John Rickards says he never sleeps. That could be a convenient affectation to suit his crime writer persona, but it's a theory that fits the facts. For one thing, there's a nervous energy to his writing that keeps his 'police procedural' thrillers lean and taut. For another, he's had two novels - Winter's End and The Touch of Ghosts - published, and he's still only 26. Book #3 is in the works, although if John's blog tells it straight, his editor is still playing bad cop with the last third.

Despite working in a genre whose golden age was more than 60 years ago, John is a child of the Internet generation. In Winter's End (WE) he acknowledges the help of members of the Mystery Writers Forum (how long I wonder, before a debut novelist credits GW with inspiration? - Ed) and he valiantly attempts to maintain his own website and blog. We talked to John about how the where the crime genre is at these days, and about his own precocious success.

Aside from his own work, John is also part of the crime writers' collective Criminal Minds, which sees him regularly evangelising about blood, gore and serial killers at libraries, conventions and children's parties across the country.

This guy isn't afraid to tell it how it is, and so to prove that we don't share the BBC's editorial policy we present our Q&A with John Rickards.


Great Writing: How did you get your first novel published?

John Rickards: I was basically a complete unknown back when WE was picked up by Penguin. I'd never had any fiction published at all, and although I was working as a journalist at the time, it was in very limited trade press rather than mainstream news. It is possible to make a name through getting shorts published, and I have several friends who went that route themselves, but my short stories used to (hopefully, not any more) suck arse, so I never even bothered trying that route to publication.

What I did have was an agent. While there are exceptions to the rule, mostly in the smaller presses, by and large these days it's next to impossible to get a publisher to read - let alone buy - an unsolicited manuscript. If it hasn't been ‘agented' first, chances are they won't even look at it. And, to be fair, now I've gone through the publishing process I know I would have been hopelessly lost without my agent. It's very, very handy having someone who knows how it all works, can handle the complicated stuff for you and who you know is there to fight your corner.

To land my agent, I went through the usual query letter/synopsis/sample application procedure with a book I wrote before WE. Copied names and details out of the Writers' & Artists' Yearbook at the library, and sent stuff off one at a time. Mine was the fourth I applied to, and it was very cool to get the letter asking to see the full manuscript, since if they ask for that having read your sample, you're in with a good chance of being signed. I didn't know any agents, had no special 'in' with the industry, but that's the same for almost everyone.

My agent helped with all kinds of suggestions and edits to WE before he shopped it around, and then sent it to ten different publishers to see if they were interested. The ones who liked it bid on it in a kind of auction process and then we came down to the final choice at the end.

The whole auction thing was pretty cool, as it goes. You go round to all these publishers' offices and they ply you with coffee, wine and free books and kiss your arse. Which for a 24 year-old scruffbag like me was very good fun.

GW: You've said that your first literary effort read like a dictionary of classic first-time writer mistakes. What are some of the traps that new writers fall into?

JR: Christ. There's an awful lot of them - I'll try to remember them, but if I miss any there's a very cool Tom Holt book, My Hero, that mentions most of them at one point or another.

Firstly, many first timers come up with plots or characters that are basically copies of movies they like or books they've read. There was a guy trying to get published I saw once on TV (not on a writing program; I think this was something about people going on blind dates and he just happened to describe his novel) who's book was about an asteroid hitting earth, causing massive global warming, so the Thames floods and a great white shark swims up it to cause mayhem. Which meant he'd seen Deep Impact/Armageddon, Waterworld and Jaws and had gone, probably unconsciously, cherry-picking from those stories.

The second classic error is another kind of copying, this time borrowing from the writer's own life and surroundings. It's very, very easy to make your main character yourself in your same surroundings and turn the thing into a thinly-veiled fantasy autobiography. Absolutely horrible. (For the record, my very first effort at university was basically a rip-off of the film Sneakers with a main character identical to me, living in my flat in Cardiff. It really, really sucked and I abandoned it halfway through.)

There are a couple of pitfalls with cliché and stereotypes. The first is to wildly overuse clichéd characters or plots without realising they've been done to death (the ‘hardbitten renegade cop with alcohol problems and a heart of gold', if you like). The second is to go too far the other way and try to be original for originality's sake (making the cop a former vicar who believes he's a psychic descendant of aliens and can talk to animals, if you like). Unless it adds something to your story, you shouldn't do it. In reality, you can't really avoid a lot of clichés - the conventions of types of storytelling force you into them. The trick is to make them cool or the stuff around them interesting. The old adage - "writing is about saying something new in an old way or saying something old in a new way" - applies.

There's bandwagon-jumping - "Harry Potter is very popular! I must write a book about a child with magic powers!" - but that's really just another kind of copying.

And there are technical errors - everything from ropy dialogue to absent or, worse yet, horribly overblown description, to pacing problems and story linearity.

There's more, but my brain's far too fogged by cheap gin, illegal drugs and all-day pornography marathons to remember it all...

I'm joking. I only drink expensive gin.

GW: Some might say the crime genre is formulaic. Is it difficult to bring a fresh perspective to a crime story?

JR: Bugger. That's what I get for rambling on with the last question. Crime is very formulaic, it's true. Like any genre, it has its conventions, which more or less have to be obeyed to satisfy the reader. Firstly, for instance, there has to be a crime of some sort. At the end, you also need to have explained something of what happened, how and why, otherwise it feels horribly unresolved. And generally you have three different perspectives to tell your crime story from - the investigator, the criminal or the victim.

But within those constraints you can have an awful lot of fun. For example, maybe there wasn't a crime, only the appearance of one or a mistaken belief about one that then leads to other events - Rear Window, if you like. You can get away with minimal explanation if it leaves the reader thinking about what might have been or coming up with their own explanation, or just marvelling at the cleverness of what you have revealed - think of The Usual Suspects for the latter, or (although it's not crime), Donnie Darko for the former. And then with the third restraint, perspective, you can mix and match, or combine things so, say, the investigator is the victim, or the criminal is the investigator, or whatever.

And then you're totally free to choose your style and content. Ken Bruen, for instance, writes in a wholly unique style, wildly different to, say, Ian Rankin. Lee Child and Ruth Rendell have totally different types of story that they tell and totally different content. There's such a broad spectrum to play with that it's very easy to write stuff your own way without stepping on too many toes. The world is very much your oyster.

GW: Must every crime story involve a 'whodunit'? How has the genre changed over its lifetime?

JR: No, absolutely not. American Psycho and books like it are told from the killer's point of view. The same with films like Heat or Collateral. There's no whodunit there - it's all about the characters involved, the changes within them and the interplay between them and the world they inhabit. In books like Ray Banks' The Big Blind, the crime doesn't happen until halfway through, and there's no mystery as to who did it and why - the story is all about the build up to it and the consequences after. Character rather than puzzle.

The genre itself is huge, and in a way you're asking the wrong guy about its history. I know something of its roots and I know where it is today, but there's a whole area from the 50s to the mid 80s where it's all very hazy.

And in some ways, it hasn't changed at all. There are occasional sudden shifts, the creation of a new sub-genre, but otherwise it's too gradual for me to tell. For instance, Raymond Chandler and his contemporaries effectively single-handedly created the noir and hardboiled genres out of nowhere in the 1930s. Before that, crime was all about the Holmes/Marple puzzle-type mystery - and possibly (here my knowledge breaks down), gangster stories originating out of Prohibition. Then we started to have the switch to the police procedural. Then, in the 80s, the serial killer/profiler subgenre exploded with Red Dragon, and more importantly, The Silence of the Lambs. Legal thrillers, forensics thrillers (the CSI-and-its-ilk-spawned bandwagon) and the like have all arisen at one time or another and in that respect crime is now a much wider genre than it was in its early days.

But then almost any genre and medium is fluid and changes constantly. Tastes change, preferences change, the readership changes. But there's so much breadth in it that there are dozens of sub-changes in each of its sub-genres.

GW: Can working in a particular genre pigeonhole you? Do you aspire to try your hand at other kinds of novel?

JR: To be honest, unless you become so big that you're a brand unto yourself, it's very hard to get pidgeonholed through working in one genre. There's nothing forcing me to write crime, and there are plenty of writers who have switch or who do switch around quite easily. Stephen King is the big one - after horror and fantasy, his first pulp novel has just been finished - but there are others. Michael Marshall (The Straw Men) started off writing sci-fi and speculative fiction.

I actually started writing in other genres. My agent picked me up based on a fantasy (admittedly, a fantasy gangster) novel that has never seen the light of day. And, in fairness, that's a good thing. I've got no burning desire to write anything apart from crime at the moment, and to be honest it does cover so much within the genre that I'm not likely to switch any time soon.

Though now I think about it, my contribution to the recent ‘Junk in the Trunk' online short story project was about a mad scientist's plan for world domination, so I may be talking out of my arse. In fact, forget everything I just said...

GW: There's an impatience and a certain anger to your editorial voice. Is this just you, or is there ever the temptation to play up to the persona of the hard-boiled Chandleresque crime writer?

JR: Hey, fuck you buddy!

Actually, no, that's just me. I'm like that - that is to say, I swear and bitch about stuff, as well as tell daft jokes and screw around as by and large I'm a friendly guy - in person. To be honest, most people are like that to one extent or another, but a lot of writers and people in the industry maintain a kind of professional persona and a separate private one, where they won't, say, swear. They'll talk about murdering (fictional) people for the entertainment of others, but they won't use bad language, which seems like an odd choice of priorities to me. But I can't complain really - everyone makes their own choices. It's just too much effort for me, maintaining the two sides, and to be fair I'd rather give people an honest impression of what I'm like so that if they ever meet me in person I don't come as a horrible shock to the system.

And I'm never tempted to do the hardboiled writer thing. I don't smoke, though I do drink, and I'm too young and too friendly to be hardbitten and moody. It just doesn't work. Nothing worse than being terribly unconvincing at something like that...

GW: How disciplined are you in your writing schedule?

JR: I don't have any special schedule. If I manage to overcome my natural laziness and stop screwing around long enough to start typing, I take it from there. Contrary to what you might think, it's no harder starting a book from scratch than it is picking up where you left off the day before. It's always just a case of getting where you've got to go next.

GW: Which works influence your own writing?

JR: I tend to be a one-book reader. That is, I've got a bunch of books, but mostly only one by each author (one Karin Slaughter, one Michael Connelly, and so on). There aren't many who've made it to two or more.

Michael Marshall (Smith) is a firm favourite, mostly for Spares, along with Chuck Palahniuk and William Gibson - especially Pattern Recognition. On the crime side, I've read all but one of Raymond Chandler's books and they're all top notch once you get used to the 40s slang.

I watch more films than I read books - terrible admission for a novelist. My friends are kinda like the guys in High Fidelity, only with movies rather than music. Sad, but true. Crime films (except gangster flicks) are comparatively thin on the ground, but the pick of the bunch has to be Memento. Chris Nolan's subsequent movie, Insomnia, is also top-notch. For lighter criminal doings, Grosse Pointe Blank is an absolute classic. Unforgiven I suppose could count as a crime film (even though it's a western), in which case it would certainly make my list. Like Heat it's a brilliant piece of character-led conflict.

GW: Does crime fiction make us feel safe? Should it adapt in response to an increasingly violent real-life society?

JR: The short, short version is no, and no. Crime fiction is entertainment.
While knowing something about the way the police operate, say, might give us greater understanding and appreciation for the job they do, and thereby make us feel safe, it can also give us unrealistic expectations and we're outraged when they're not met, making us feel less safe.

As for matching changes in society - how violent we are is debatable, and apart from mirroring changes in the settings we place our stories in if we want them to be realistic, I don't see any other reason for adapting in that way. If we want to make stories more or less gruesome, say, we're free to do so, but there's no obligation.

GW: Do tales of scary murderers contribute to the 'climate of fear' propagated by the media?

JR: Hahaha! In short, no. I mean, who is really, actually scared that the world is full of Lecter-ish psychopaths? Especially given the greater volume of stuff the news media covers, and the usual convention in crime writing that the good guy catches the bad in the end.

Violent and gritty crime fiction's been popular since the days of Chandler and co in the 1930s, and I seriously doubt it has any more impact today than it did back then. Fiction's fiction. Anyone who has trouble differentiating between fiction and reality needs professional help.

GW: What makes the perfect bad guy?

JR: A good bad guy is one that engages us emotionally, one way or another. That we can relate to on some level, no matter how bizarre and horrific their actions. Lecter's a fine example of this - although he's an almost inhuman monster whose motivations and actions are never explained, he is urbane, witty and refined, qualities we can admire and which we find attractive. He has an allure to him that draws us to him; even when he's something to fear, we can't help rooting for him just a little. A bad guy who turns to crime to get revenge, or someone who we can't help but pity for the things that have driven them over the edge, or someone who's incredibly normal and everyday but who has this evil streak, they're all good bad guys.

Depth, I suppose you could say. Something to make them more than pantomime villains.

GW: What advice do you have for aspiring writers struggling to get published?

JR: Actually, the hardest part I found about getting published is having the stamina to stick through the long process of application, rejection, as well as the endless self-improvement and having to accept that what you're currently producing is a load of shit. Redraft, rewrite, send off another query letter. If you can make it through all that and stick with it long enough to produce something that's cool enough, and you make sure you pitch it as professionally as possible, it should eventually find a home. Churning out an amalgamated rip-off of half a dozen of the summer's blockbuster movies or a barely-disguised fantasy autobiography and sending it off with a query letter written in ballpoint in which you claim it'll be a sure-fire bestseller and they'd be stupid to pass on it will, I'm afraid, get you nowhere.

John Rickards' novels, Winter's End and The Touch of Ghosts are available from all good bookshops, and a few bad ones.