Backstory Page 16

  The guys loved it. In these situations – if you’re wise- you always say “we” instead of “I”. This was to be our book, not mine, a collaborative exercise scored for pain raisin and lashings of Easy Shopper coffee. Between them they sorted out a headcode for the train, the exact time of departure from Portsmouth Harbour Station, plus the likely time of entry into the tunnel. They contacted an off-duty driver to give me the speed the train would be doing, and the distance he’d need to stop. A handset in the cab would enable him to contact the nearest signal box. He’d need the power turning off plus various emergency services to help evacuate the train. A BTP Inspector would be tasked to attend, ahead of the incident being handed to civvie police.

  I was still with the driver in the cab. Procedures always fascinate me. What, exactly, does the driver say when he gets through on the phone?

  One of the BTP guys was a lovely guy called Monksy. He was a huge fan of the books.

  “We just told you,” he said. “He’d report the incident. Give a location. Explain what had happened.”

  “Sure, I know that, but what would he say?”

  Monksy looked blank. He thought they’d already nailed the question. I asked him again. There has to be a special phrase. There always is. Imagine the guy on the phone. Tell me what he actually says.

  “Ah, gotcha…” Monksy was grinning. “…yeah.”

  “So what does he say?”

  “You mean in real life?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He says ‘one under’. That’s the phrase you use for a jumper at a station, some nutter who ends up under the train. It would be the same in this situation. Yeah…one under.”

  I wrote the phrase down. Perfect title.

  We had more coffee. I signed the books. Then Monksy asked me whether there was anything else I needed. By now, belatedly, I’d realised I was very close to realising my lifetime’s ambition. Since I was a kid, I’ve been dying to drive a real train. I looked Monksy in the eye, told him how the writer had to get inside the head of every character he created, had to understand how it felt to be this fictitious person, had to know exactly how he or she would react in certain situations, had to become this character.

  Monksy was grinning again. He’d based an entire career on seeing through bullshit like this.

  “You want to drive a train, right?”

  “Right.”

  “No problem, mate.” He checked his watch. “You know the Driver’s Depot, back of Fratton Station? Be there for 10.45.”

  I phoned Lin. This was unbelievable, God’s little present for getting on the road so early. She laughed, told me I was far too smooth for my own good. One day you’ll get sussed, she said.

  “Yeah? And then what?”

  “God knows. Make some notes and tell me about it.”

  I was at Fratton Drivers’ Depot bang on 10.45. A BTP Sergeant called Derek Bish introduced me to a training supervisor called Andy, himself an ex-train driver. Andy had made arrangements for us to commandeer the next London train. The real driver would find himself in First Class for the ride up to Petersfield, after which our little party would take the next train back south.

  Minutes later, the three of us were crowded into the cab of one of the new Siemens electric units. As we eased through the nether reaches of Copnor Andy showed me how the controls worked. I couldn’t believe how easy, how smooth, it was. We stopped at Havant then headed north again. By now the tunnel was minutes away. Andy was in the driving seat. I’d already explained about the body in the tunnel but now it occurred to me that I had to find a way of getting him there. On a map I’d been studying yesterday, there seemed to be some kind of gate that offered access from a trackside wood. Andy and Derek looked at each other. The wood was rapidly approaching on the left hand side. Derek thought he knew exactly where I meant. Andy braked. The train slowed to a crawl.

  “There…” Derek was pointing. “No, there….”

  Andy shook his head. Maybe we’d already passed it. By now the train had come to a halt. I stared at them both. This was research gone mad. Was Andy going to take the train backwards? To help me solve some half-baked plot to smuggle a guy into a tunnel at the dead of night? I shot Derek a look, said it wouldn’t be a problem, told him I’d drive up here and take a walk in the woods and find out for myself.

  “Like you were the murderer?” Derek had been listening to me earlier. “Doing it for real?”

  I love encounters like that. There have been more of them than you can possibly imagine and one of the things they give you is that little jolt of excitement that tells you you’re probably on the money. These people believe what you’ve told them. They’ve bought into Duley and Jenny Mitchell. And they want to do their level best to make sure you get the details exactly right. Magic.

  The following day, on the phone, I set about extending my tunnel research to the impact on Duley himself. A conversation with Bernard Knight, both a working pathologist and a guy who writes excellent crime books, wised me up to the mysteries of head deflection and flange damage. After an encounter with a train, he said, most people are in bits. This I could well believe. Still in Pompey, I went to meet a Crime Scene Coordinator, Martin Chudleigh. It would be Martin who’d be in charge of the carnage in the tunnel and he spent half a morning explaining exactly what he’d do. Collection bags, he said, were a priority. Lots of them.

  That same day I met Andy Harrington and over lunch he gave me an update on current street prices for a cocaine sub-plot. That afternoon, busy boy that I was, I spent a fascinating couple of hours with Jake, the guy who worked in the mortuary at St Mary’s hospital. Jake was a huge Pompey fan and had come up with an idea for the perfect murder. This I subsequently offered to Paul Winter who, of course, promptly turned it to his own advantage. That evening, knackered, I had a final meet with Susan Newcombe who ran the Portsmouth Council of Community Services. I knew a number of social entrepreneurs in the city but I needed an over-view of exactly where these creatures belonged in the fast-changing food chain that was community care. She obliged, both on and off the record.

  Back in Devon, it was time to shape the book’s plot. Unlike some writers, I never do this in great detail. Jilly Cooper, for instance, is said to write herself a detailed series of scene-by-scene breakdowns that could easily extend to 50,000 words. By the end of this exercise she’d know exactly what every character would be doing to every other character for the entire length of the story. It undoubtedly works for her, because her stuff sells in squillions, but I think I’d find myself disheartened by having to write the thing not once but twice. The element of surprise, the moment when a character does something you’d least expect, is as important for me, the scribe, as it is for the readers and without that shiver of delight – plus the knowledge that I’m heading into the unknown – my writing days would be a great deal emptier.

  A little light plotting turned out to be extremely productive and by late summer, under our glorious new Exmouth roof, I had all my characters on their starting blocks. Duley, poor man, was about to spend an uncomfortable night in Buriton Tunnel. Faraday raised a glass of Rioja to a spectacular sunset and retired early. While Winter, now recovered from the traumas of brain surgery, was looking forward to another week of light duties. Both my detectives, in their separate ways, were to be seriously challenged by the wreckage that Mr Duley left behind him, not least Winter – who would end up trying to suss Jake’s perfect murder.

  The first draft of One Under took me to Christmas. Simon adored it. There was very little revision to be done before it was readied for the printers and by the end of January, I was at a loose end.

  By now, the series was floating on a raft of seriously great reviews. Here’s Ed Vulliamy, a gifted investigative reporter with the Observer whose article on the Serb holding camp at Omarska I’d plundered for Blood and Honey.

  “This is crime writing with attit
ude,” he wrote. “Graham Hurley’s D/I Joe Faraday is everything that Inspector Morse is not and the books are all the more impressive because Faraday’s beat isn’t leafy Oxford but the netherworld of Portsmouth. Authentic, bleak and richly documentary, the Faraday series offers the key to an entire city. Read these books and you’ll understand why Blair’s Britain is falling apart”.

  And this from Mark Timlin, still with the Independent on Sunday.

  “Joe Faraday returns in Deadlight. Now part of the city’s elite Major Crime Team, he investigates the death of an unpopular prison officer and discovers that the trail goes back to the officer’s naval service during the Falklands War. This is how a crime novel should be written and it pushes Hurley right to the forefront of British crime writers where he richly deserves to be.”

  Or this from Margaret Cannon on the Toronto Globe and Mail

  “Readers who haven’t already found the brilliant Joe Faraday series of novels by Graham Hurley should pick up the latest superb episode, Cut to Black. Hurley is one of the best of the new crop of realistic cop-shop writers and British to boot. He’s a very different kind of writer to Ian Rankin but every bit as good.”

  Or this from the Literary Review

  “Not being police officers, most readers have to take on trust the accuracy of Graham Hurley’s account of their work but there is no doubt that his series of police procedural novels is one of the best since the genre was invented more than half a century ago.”

  Each of these reviews, and there are dozens more of them, made me believe that I’d delivered on my half of the deal proposed at that long-ago lunch when Malcolm Edwards suggested I change course and become a crime writer. Yet the books were failing to appear in major book chains and the promotional support for each launch was largely confined to a reviewers’ lunch in London and a couple of signings in the Pompey area.

  The reviewers lunch was undoubtedly helpful and it was good to be able to put a face to these glowing reviews. But there was no sign of serious promotion, no budget set aside for newspaper ads or display posters, and it became a bit of a piss-off to see my fellow scribes papering the walls of railway stations up and down the country while Faraday and Winter lingered in the sidings. Even the Portsmouth branch of WH Smith’s didn’t stock my books.

  These are hundreds of writers like me marooned in the mid-list, and I was only too aware that simply staying in print – with fabulous jackets and excellent editorial back-up – was a substantial triumph. Nonetheless I had the feeling that I was somehow being short-changed. Orion had pushed the promotional boat out with Angels Passing, but nothing of that scale had happened since - with the exception of a promised “major marketing campaign” for Blood and Honey which had failed to materialise.

  I wondered first about raising this whole issue with Simon, my editor, but I sensed the battles he’d fought in-house on my behalf and I suspected that he’d pretty much run out of bullets for his editorial gun. I therefore decided to aim a little higher and frame a careful letter to the man responsible for the series in the first place. By this time, Malcolm Edwards was Orion’s Deputy CEO.

  3rd February, 2006.

  Dear Malcolm,

  I’m not quite sure of your current responsibility for Orion’s fiction output but here goes. Seven years ago, you invited me to try my hand at crime fiction. Specifically, the challenge was to do a Rankin on Portsmouth.

  With one or two misgivings, I accepted – and six books later I have, I think, make some impact. The series has built a strong readership, both here and abroad, and the critics have been more than kind. Reader support through my website is extremely heartening and this month’s PLR figures will

  reveal 136,000 loans for the Faraday series. Ironically, Publishing News recently described yours truly as “every bit as strong as Ian Rankin”. As of this week, he and I now find ourselves on the Theakston’s crime prize long list.

  “Blood and Honey” came to market last month. The Sunday Telegraph has applauded “another first rate thriller from a writer who is firmly up there with the best.” As I understand it, you’re about to reprint both hardback and trade p/back editions against outstanding dues. And all this after cancellation of the “major marketing campaign” promised on the back of the bound proofs.

  My point, Malcolm, is this: I think I can fairly claim to have delivered on your original mission statement. All the indicators are now looking extremely promising. Simon believes next year’s book, One Under, in his phrase, to be “stonking” (I think that means OK). Cancellation of the marketing campaign for “Blood and Honey” was, to be frank, extremely disappointing. Might I ask for a meeting to discuss Orion’s forward strategy for the series?

  I never got an answer from Malcolm. A couple of days later I had a call from Simon. He sounded unusually fraught, even angry. My letter, he said, had been passed to Lisa Milton who had recently joined Orion after a highly successful career in retail, managing the giant Waterstones bookshop in Piccadilly and subsequently moving on to head Book Club Associates. Lisa, it seemed, had been pretty unimpressed by the contents of my letter, a reaction all the more regrettable because she’d evidently been planning to descend on Devon for a one-to-one meeting. This, of course, I couldn’t possibly have known but I was intrigued nonetheless. Was her trip still on? It wasn’t.

  Instead Simon and John Wood took the train down from London. John, whom I knew already, was Publishing Director for Trade Fiction, which gave him a good deal of in-house clout. The weather was brilliant, a cloudless blue sky with views along the coast down to the distant smudge of Torbay. Lin and I had laid on a light fish lunch on our new balconette and after we’d emptied the first bottle of Chablis we settled down to serious business.

  The good news was that Lisa had found time to read the MS of One Under. The bad news was that she found important elements in the book a bit of a turn-off for certain key demographics in the marketplace. Her real beef was Jenny Mitchell. The woman was too compliant. She’d gone along with Duley far too easily. She need to be stronger, more modern, more cool. The way I’d written her would cut little ice with feisty metropolitan career women in their late twenties, early thirties, who evidently led a very different kind of life.

  This was a bit of a blow. What did Lisa want me to do? The deal, it seemed, went like this. If I’d like to re-write the book along the indicated lines, turning it into a must-read for these busy young women on the Tube commute into work, then Lisa would consider putting some promotional money behind it. Otherwise I was on my own.

  That afternoon, while Simon and John were still with us, I gave the proposition some thought. There were two problems. The first was that Lin and I were about to depart on a lengthy trek around Europe in our old camper van. This was to end at a very posh French crime festival at Frontignan, on the Mediterranean coast. I knew Marie-Caroline had worked hard to secure the invite and would never forgive me if I didn’t turn up.

  The other problem was simpler. I understood the book well enough to be sure that it wouldn’t work without Jenny’s preparedness to embark on an affair with Mark Duley. She does this on her own terms, with a little of Madame Bovary’s recklessness, but the whole point of the book was the fragility of the middle-class cocoon she’d built for herself. Turn her into someone harder, and maybe younger, and much of that impact would be lost. This was bad enough. What was worse was the fact that I knew zilch about the kind of women that John and Simon (and obviously Lisa) were talking about. And, to be frank, I doubted my ability to invent them.

  Simon and John left to catch the train back to London. We were on good terms and I hope we have remained so. But what that afternoon had given me was a brief glimpse of the kind of compromises that were probably required if I was to break into the big time. Breaking into the big time meant wall-to-wall display ads, advertorials in the national media, big splashy promotional tours, the whole schtick. Only that way would
you secure a place in the top ten.

  That I understood. It was exactly for that reason that I’d written to Malcolm in the first place. But what I now realised that Orion – and doubtless every other publisher in the country – would only risk that kind of money if they felt they were sitting on a sure-fire best-seller. In that respect, none of my books measured up, and none of them ever would. Why not? Because they were too complex, too subtle, and altogether too preoccupied with the way things really happened.

  Several months later, over a pint of two in a pub off Long Acre, Simon put it rather well.

  “You know your problem?” he said. “You write too well.”

  In one sense, this was deeply depressing. How can you possibly write too well? But in another, it clarified everything. My books would stay in print. The Design Department would re-jacket them for the second time and Sales would do their level best to get them out in the marketplace. Faraday and Winter were gradually building a truly loyal readership and one day – who knows? - I might find myself looking at a contract for a TV series. In the meantime I was a solid upper echelon mid-list scribe with a licence to do it my way.

  Could I live with that? I could.

  There’s a telling post-script to this little episode. Afterwards, Lisa and I agreed, by e-mail, to meet over the next couple of months and get to know each other a little better. Six years later, it’s yet to happen.

  Nine

  I owe Book Eight, which turned out to be The Price of Darkness, to a guy called Harry Pounds. Sadly Harry is dead now but he built a Pompey fortune on the back of a scrap and salvage business that operated on a scruffy piece of wasteland at Tipner adjoining the upper reaches of Portsmouth Harbour. He bought derelict warships, submarines and other bits of military kit and feasted on the bones of our Cold War navy. Once the M275 had been built, funnelling traffic into the city from the M27, drivers coming into the city had a dress-circle view of Harry’s empire. The piles of rusting scrap and the half-submerged tug beside the jetty were never pretty, and the gauntness of the Greyhound Stadium behind didn’t help, but whoever thought that this was the snarl on Pompey’s face had – in my view – got it wrong. The city owed its very existence to century after century of war. This just happened to be Harry’s riff on all those years of violence.