commercial breaks that punctuated every hour. It was a deeply pleasant introduction to Oz but it always felt like a fantasy. There were proper cops out there in the Melbourne ‘burbs but it never crossed my mind to try and meet any. Homicide went down really well nation-wide at prime time on a midweek night. Fans knew exactly what to expect. Why bother with the real thing?

  After my six months were up, I returned to making documentaries in the UK. Since I can remember I’d always wanted to be a writer, and had five mercifully unpublished manuscripts in my bottom drawer to prove it, but television is the sweetest of temptations and it didn’t take much to succumb. Then, a decade later, came another interlude. I found myself afloat on a converted Hull trawler in the middle of the Atlantic, trying to find the wreck of the Titanic. We did it in the end, and made a decent film as a result, but the assignment lasted weeks and weeks before we could get down to business and those long days of dragging a black and white camera across an empty seabed took me back to the typewriter.

  The result was a submission for a six-part TV drama series called Rules of Engagement. It was fun to write, and offered a rich contrast to the world of documentary-making, but the best news of all was a two-book contract from Pan Macmillan. The first of these tomes, naturally enough, was the novelisation of the TV series.

  More contracts followed. By the time I finally left TV, in 1991, I had four titles on the shelf, and just enough bookshop cred to try and turn novel-writing into a full-time occupation. In publishing-speak, these were “international thrillers”, big fat stand-alone paperbacks you might buy at an airport if you had a long flight ahead of you and nothing better to read. Each book offered a new cast of characters and a satisfyingly blank canvas. As a writer I could take these pretend people anywhere I chose. I set them tests by means of a plot and spent weeks at my PC wondering how they’d cope as the fictional pressures mounted. Some sank without trace. Others stayed afloat. Some even made it to the final page. It was control freakery gone mad and I loved it.

  After seven outings with Pan/Mac, I accompanied my editor – Simon Spanton – to Orion. They offered me a two-book contract which I happily accepted. Both these stories were voiced by female characters, a fictional liberty I much enjoyed, and Orion seemed happy enough with what they were getting. Then came a summons to London.


  Simon was at the lunch and so was Orion’s managing director, Malcolm Edwards. I was out of contract at this point, and was pitching for another two stand-alones. I’d already written 50,000 words of the first one. The working title was Fastnet, and both Simon and Malcolm had had plenty of time to read it.

  It takes time to get round to business at lunches like these. Finally, I asked them about Fastnet. This was a thriller spun around the yacht race from Cowes, to the Fastnet Rock (off southern Ireland), and thence back to Plymouth. The plot involved a murder, a savage storm, a capsize, and a complex investigation (roughly in that order). This time round, it wasn’t narrated by a woman.

  Malcolm answered the two key questions. Yes, he liked it. No, Orion wasn’t going to publish it. This, as you might imagine, was a bit of a blow. I’d always imagined that authors with a sizeable backlist could swap publishers with gay abandon. To date, I had eleven published titles to my name. Selling Fastnet elsewhere, therefore, shouldn’t have been a problem. Wrong. If Orion didn’t intend to publish the thing, any new suitor is going to want to know why. And it’s at this point that the difficult conversations would begin.

  Malcolm, though, hadn’t finished. Both Nocturne and Permissible Limits had achieved decent sales but he felt Orion could do better by re-positioning me in the marketplace. Lately, they’d built a very healthy sales record in something he described as “the fastest growing sector in commercial fiction”. With American authors like Michael Connolly and Harlen Coben, plus home-grown talent like Ian Rankin, Orion had become a regular presence in the Top Ten. My heart fell. Malcolm was talking crime fiction.

  I wanted to know exactly what he had in mind. A three-book contract, he said (normal contracts are two-book), set in Portsmouth, the city where Lin and I had been living for more than a decade. Pompey, as the locals call it, has few fans in the tight little world of London publishing but Malcolm – with some courage – had decided to try and turn this distaste to our mutual advantage. He spelled out the challenge. I was to invent a home-grown cop. I was to root him in the city I loved. I was to build at least three books around an ensemble of characters. And I was to try and deliver the kind of readership that had taken Rankin’s Inspector Rebus to the very top of UK crime fiction. No pressure.

  That afternoon, I sat on the train back to Pompey wondering what on earth I was going to do. Despite my adventures in Melbourne I didn’t much like crime fiction, and I certainly didn’t read it. The fridge, on the other hand, would empty very fast without a new contract and I had a limited appetite for going back to making TV documentaries, the only other job for which I was remotely qualified.

  A number of my ITV ex-colleagues were still in the game but the reports they brought back from the front line painted an ugly picture. Everything had been casualised. Documentary-making had become a business. The queues for face-time with the all-powerful commissioning editors extended around the block. The editors themselves were barely out of their teens. Production budgets had been slashed to the bone. Something called “Reality-TV” was the hot genre, an industry-wide codeword for cheap. In short, the race to the bottom had begun.

  Did I want any of this? I didn’t. Would they ever have me? Highly unlikely.

  Lin and I went to the pub that night. By now, I’d concluded that if we were to live with a fullish fridge, I had two choices. On the one hand I could descend on the library, borrow an armful of titles, and bury myself in other peoples’ crime fiction. This prospect filled me with gloom. Not only did I not want to read this stuff but if I did I’d probably end up writing crap pastiche, exactly what Malcolm Edwards didn’t want.

  The other option was more beguiling. As a documentary producer, I’d always loved the first stage in the production cycle: getting alongside people, winning their trust, finding out what makes them tick, exploring the kinds of lives they’d made for themselves. This, in essence, is exactly the business of the working novelist and over the past decade I liked to think that research for TV documentaries had taught me a thing or two about listening, and watching, and trying to imagine life as someone else. What if I spent some time with working detectives? Tried to figure out what made them tick? Tried to understand the world they’d made their own? Lin and I had a third pint and raised our glasses to Option Two. Game on.

  But how to open the door to the magic box marked “CID”? This was never going to be easy. The only sharp-end detectives we really knew were a pair of fellow-quaffers, Pughie and J-R. They formed part of a tight knot of drinkers who gathered at the Wine Vaults, in Southsea’s Albert Road, every Monday after work. Lin and I would wander down there sometimes and the evenings were a noisy mix of gossip, slander and multiple wind-ups. We drank a lot of beer, and had a fun time.

  Both Pughie and J-R were seasoned detectives and were on intimate terms with the darker parts of Pompey but very little of this stuff ever surfaced on Monday nights. We were there to talk amiable nonsense, get bladdered and have a laugh or two. So how on earth was I going to finesse these piss-ups at the Wine Vaults into the kind of comprehensive research I needed to launch a cutting-edge crime series?

  The only answer was to come clean. Detectives are canny, especially these two. They knew I wrote books and one or two of their mates had even read some but so far they’d no idea I was about to abandon international one-off thrillers and barge into their tight little world. I suggested a drink at another pub on another evening. Just the three of us. The pub was called the Eldon Arms. At six fifteen in the evening it was practically empty. The clue lay on the table between us. My notebook. And a pencil.

  These two guys, between them, had maybe fifty years experience in the Job. Pughie had been a decent footballer and in certain lights, with his Italian good looks, he could still pass muster as a veteran from Serie “A”. J-R was a hard-core Dylan fan and in his spare time he was beginning to make headway as an R&B promoter on the local music scene. He wore his hair long, tied in a pony tail, and had the good detective’s knack of being able to tease a conversation out of pretty much anybody. Years later, when all the controversy kicked off about u/c officers going native with women from the protest movement, a lot of the mug shots of these guys reminded me of J-R. Was he u/c? I never found out. U/c, in case you’re wondering, means undercover.

  That first night in the Eldon wasn’t easy. The moment we started talking it was obvious that the rules of engagement had changed. We were still mates but this was no longer a social occasion. They wanted more detail. They wanted to know that this thing was really going to happen. I assured them that it was but when I broke the news that all three books were to be rooted locally, here in Pompey, there was an exchange of looks. No one was using the word trespass but this very definitely wasn’t Monday night at the Wine Vaults.

  I knew from other people that both Pughie and J-R had led colourful lives. More importantly, I’d sensed that their years at the coal-face in CID had bridged the gap between old-style detective work and a whole new culture of rights and responsibilities that, to put it mildly, could be a pain in the arse to can-do guys like these. And so that evening, I set out to explore the fault line between these two very different worlds. A generation ago, as I knew from a couple of documentaries I’d made, Pompey had been full of spirited detectives who’d regularly bend the rules in the hunt for a quick result. This process left lots of today’s boxes completely un-ticked.

  In that pre-PACE era, unrestrained by tightly-drawn new rules about evidence gathering, detectives didn’t care a stuff about Risk Assessments or the Human Rights Act, largely because neither existed, and the notion of political correctness would have made them laugh. They were there to pot the scrotes and the low life. They worked an army of informants, laid elaborate traps and did their business in locked cells. None of this stuff necessarily guaranteed a totally fair outcome but they got results. Whether or not this made Pompey a nicer place to live in is not for me to say but the point is that it seemed to work.
Some of these D/Cs became legendary thief-takers, as did some of their bosses. They also won themselves, amongst Pompey lowlife, a considerable degree of respect.

  As it happens, I had a little hands-on experience of this myself. Back in the early seventies I’d regularly turned out for the Southern Television football team. One year we’d played a side from Southsea CID. Their centre forward was a detective called Dave Hopkins and my job that afternoon was to try and stop him scoring. Marking Dave Hopkins, it turned out, was a nightmare. He’d kick you to death when the ref wasn’t looking. Most of his many goals were blatant off-sides. He had the sharpest elbows on the pitch and absolutely no time for the rules. Yet afterwards, in the bar, he was the nicest, funniest, warmest guy imaginable and hours later, still nursing your bruises, you’d be wondering exactly how he managed to pull off a trick like that.

  Dave Hopkins, I later discovered, was a D/C in the Pompey Drugs Squad. He worked under a D/S called Alan Russell, a quiet, reflective, hard-working skipper who in most respects was the reverse of his bandit D/C. Dave and I got to meet again because I was making a film about young junkies who’d got into serious trouble with heroin. It turned out that Dave had nicked pretty much all of them but what was truly remarkable was the fact that they all ended up thinking the world of him. Dave’s MO, on and off the football field, was the same. It was means and ends. You laid traps, threatened, charmed, pressured , made promises, broke them, then kissed and made up. In short, you did everything that was necessary and got a result. Months later the stars of my little film were all banged up and tidied away yet they still loved him. Just how, once again, did Dave do it?

  Twenty five years later, I found myself putting this question to Pughie and J-R in the Eldon Arms. We were only on our second pint, and I was only too aware how cautious they were still being, but mention of Dave Hopkins seemed to take us to a different place. By now Dave was dead, a victim of cancer, but they both agreed that his passing was a double shame, not simply because he’d gone before his time but because he was one of a certain kind of sharp-end detective for whom the Job would soon have no room. In this, they pointed out, we were all losers. Pughie and J-R because some of the colour had gone out of their professional lives. And us punters because – when push came to shove - the likes of Dave Hopkins truly did the business.