Mark Billingham
‘Nice’: it’s a word our English teachers told us never to use. But it crops up time and again – how nice crime authors are.
“Oh, we like to put that rumour about, but the truth is we’re all horrible really,” Mark Billingham says. “I was at an event recently where crime writers were described as the smokers of the literary community. We’re on the outside a little bit and you imagine that writers from other areas of the literary world are looking at us with some slight disapproval, but at the same time they’re thinking, ‘Oh God, they really look like they’re having a good time.’”
That’s for sure. Harrogate, as Mark says, is a festival, not a convention:
“There’s a fantastic atmosphere to the Festival that you really, really don’t get at any other event I’ve been to. There’s plenty of action in the hotel bar, and I think that’s part of the Festival’s success too. There have been crime festivals in this country before in London and in Manchester and those festivals have died away, whereas Harrogate has gone from strength to strength. The whole of the crime fiction industry just decamps up to Harrogate for the weekend.”
One of the huge attractions is that it’s inclusive.
“You go to a lot of festivals and the readers are in one corner and the writers are in another corner, and the fans just go and have their books signed. It’s not like that at Harrogate, everyone mucks in. Maybe it’s the Yorkshire roots that keep it down to earth. I think it’s a mark of the kind of festival it is that there are plenty of writers that go who aren’t booked. They just want to be there with their friends and colleagues and hang out. I think that’s a real tribute to the Festival.”
Mark is certainly a big heart of the event – he was programming chair in 2006 – and is a regular on panels, quizzes and skits. In 2009, he will attend as a Special Guest, alongside George Pelecanos and Lee Child.
“I can’t think of another group that is as welcoming and decent as crime writers,” Mark says. “They’re certainly a lot nicer than comedians, who are the other group I know pretty well. I think we’re a gang. And crime writers tend not to subscribe to the idea that for them to do well someone else has to do badly. They are mostly pretty generous with their time and in encouraging new writers and maybe that’s because we get all our dark stuff out on the page and it’s not slopping around inside us. That’s the theory anyway. Or perhaps we’re all just naturally extremely lovable. It’s something of a generalisation to be honest.” He laughs. “Actually, there are some horrible bastards that write crime fiction, but I’m not going to name any names, not until I’m a lot drunker at the bar at Harrogate…
“Seriously, I think it’s a perception based on what we write. Because our stuff is often very dark and disturbing, when readers meet crime writers and they’re not pulling a knife on them or looking like they’ve just chopped someone’s head off and put it in the fridge, it’s a pleasant surprise. They just presume we’re really nice, because we’re much nicer than they thought we’d be.”
‘Nice’ barely covers Billingham. Fans of the Festival, and his books, remark on his humour, energy, charisma and generosity. But his books come in various shades of black. His standalone novel, In the Dark, may suggest murky territory, but actually, it’s an all too human tale. There are no crazed psychopaths or macabre mindsets. In fact, his characters are beautifully human. His pregnant heroine Helen falls out with her family and is in a far from perfect relationship. She throws up, eats too much and loses her rag – she’s someone you feel you know. A sister, a best mate. And it’s this endearing quality that makes the book so powerful. It’s been hailed as his best work yet.
“I think you have to do something that gets you out of the comfort zone a little bit, that challenges you in some way. I’m a middle aged white man who usually writes about a middle aged white man. OK, he’s a copper, and he has a very different life to me, but it’s still a lot easier for me to write a character like that than it is to write a young pregnant woman, or a young black guy. A writer is as good or as bad as their imagination and I just wanted something that would spark my imagination off in different ways. That story came into my head and it was about those characters. Yes, it was scary to do and there were times when I panicked; when I thought, “Why have I done this? Why can’t I just write a scene with Thorne and Hendricks having a curry?” That would have been the easy thing to do, but if it’s easy, it’s probably not very good.”
In the Dark has urgency. It follows the lives of people who are victims of society – a context that has sparked comparisons with The Wire.
“Well, there’s no point pretending I’m not an enormous fan of The Wire and when I’ve had reviews mentioning The Wire, even in passing, it’s an enormous compliment because it’s such a fantastic piece of television. I think if you set out to address social issues, you’re going to write a bad book. That’s absolutely not what I set out to do. I set out to tell a story about this one random act of violence and how it affected these three characters. Inevitably, because of the lives some of these people lead, you’re going to be looking at that world, but it certainly wasn’t an agenda. You don’t engage people by haranguing them; you engage them by telling them a story with characters they care about. That’s also how you create genuine suspense. I’ve really come to believe that suspense on the page or on the screen isn’t about little page turning tricks or techniques, it’s just about creating characters that readers or TV viewers will genuinely care about.”
Moving away from the popular Thorne series was a brave step, but not an easy one. John Connolly’s blog on writing recently revealed the terror of starting a new book.
“I read what John wrote,” Mark says, “and every single word rang this enormous bell. It’s completely true. You think, ‘I’ve done this 8, 9, 10 times I can do it again’, and every time you sit down to write a book, it’s as though you’ve forgotten. You write a book, then you take a couple of months to promote it, but then when you have to sit down at a computer and start again, it really does feel like as if everything you’ve learned has just slipped away. But I think that’s how it should be. If writing a book was an absolute breeze, you’re probably doing something very wrong, because you’re trying to write a better book every time.”
Being a stand-up involves facing heckles, writing opens you up to critics, but you’ve got to put yourself on the line:
“You’ve got to. I’ve been doing a fair amount of teaching recently and whenever people are a bit shy in class about reading their stuff out or letting other people critique their work, I have to tell them that there’s not much point in being a writer unless you’re prepared to do that. You have to open yourself up. A book is written and then it’s read and unless and until it’s read, it’s not really a book at all. It’s only half a book. It’s only something that you keep under your bed. Yes, you have to develop a bit of a thick skin, in the same way that as a stand-up I had to get use to the fact I might die on my arse. You have to get used to the fact that you’ll open the newspaper and see a terrible review, and that you’ll just get emails from readers saying they absolutely hated your book. As long as you’ve written the best book you can, you’ve got to try and not let it worry you. But of course it does worry you. If a writer says they don’t read their reviews or they don’t care about their reviews, they’re probably lying or mad…or both.”
Mark was first published in his thirties. Was there a turning point?
“I think I just got to the point where I was brave enough to have a go at it really. I’d written all sorts of other things: terrible plays and terrible poems, TV and stand-up, but the stuff I was devouring for pleasure was crime fiction. So, it was the missing piece of the jigsaw, but I was too scared to do it for a long time because I thought a novel was far too intimidating. So maybe it just took me that long to pluck up the courage.”
Mark has remarked that as his life gets happier and more settled, the more twisted and dark his character, DI Tom Thorne has become. What kind of person would he be if he didn’t write?
“God, I don’t know. How can you not be happy when you’re doing what you’ve always wanted to do? It’s a real privilege to write books for a living. If I wasn’t writing crime fiction I don’t know what I’d be. Can you get paid for being a work-shy fop? The sad truth is, I’ve always been highly skilled at avoiding any kind of proper job.”
You can see Special Guest Mark Billingham interviewed by Laura Wilson on Friday 24 July, 9am. He will also be doing a session on ‘Adapting for Audio’ on Creative Thursday (23 July), chairing the Late Night Cabaret: Secrets and Lies on Friday 24 at 10pm, and featuring on The Late Night Quiz Show on Saturday 25 at 10pm.
Mark Billingham was interviewed by Ann Chadwick.
© Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, Harrogate.
