Music Maestro

This post is from a piece I was asked to write about music and writing:

I like to listen to music while writing but my choices are limited because I just cannot write while anything with a lyric is playing. I am so interested in writing of any kind that I become too easily distracted by other people’s words to write my own. As a result, I am usually restricted to tuning into Classic FM, so most of my gritty, contemporary crime stories are written while the music of long dead composers plays gently in the background.

Music does feature in my books. I figured David Blake, my white-collar gangster anti-hero would spend a fair bit of time in night clubs, so I researched the kind of music that would be played in them these days and was quite surprised to pick up a taste for R&B along the way. I found myself driving around with Rihanna and Black Eyed Peas CDs in my car and Flo Rida or Neo blasting out of the radio. Down with the kids? No, it’s more of a guilty, private pleasure. If I attempted to bust some moves to Rihanna, I’d look like one of those embarrassing dads trying to dance at a wedding.

If I’m really looking for a bit of inspiration to get the words flowing or to drag me away from the twin, distracting evils of Facebook and Twitter, I’ll play a film score. I’ve always been a film fan and my writing is more influenced by films than books if I’m honest. I love soundtracks and these days, with the advent of YouTube, it’s even easier to find obscure scores from long forgotten movies or TV shows. I’m a fan of Ennio Morricone, particularly his score for ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’ and John Barry’s themes from, ‘The Ipcress File’, ‘The Persuaders’ and the Bond films never seem to diminish with age. Hans Zimmer, composer of ‘Gladiator’ amongst others, writes some stirring stuff to help gee up the word count and it doesn’t get more atmospheric than Trevor Jones soundtrack for ‘Last Of The Mohicans’.

Ipcress File Theme http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2Jw6_Xgszk

I’ve never been able to pick up a copy of my all-time favourite film soundtrack, so I have to summon it up from YouTube whenever I feel the need to hear it again, which is often. The theme for ‘The Long Good Friday’ is simply terrific.  Francis Monkman’s pulsating score might sound like it was distinctly of-its-time but still provides the perfect backdrop for London’s top boy, Harold Shand’s arrival at the airport, ten minutes into the film. Bob Hoskins doesn’t even have to emote at this point. The theme tells us everything we need to know about Shand. He’s nails and you wouldn’t mess with him……unless you happen to be the IRA of course, which sets us up for possibly the finest climactic scene of any British film ever. Hoskins face, as he is driven away at the end of The Long Good Friday, to the strains of Monkman’s brilliant theme, lives long in the memory.

The Long Good Friday theme: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAXxYKave6o

A couple of years back, I managed to get hold of the soundtrack for the classic British gangster film ‘Get Carter’, which has a particular resonance for me. My first book ‘The Drop’ has been described as “A Get Carter for the 21^st Century”, partly because the two stories share a common gangster theme but primarily because ‘The Drop’ is also set in Newcastle (though the original book ‘Jack’s Return Home’ by Ted Lewis is famously not based in Tyneside). Roy Budd’s soundtrack is one of those scores that’s instantly recognisable. ‘Get Carter’ is a very good film that becomes a terrific one because the incidental music lends it an instant ambience of understated cool. It even makes up for Michael Caine’s ludicrous accent; a Geordie returning to his homeland? I don’t think so, unless the Elephant and Castle is actually a district of Wallsend. Somehow it doesn’t matter and ‘Get Carter’ is still a classic.

Get Carter theme: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoa3OTJfWIY

When my second book ‘The Damage’, came out, I was interviewed on TV for the first time. The ‘North East Tonight’ reporter asked his cameraman to film me walking up and down the mean streets of Newcastle. I was eager to please but more than a little self-conscious. I didn’t expect much from the end result but was pleasantly surprised when they aired the footage. I was no better looking, cooler or harder than normal - I look like a chubby Peter Beardsley on a good day - but, as I made my way through the dimly-lit, pedestrian tunnel behind Newcastle Central Station they played a bit of background music that I instantly recognised; the theme from ‘Get Carter’. The reporter concluded that, “Forty one years on from Get Carter, Newcastle may have another gritty gangster thriller to define its character in the eyes of crime novel readers.” I don’t do cool; never have, never will but that was……almost cool. So shoot me know. Thanks to Roy Budd’s iconic theme, that short walk, captured on film, was easily my finest hour.

That TV interview: http://www.itv.com/news/tyne-tees/2012-05-08/newcastle-gangster-novel-adapted-for-tv/

Living with a Gangster

I was honoured to be invited onto author and reviewer Graham Smith's blog in May, which is where the following post first appeared. Graham has a lot of interesting posts on his blog from up and coming writers. There's a chap on there at the moment called Lee Child for example and he seems to be doing okay. http://grahamsmithwriter.blogspot.co.uk/

For the past three years now I’ve been living with a gangster. It’s been a dysfunctional and abusive relationship but you might be surprised to learn that he took the brunt of the violence not me. In three books now; ‘The Drop’, ‘The Damage’ and ‘The Dead’, which has just been published by No Exit, I have taken great delight in placing my Geordie, white-collar criminal, David Blake, in trouble again and again. Blake has been beaten up and shot at, chased by men on motor bikes then threatened with imprisonment, torture and execution. He has been targeted by hit men, assaulted by Police officers and forced to fend off an attacker in his apartment, using nothing but an urn containing the ashes of his girlfriend’s mother.

Blake is no saint however and he, in turn, has killed people in all three books; with knives, guns, machetes or simply by ordering their deaths. Not bad for a man who never actually considers himself to be a gangster. Blake’s life is pretty stressful, so he has occasionally turned to drugs but, being an old fashioned, northern lad, he tends to prefer booze or, on occasions, women to relieve that stress. He is not the best boyfriend material however, having cheated on his girl with minimal guilt, and is unlikely to empathise with you if you’ve had a hard day at the office, as it is unlikely to have been as tough as the 24 hours he has endured.

And what has David Blake given me in return for all of the grief I’ve put him through? Well, plenty. Apart from the obvious relief and joy that comes with finally becoming a published author and seeing my name on a book cover, I wasn’t sure what to expect as a first time novelist. Would anybody read my book, would anyone actually like it? Thankfully they did and they do. I have had some wonderful moments because of Blake. I’ve been reviewed positively by, amongst others, The Daily Mail and The Times; the latter naming me as one of their top five thriller writers of the year because of ‘The Drop’, an accolade that I still can’t quite believe, even now. Frankly I’d be happy to have that one etched on my tombstone.

In the north east in particular, the books have gone down really well and I have received a stack of messages from folk who enjoyed reading a story that is set in an area they know. I’ve been interviewed in all of the local papers, made numerous appearances on BBC Radio Newcastle and even been on TV.  I’ve also given away my books in competitions on NUFC.com, the web site for exiled Newcastle United fans around the globe, which I think gave me almost as much pleasure as the Times review. ‘The Drop’, renamed ‘Crime Machine’, has been published to great reviews in Germany, so ‘The Damage’ will follow it there next year and, in the Autumn, Harper Collins will publish both books in the U.S. God knows what they will make of my Geordie gangster in America.

The only thing that could possibly top all of the above is the e-mail my publisher received from someone claiming to work for David Barron, producer of the Harry Potter films. He had apparently bought a copy of my book, read it, loved it and wanted to turn it into a TV series. This seemed a tad unlikely but it turned out, astonishingly, to be true. A few weeks later I was sitting in my agent’s London office in a meeting with David, who turned out to be a very nice bloke indeed. I spent a pleasant hour or two with the man behind the most successful movie franchise the world has ever seen, discussing the practicalities of bringing David Blake to the small screen. The scripts are being developed by JJ Connolly, another top man, who wrote the great British gangster flick, ‘Layer Cake’. Hopefully one day I’ll be able to watch David Blake being put in peril all over again; this time on the telly.

Now that the trilogy is finally complete, I’m not going to say whether Blake, or his large assortment of supporting characters from the Newcastle underworld, will ever make a re-appearance. That’s dependant on me coming up with a strong enough storyline. The last thing I want to do is churn out two dozen very similar books, on auto pilot that, like Hollywood sequels, fall foul of the inevitable law of diminishing returns.

I have an idea for a new book and I’m afraid there’s no space for David Blake in this one. I owe the fellah a great deal but I’ve been seeing other people lately; in my mind’s eye at least. I’m going to take a break from Blake for a while, to allow some different characters to live with me instead. However there is no way I am ever going to forget the man and everything he has done for me. Who knows, maybe one day, I’ll come crawling back to him.

On the Joys of Editing ‘The Dead’

This writing lark is easy really. Just rattle out a first draft of your novel in six months or so then send it off to your editor, who’ll ring you straight back to tell you she just loves it, don’t change a word; job done. Oh, if only.

I finally sent the second draft of ‘The Dead’ off to the publisher last week, meeting its deadline by, well, minutes, if I’m honest. The second draft is the big one. When I send the first draft to my agent and editor it feels a bit like stepping off a cliff. Nobody else has seen it until that point, so I have no idea what their reaction will be. There was a huge sense of relief this time when they both really liked ‘The Dead’, because they would tell me if they didn’t, believe me.

So they both loved it but there were just a few changes needed. Even though I have been through this process before with ‘The Drop’ and ‘The Damage’, I was still lulled into a false sense of security by their positivity, mainly because I was pathetically grateful that they didn’t hate the book. They really like it! So I must be nearly finished, right? Wrong.

I then had to wade through every comment on my one hundred and four thousand word manuscript and there were a lot of them. Not every page warranted their scrutiny but every now and then there’d be a little observation on the side of a page, “Can we have a little bit more of this….or a little bit less of that? Could we delete this bit for pace but could we expand on this? How about an extra scene here, where we see this explained earlier and, I hate to say it, but do we really need this chapter at all….you know…the one you spent a week writing.…..oh and that character…you know the one…..sorry but I’m afraid she doesn’t really work for me at all.”

At this point my heart sinks and not because I resent my agent and editor’s input, far from it. It’s precisely the opposite in fact. I really respect their opinions and had to think long and hard about what they had told me, because I want this book to be the best it can be. I obsess about it in fact. I picture readers having the exact same thoughts they do. I know what it feels like to spend eight quid on a paperback and invest a week or two of your commute time or that precious last hour before bed, only to be disappointed by the outcome. I don’t want to be responsible for that feeling in anyone, so I am my own worst critic. I’d rather change or bin anything that doesn’t quite work long before it reaches the reader.

When I wrote the second book in the David Blake trilogy, ‘The Damage’ I took out two whole chapters because both my agent and editor thought they were “good but they slow down the narrative”. I think I allowed myself to use the word ‘bollocks’ quietly to myself more than once, as I contemplated the time it had taken me to write, edit, re-edit and final-edit the words I was about to delete but when I looked at the book again with fresh eyes I knew they were right.

Editing ‘The Dead’ was tricky. I’d specifically asked my extremely talented editor, Keshini Naidoo, if she could help me get the word count down and she removed 5,000 words before returning it to me. This was great on one level, because it saved me a lot of work, but it still hurt a little when I saw some of the writing I had been quite proud of culled from the page, even though I knew it had to be done. I then went and made another fifty-five fairly major changes. I know it was that many because I made a list of all the work I had to get through to complete that second draft, so I could cross each one off when I’d finished. Some of those changes took a few minutes, some half a day. The worst one involved removing a key character that had become an integral part of the story and one of half a dozen plot lines that were all interwoven nicely together in ‘The Dead’. As I mentioned, neither my editor nor my agent were convinced by the character and felt removing this plot line would streamline the whole story and make ‘The Dead’ a stronger read. No problem I thought, as I methodically removed every scene involving that character, sobbing to myself inwardly as more than eight thousand words hit the cutting room floor.

Eventually, draft two was complete and a manuscript covered in electronically generated amendments – the Microsoft word equivalent of reams of red pen crossings-out – was off to the publisher. This version will be copy edited and returned to me with just a few grammar amends and literals that three pairs of eyes all somehow missed (it happens, believe me) and I’ll get to read through the whole thing again to check that I’m finally happy with it. Draft three will be the final version that hits the book shops on April 25^th. We will be launching ‘The Dead’ with a couple of events and some signings, plus radio and press interviews, which is a fun and exciting way to complete a very lengthy process. I can go into the launch with a clear conscience because, after all of the hours of hard work, fretting, editing, more fretting, further editing and fretting about my fretting…..I am really happy with the end result and I hope that readers of ‘The Dead’ will be too.

The only bit that remains is the nervous breakdown, which I have pencilled into my diary for the end of May.

It’s strange though. I had been really looking forward to completing that difficult second draft and was going to reward myself with a nice little rest from writing for a while. After a couple of days I was already reading through my notes on a new book.

The writer Eugene Ionesco once said, “A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.” In my case, he could possibly have added ‘with just a few strategic breaks to read web articles about incoming Newcastle United players during the January transfer window” but, aside from that, the gist of what he said is undoubtedly true.

The next book after ‘The Dead’ will be my first that does not feature David Blake. I have some great ideas for this one and I think it will work but I know there will be countless man-hours devoted to knocking the first draft of that one into shape. Then, if I am really lucky, my agent and editor might both agree that they love it……………but they’ve got just a few, little changes in mind…………

Geordie gangster, David Blake, returns in 'The Dead'; to be published by No Exit on April 25th, 2013. In the third installment of the trilogy the reluctant gangster is back on his home patch and facing his biggest challenge yet

David Blake is now running three cities, top boy. Life is sweet until his bent accountant is arrested for murder. The money man is nailed on for a life sentence until he puts five million pounds out of Blake's reach. Now Blake faces an agonising choice; fix the acquittal of a child killer or run out of the cash he needs to bankroll his empire.

Meanwhile, Serbian gangsters are slowly taking over his territory and a crazed Russian Oligarch wants to use Blake's drug supply line for his own ends. Back at home, the Police are closing in, determined to take David Blake off the streets of Newcastle forever, and Blake's girl Sarah is asking awkward questions about the death of her father that he really doesn't want to answer.

The Next Big Thing - Peter Guttridge's Questions

Guttridge: What is the working title of your next book?

It’s called ‘The Dead’ and it’s the third in the David Blake series. Blake is a white-collar gangster, an anti-hero and the reluctant boss of a Geordie crime firm.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

I started out wondering what it must be like to work for a gangster, particularly if you are not a big, scary enforcer type. What if you used your brain not your brawn and left the dirty work to others, because you assumed you’d get all the benefits of a criminal life; money, prestige, women, without any of the down side? Then something goes wrong and you are left in fear of your life. That’s what happens to David Blake.

What genre does your book fall under?

Crime –thriller I suppose. My books have been described as crime fiction or thrillers so I guess they straddle both genres.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

David Blake is back and he’s got problems. Very big problems.

Will you will be self-published or represented by an agency?

I’m published by the lovely people at ‘No Exit’, who manage to confound their reputation as gritty, hard boiled crime aficionados by being really very nice indeed. I’m represented by Phil Patterson at Marjacq Literary agency or ‘Agent Phil’ as he is affectionately known by everybody in the business, as he is something of a legend. He’s also a very nice bloke, so I don’t think he really gets this agent lark. They are supposed to be nasty aren’t they?

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

This one took about nine months but I didn’t do myself any favours. I don’t write chronologically, so I’m always left with the pieces of a very complicated jigsaw that has to be spliced together somehow and I seem to come up with complicated multi-storyline plots. I curse myself for not just having someone murdered then allowing the case to be solved by a maverick detective. It would make life a lot simpler.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

I am influenced by classic British gangster films like ‘The Long Good Friday’ and ‘Get Carter’ and American mafia movies like ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Goodfellas’. I wanted to write the kind of book I like to read.

And your commissioning editor?

Ion Mills from No Exit bought the first two David Blake books, ‘The Drop’ and ‘The Dead’ and they proved successful enough for him to ask me for a third. Ion enlisted the help of a great editor, Keshini Naidoo, to work on all three novels. Keshini used to be with Harper Collins but, luckily for me, she is now a freelance. She gave me invaluable help and advice on my earlier books and will doubtless do the same with ‘The Dead’.

What else about your book might pique the readers' interest?

I get a lot of positive feedback on the setting from people who live in or around Newcastle because they love it when I mention a place or a pub they know well. I think Newcastle has an atmosphere all of its own that adds to the books.

For the next in the Next Big Thing interviews, I'm passing my baton on to three excellent writers of crime fiction who you are going to hear a lot more from in 2013:

Nick Quantrill: http://wwwshotsmagcouk.blogspot.co.uk/

Ian Ayris: http://www.ianayris.com/

and Luca Veste: http://lucaveste.com/

A Time of Firsts

It's been a time of firsts lately. In the past couple of months, leading up to the launch of The Drop, I have been interviewed by newspapers, magazines and radio programmes and I've read reviews of The Drop in a dozen publications or on line, all of them, thankfully, very positive, including wonderful reviews in The Times and New York Journal of Books. I've done signings in branches of Waterstones and public readings of my book at Bookstock and the launch party, in front of dozens of close friends. All of these have been slightly terrifying experiences, the latter requiring copious amounts of alcohol beforehand, to give me the courage to read from The Drop to people I have known and cared about for years, but all went really well on the night.

When you are a writer you spend endless hours on your own, trying to create something readable out of one original germ of an idea that you hope, and I stress the word hope, someone will like when you are finally finished wrapping 90,000 words around it. The trouble is, you become so close to your work while writing it, editing it, rewriting it and re-reading it countless times that you end up not really knowing if it's any good or not. In other words you can't see the wood for the trees. That's why it's important to have a few loyal friends to not only take the trouble to read your book but also give you some positive feedback. This acts as the reassurance insecure writers need to keep them going.

While you are writing your book you barely dare to hope that someone will want to publish it one day and then, when it does happen, you can scarcely believe it. The time between shaking hands on a publishing deal and seeing your finished book on the shelves flies by but you must try to enjoy it because there are some lovely moments along the way. When I launched the book in Waterstones Metro Centre branch in Gateshead, friends I had not seen since my school days 25 years ago turned up to buy copies and wish me well. My old primary school teacher, from thirty odd years back, phoned the branch in Newcastle when I was signing there, as he’d seen me in the local paper. He called for a chat about the days when I used to play (badly if I’m honest) for his school football team and asked me for a signed copy. I’ve been on Radio Newcastle and Radio Leeds, where I was interviewed by my old and very close friend Adam Pope, who hosts the morning show. Adam and I were at Huddersfield Poly together 24 years ago and I told him then that one day I would become a writer. He kindly interviewed me on his show about the long journey to publication. I think, as much as anything, to ask me why it had taken me so long to get round to it! In all seriousness it was a big and quite emotional day for both of us.

Adam was one of many friends who took the trouble to attend the launch party for The Drop. It was a fantastic evening and the room seemed full of goodwill (or was I just drunk?). It is a quite surreal thing to sign copies of your book for your friends (including my good mate Imogen on the pic below) but it is one of the nicest experiences a writer can have. It also gave me the chance to publicly thank a few very deserving people like my fantastic publishers at No Exit, my terrific agent Phil Patterson at Marjacq and the friends who kept me going with their faith, when publication seemed as likely a prospect as dinner with Cameron Diaz…or Newcastle winning the Champions League…three years running. Finally, I got to thank my lovely wife Alison for putting up with all of those hours of writing and years of near misses before The Drop finally appeared in print. It was nice to see her having as much fun that night with all of our friends as I did, because she bloody deserved it.