Writing novels is a lonely job – interview with Andrew Taylor

Why did you choose the career of writer?
- I decided I wanted to be a writer when I was about ten, partly because I thought it would be an easy road to wealth and fame (I was innocent then). I wanted to tell stories - it could have been through screenplays as easily as novels, and in fact I wrote several plays in my teens.
But finally, in my late 20s, my wife encouraged me to take it seriously and really give it a go.
I had a moment of truth when I realised that if I didn’t start now, right that moment, I never would. So I started in my lunchbreak and wrote what turned into the first six pages of my first novel, “Caroline Minuscule”.

The An Air That Kills is the first of your books and first Lydmouth series crime story. How does is begin?
- Lydmouth began with a mystery, if not with a crime. It started one Sunday when we were driving near my home. A friend said, staring out of the car window at the blue hills, "Wouldn't this be a great location for a crime novel?"
"Yes," I said - and then came another mystery, because I added with inexplicable certainty, "but it would have to be set in the 1950s."
That fragment of conversation was the trigger. The question collided with my own long-held desire to write about the border country, the enigmatic and very beautiful strip of land which isn't quite England and isn't quite Wales. At the time I was actively casting around for a new series and there, suddenly, it appeared. It had been under my nose all the time.
Why the 1950s? One reason was that I felt it would be refreshing to write not just about a different time but also about a different moral climate from our own. The 1950s are so relatively recent that we tend to assume that they are part of the present, that people were not so very different from ourselves in 2001. But they were different. That generation sits uncomfortably on the fence between past and present.

Britain had won the war, more or less, and was in the slow and inexorable process of losing the peace. We were discarding an empire and acquiring a welfare state. The political, social and economic certainties of the past were dissolving.
I wanted the plots of the novels to turn as far as possible on how people thought and lived in that extraordinary decade just after World War II.
The place - Lydmouth, a town and its hinterland - emerged simultaneously from the creative mulch. The town belongs in the geography of the mind, but its nearest approximations in reality are eastern Monmouthshire, the Lower Wye Valley and the Forest of Dean. The setting is important. Crimes don't occur in a vacuum. Even now, my fictional area's real life equivalent has a strong sense of its own regional identity. Fifty years ago, of course, this was much more pronounced.

You wrote Bleeding Heart Square in 1998. I found information, you heard interesting story your grandmother said and it was inspiration to write this book. How was it exactly?
- “Bleeding Heart Square” had three starting points for me - the real-life Moat Farm Murder of 1899, a classic late Victorian case which my granny told me about when I was twelve. She and her sister used to play at the farm where the murder later took place, and her uncle and granny sold it to the killer and his victim. I wanted to examine the case in fictional terms, especially from the woman victim’s viewpoint. I chose to relocate it to the 1930s because I had been researching the British Union of Fascists, and become amazed by how significant they were in the 1930s; we Brits have tended to airbrush many inconvenient details from the record.

Does The Bleeding Heart Square, mysterious place from your book, really exist?
- Yes - though in real life it is called Bleeding Heart Yard. It’s a place with many legends and stories attached to it, mentioned in Dickens, on the site of a lost medieval palace - in other words, it seemed the perfect setting for the sort of crime novel that I wanted to write, and it even provided the title. For many years it was a rundown corner of London. But now it’s gone up in the world and has smart restaurants, etc. The book’s title and setting came when I was having lunch with my editor in one of the restaurants in (the real) Bleeding Heart Yard. I made it a ‘square’ rather than ‘yard’ to give myself more room for manoeuvre in terms of the geography

You write historical, sensational and criminal books. That’s the most favorite grade of books for you?
- They seem to be, judging by the evidence! My recent books have tended to have historical settings. It’s partly because I’ve an abiding interest in history so the research is fun; partly because I think the past reveals a great deal about the present, often in unexpected ways; and partly because the past is paradoxically liberating - you don’t have to tie yourself down to rigorous modern police procedures, for example, or bear in mind the impact of genetic fingerprinting or mobile phones on your storyline. Finally, no one can hope to understand the future unless they have some knowledge of their past.

What is fascinating in the crime story?
- I think of myself as novelist whose plots happen to revolve around murder. For a novelist, crimes are useful in a very practical way: they make things happen in your storyline, and they reveal your characters acting under stress.
People can be dismissive of crime fiction as too ‘limiting’ or ‘formulaic’. It’s true a few formulas in crime fiction get used over and over again - Christie’s Mayhem Parva puzzles; the boozy private eye in the means streets of the American city; more recently all those serial killers, forensic pathologists and of course the endless British series featuring a faux-gritty Inspector Ipod with his doomed personal relationships and his awesome capacity for alcohol.
Some of the novels that rely so heavily on such tried-and-tested formats are very good indeed, and well worth reading - but many aren’t.

But there’s more to crime fiction than repetition. In the last 30-odd years things have changed - crime fiction has become an almost infinitely elastic genre: any novel can be considered as a crime novel as long as a) it has a corpse or at least a crime in it, and b) it remembers that the need to entertain the reader (in the sense of making him/her want to turn the pages. That’s been hugely liberating for the genre as a whole. You can write a book that uses a formula. But you don’t have to.
In the same period I think there’s been a linked development - partly as a matter of changing literary fashion and partly for sordid economic reasons. Many literary novels have moved away from the traditional features of fiction (narrative, character, theme, tension, etc.) towards technical experiment or forms of animated sociology.
Crime fiction tends to be technically conservative in the sense that it can’t ignore the need to keep the reader reading. But it can also handle serious themes. More and more authors are using the genre to describe and analyse society. Which is why it’s the arguably the most popular form of modern fiction - for authors as well as readers. There are some authors now writing crime fiction who, fifty years ago, would probably have been writing mainstream fiction.

Your favorite writers are…
- Let’s concentrate on the dead. Chandler’s prose made a great impression when I first read him as a teenager. So did Margery Allingham with her almost Dickensian grasp of settings, especially London. Josephine Tey’s ability not to write the same novel twice (a rare talent among crime writers) impresses more and more.
Just before I wrote my first crime novel, Caroline Minuscule, I discovered Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley books. They really were an inspiration - you could have a hero who was also a murderer.
And you weren’t necessarily tied to a limited genre formula.
I read a a lot of nineteenth century fiction too - Trollope, Dickens, etc. - and also modern literary fiction.

„Andrew Taylor is one of the most interesting, if not the most interesting novelist writing on crime in England today. Like Ruth Rendell he produces particularly good, emotionally complex psychological novels and rather better straight detective novels than she does in her Wexford series." (Harriet Waugh, The Spektator). How do you feel when you read words like this?
Obviously it made me feel very pleased - all the more so because Harriet Waugh is the daughter of the famous English novelist Evelyn Waugh. I only wish my sales would match those of Ruth Rendell!

Do you get some letters from your fans?
- I receive a steady trickle of emails and occasional letters from all over the world.
Almost all of them, I’m glad to say, make kind remarks about my books. Many of them are about the Lydmouth Series - people want to know what will happen next - or to ask about the new book. It’s one of the great things about the Internet, that it helps writers and their readers to be connected.

„All writers have a tendency to feel that they are working in a vacuum, and that our readers are really figments of our overheated imaginations” – explain your words.
- Writing novels is a lonely job, by definition. For an author, readers sometimes seem less real than the book he or she is writing.

Do you plan to write next book?
- I’m already at work on the next book, which is set in the eighteenth century, as is The Anatomy of Ghosts. But every other respect it’s completely different from anything else I have done.

Thank you for conversation

Official website of Andrew Taylor: http://www.andrew-taylor.co.uk
Promotional video for the new book “The Anatomy of Ghosts”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpiuXRUhFXA