Eyes snap shut

Yesterday, Tuesday June 29 at 5.33 pm I finished writing what I have always referred to simply as Book Number Two.

Now that it is finished – and I say hallelujah to that, not caring whether it is the Alexandra Burke or Jeff Buckley version – I can call it Snapshot. Although to be honest, right now I am just glad to call it completed.

How do you feel now that it is finished, I’ve been asked. Excited, proud? Nope. Absolutely knackered.

The overriding emotion is just tiredness. Sheer exhaustion, even. This wasn’t how I pictured it at all.

Maybe it would have been different if I hadn’t been writing it while also doing the day job. Or while watching the World Cup. Or being a naturally lazy sod. Or if I hadn’t let my deadline get quite so close before I finished.

The deadline was today. I hadn’t realised it would mean dead beat, dead tired, dead on my feet.

I ‘celebrated’ with a bottle of champagne, a smoked sausage supper and Spain v Portugal. Then falling fast asleep.

Romantic, it ain’t.

Unhappy happenstance

The title of this blog has never been more apposite, or more ironic, than in the past few days.

On the one hand, I’m the author of a thriller about a taxi driver who goes on a killing spree, murdering people seemingly at random. On the other, I’m still doing the day job as a reporter on a Sunday newspaper.

Last Wednesday, I was told to pack a bag and head for Cumbria – after a taxi driver went on a killing spree, murdering people seemingly at random. No shortage of blood and no shortage of irony.

I’ve been parachuted into “similar” situations often enough before but the odd parallels between my fiction and Derrick Bird’s reality made this slightly different.
Not that there was any time to consider the oddness of the coincidence as there was work to be done. This was a story of national significance and global interest and, whether people think it right or not, the job of the media is to report on it and that meant being there.

On Wednesday, reporters and photographers raced to west Cumbria as news of the shootings broke. By Thursday, Whitehaven and its surrounding villages were under siege by the press, me included. My remit was the stories of the bereaved and witnesses, what might be called the lost and found – those who lost loved ones or those who found the bodies of victims.

It’s a typically cavalier journalistic term, the kind of thing that gets you through a job like this where it doesn’t pay to become too involved, even if that is sometimes easier said that done. The dividing line between reporter and writer stands somewhere along that crevice, where one must remain detached as the other must make a connection in order to understand and therefore relate.

I stood, precariously, with a foot either side of the line.

It inevitably struck me how much easier it is to write fiction about someone being shot, revelling in all the gory detail, than it is to be confronted with the evidence of very real deaths and having to interview the lost and found. A photographer I know was one of the first on the scene and dashed from village to village, trying to record the mayhem as it unfolded. He personally found three bodies as he drove in the wake of the killer, just coming across them as they lay untended by the roadside, blood flowing into gutters, as the police concentrated on catching Bird.

A nice old gentleman that I spoke to, who from my parochial point of view had the added bonus of being Scottish, had to face the horror of one of the victims, a neighbour, being shot on his doorstep. He rushed to her aid but she had died immediately with half her face blown away, a situation that he described with remarkable understatement as “something that you don’t see every day.”

As part of my research for Random, I read extensively about serial killers including various tomes by psychologists who had conducted series of interviews with murderers. I know lots about trigger points and psychoses, Mad Emperor Syndrome, Fractured Identity Syndrome, Looking Glass Self and more.

I know the distinction between serial killers, mass murderers and spree killers – but then any fan of CSI could tell you that. I know the FBI’s Crime Classification Manual divide them into “organised”, “disorganised” and “mixed” killers. Their motives are generally categorised as being “visionary”, “mission-oriented”, “hedonistic” and “power or control”.

But does any of this give me a greater insight into why Derrick Bird embarked on his particular killing spree? Not particularly. As with Thomas Hamilton and Michael Ryan, Bird destroyed the most vital piece of evidence – himself. Without the opportunity to question him, all that is left is the tittle tattle of other taxi drivers, half stories of feuds and tax bills, taunts and vice girls. It’s all grist to the tabloid mill but is unlikely to ever give a definitive answer as to the Why.

It’s all so much simpler in the world of fiction. In Random, as in west Cumbria, there is never any doubt as to Whodunnit as the story is told by the killer himself. The Whydunnit unfolds in due course and all is revealed.

Being inside the head of my killer, The Cutter, was an uncomfortable place to be. Being inside the head of Derrick Bird might be too much for anyone and in the end, it proved too much for him.

Any way you look at it, there was far too much blood and far too much irony.

Yer tea's oot!

It’s penguin suit time tonight. The annual evening of backstabbing, fistfights, hypocrisy and prodigious drinking that is the Scottish Press Awards take place at a city hotel.

A brilliant piece of planning means that the good, the great and the greedy of Scottish journalism gather at 7 and there will be no food served until 9. I’d loved to have heard the discussion process on that one. “We’ll get them there at 7, have the awards and then a lovely meal at 9. What could possibly go wrong?”

Guess what this is a recipe for... take a large banqueting hall, add a couple of hundred Scots journalists, a few hundred bottles of wine, assorted beers and spirits, a two hour time frame, empty stomachs and a succession of deadly dull awards.

Got it? Yes, it’s a recipe for disaster. It will be carnage.

The last time I attended– the time after which I swore I’d never go again – I disgraced myself by asking a particularly irritating award winner outside to discuss the finer points of fisticuffs after he failed to respond to more gentle requests to shut up and go away. I rounded off the night by telling my editor exactly what was wrong with the newspaper and why most of it was his fault. I told him this despite him politely asking me not to on three occasions. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It wasn’t.

Tonight there will pomposity, obsequiousness, aggression, drunkenness, more aggression and the inevitable bit of one two buckle my shoe. And then there will be food.

Tomorrow, bacon rolls and brown sauce. On prescription.

Book signing, signing books

It’s a pretty strange deal being a sort of author. I used to think I wouldn’t consider myself a proper one until I was actually published but now that I have been I’m waiting until it’s translated into Portuguese and made into a movie starring Danny DeVito. At the moment it feels like a two-sizes too big jumper that I’ll need to grow into.

People ask questions to which I have no idea what the answers are. Things like “how are sales going?” or “when will the second book be finished?”. How am I supposed to know?

That’s not say that I know nothing. I know that trying to do a day job and complete a book to deadline is hard work. I know that what seems like a good plotline at midnight is likely to appear duff at breakfast. I know that I have no time for breakfast. I know that David Cameron is mutton dressed as ham but that’s not entirely relevant.

I’ve also learned the difference between a book signing and signing books. The former is something that is done by proper authors, the latter is what the likes of me do. It involves a book and a pen but does not involve interaction with human beings. The publicity team arranged signings at various Waterstones and I had vague ideas of an orderly queue of people forming and me asking if it is Cathy with a C or a K (whether their name was Cathy or not). It’s not like that. You sign a pile of books and the shop stacks them and sells them. Glitzy it ain’t but it’s a suitable antidote for an inflating ego.

On Monday I went to HarperCollins warehouse in Bishopbriggs to be a faced with a table groaning under the weight of 350 books needing a signature. The very sight of so many copies of Random threw me a bit, having never previously seen more than a dozen together in one place. An hour and a half later, the table was no longer groaning but I was. In the process, I learned something else new – that a hardback book is a bad back book. Two hundred of them were hardbacks for a specialist collector shop and so had to be dated as well as signed. Trying to remember the date and write it at speed isn’t as easy as you’d think. Well, not once your brain turns to mush.

Anyway, I’m writing this blog entry while waiting for a cop to phone me about a serial killer, a real one. This is the bit where I have to be careful to distinguish between fact and fiction…

Why doesn't it always rain on me?

It’s a wet old day in Raintown. Raining down on all those tired eyes and tears and frowns. You know it’s a wet Tuesday when you find yourself quoting Deacon Blue lyrics.

It’s not all bad though. When Glasgow is grey and miserable, i.e. 83% of the time, then it’s much more conducive to crime writing. The remaining 17% when the sun shines and all is warmth, sweetness and light then it is harder to conjure up the image of the victim face down on the pavement or the blood leaking into a gutter on Argyle Street.

Today, no such problem. All is puddles, potholes and pissing down. My mind’s eye sees bleakness, bodies and blood. It’s great.

I’m currently about halfway through the follow-up to Random and this evening will be spent on pursuits of kidnap and casual murder. I’m considering a bullet through the head in front of the new(ish) flats at Glasgow Harbour although other venues are available on request. There’s something about death juxtaposed with regeneration (but hopefully not quite as arsey as that sounds) that is pretty interesting. New builds but still the same old Glasgow. Let’s face it, you can’t beat the romance of a murder in the shadow of the Finnieston Crane.

My main character in the second book is a police photographer and a miserable day on Clydeside is his perfect landscape. In fact the more misery the better as far as he is concerned. He prefers to shoot in black and white and the beauty of a day like this is that everything in the city is already monotone. He’s Oscar Marzaroli with a taste for photographing blood. Nice guy though.

Happy and glorious, long to rain over us, doggone Glasgow.

Roll on lunchtime

You really should be able to get bacon rolls with brown sauce on the NHS. Having woken on day two of authordom with a hangover courtesy of overly celebrating day one, there was only one possible cure. Nothing else, except the unavailable option of more sleep, would do the trick.

Bacon rolls are a panacea for all alcohol-induced illnesses with the possible exception of liver disease. I don’t know if it is the bacon, the roll or the brown sauce but I’m pretty sure that complete efficacy can only be achieved by the combination of all three. Scientists should do tests.

Look, it is a basic tenet of the National Health Service to provide medical treatment “free for all who want to use it”. I want to use it. I want not to have a hangover. I want bacon rolls. It’s why Nye Bevan set the NHS up in the first place.

Feeling politically disenfranchised as I am, I offer this opportunity and advice to all parties. Make bacon rolls with brown sauce available on prescription and you will get my vote and the votes of millions of others. I say all parties but this offer does not extend to the Conservatives. My hangover’s not that bad.

Falling trees

Do you think it’s unreasonable to want people to buy a book but not actually read it? I don’t think it’s too much to ask but my publishers just can’t get on board on this one. Simon & Schuster seem adamant that people reading the book is pretty much a mandatory part of the author-reader dynamic.

I’ve got to say that they are being unnecessarily difficult in this regard. I don’t see why people can’t just buy Random (available in all good bookshops from April 1) then leave it in a prominent place on their bookshelves with a mental note to read it one day because it is probably really good.

They could also tell their friends about it, on the understanding, of course, that they wouldn’t read it either. I’m thinking of it as a “must buy” book rather than a “must read”. It could be a whole new genre. Like trees falling in the forest without making a sound or whisky being bought by collectors who will never drink it.

Or else maybe I could just limit it to friends who could be trusted to say nice things about it even if they aren’t true. Hm, not sure my publishers would be happy with that option. And come to think of it, most of my friends will tell me if they think it is crap. That’s it settled, they aren’t getting to read it either.

As if things weren’t bad enough, I’ve now got to get out from behind my keyboard and go into the real world to meet real people. I’ve been told that there are five book signings lined up for the middle of April at various Waterstones stores. With my luck, some of those that the books are being signed for will want to read the thing. Can’t they just look at the signature? Some people are never happy.

Cold feet? Who, me? Nooooo.