Dust and Desire (38 page)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

C
onrad Williams is the author of seven novels, four novellas and a collection of short stories.
One
was the winner of the August Derleth award for Best Novel (British Fantasy Awards 2010), while
The Unblemished
won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel in 2007 (he beat the shortlisted Stephen King on both occasions). He won the British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer in 1993, and another British Fantasy Award for Best Novella (
The Scalding Rooms
) in 2008. He lives in Manchester.

AUTHOR Q&A

What inspired you to write this novel?

In the early Noughties I heard of an anthology Maxim Jakubowski was putting together with M. Christian, a
Blade Runner
-ish book called
Future Cops
. I came up with an idea for a story called ‘Footprint on Nowhere Beach.’ My protagonist was a guy called Rad Hallah. I had an enormous amount of fun writing that story, and was considering writing more in the world I’d created, but in the end I thought it would be easier to write something set in the here and now. Rad Hallah was slightly too exotic a name and so he became Joel Sorrell. Although he’s pretty much no different from that original story. I was living in London when I first had the idea for
Dust and Desire
. I was at St Pancras and I was thinking, pretty much as The Four-Year-Old does, that everything you needed was here. You could live here. The story grew from that, and also was inspired by some colourful characters I remembered from my life in Warrington: bouncers and bodybuilders and what they might get up to.

Joel is a very damaged character, but also darkly humorous. How did he introduce himself to you?

The characters that matter to me in crime and thriller fiction are all flawed in some way. The unnamed Detective Sergeant in Derek Raymond’s
Factory
novels is profane and obstinate, Will Graham possesses traits of the thing he wants to defeat, James Bond is a blunt tool, a womanising bastard, Scylla in
Marathon Man
and
Brothers
is an expert killing machine crumbling under the sense of his own mortality. Dave Robicheaux is a recovering alcoholic. I wasn’t a very rebellious teenager, so Joel’s puerile sense of humour and disdain of authority is pretty much me dealing with some thirty-year-old frustrations.

The Four-Year-Old is a very disturbing antagonist. Do you think that serial killers make for the best perpetrators?

The reading public’s appetite for serial killers doesn’t look like abating. But I wanted to come up with a killer who has an agenda beyond what the voices in his head are telling him. I wanted his reasoning to be the kind of thing a reader might think about and decide, well actually, he’s got a point. I’m not looking for sympathy for my devil, but I certainly felt for him. What he’s doing, in his eyes, is a noble thing, the right thing.

What kind of research did you do while writing this novel?

Lots of stuff form the unnecessarily picky (what kind of cheap cars would be on offer to hire from a Liverpool car rental company?) to the nerdy and pointless (what kind of ships operated out of the Liverpool docks a hundred years ago?) to the mundane (wandering around St Pancras looking for hiding places and seeing what shops were in business). I also had to look into exercise routines and weight-lifting. I think the vast majority of research is unecessary actually. But it’s fun to do. I could have made everything up and I doubted it would have mattered.

Joel is driven by the search for his missing daughter. Do you think that crime protagonists need to have a dark past?

No, but it helps me. I wanted to write about a punished character, someone with a nightmarish history, a knottier, chewier kind of character with no black and white sides but lots of edges, lots of shades of grey. Someone who is driven, and good at what he does, but is fallible, knows moments of weakness and fear, but has to go on because his daughter is out there.

Do you think that your background in horror has influenced the Joel Sorrell books?

Without doubt. I think there’s much to be said about the crime/horror fusion that has been going on probably since Thomas Harris’s
Red Dragon
appeared in 1982. You only have to look at how the covers of crime and thriller novels have developed over the past thirty years. You could put a horror novel alongside a crime novel and have a tough time deciding which was which. And there really isn’t much difference. Crime is horror. I want to push Joel into some dark, dark territory. The only real difference is that I’m not entertaining any supernatural strands in these books.

If you could have written any other crime novel, which would it be and why?

It’s an odd subject, because my idea of crime might be someone else’s idea of horror and vice versa. I don’t see much of a difference, as I’ve said. I like the books that have a transgressive feel about them. Recent favourites include Michael Connelly’s
The Poet
, Louise Welsh’s
The Cutting Room, The Eros Hunter
by Russell Celyn Jones and
Others of My Kind
by James Sallis. But I would have to choose either
Red Dragon
by Thomas Harris or
I Was Dora Suarez
by Derek Raymond. Both are the kind of book you put down with fingernail indentations on the cover.

Who are your favourite crime writers and why?

Derek Raymond, James Sallis, James Lee Burke, Thomas Harris. Joel Lane, who was best known for his supernatural stories, but was moving into crime fiction before his untimely death. For reasons I’ve already touched upon, but also because they write beautifully, from the heart, and tell great stories.

Who would be present at your fictional character dinner party?

James Bond, Ignatius O’Reilly, Danny Torrance, Clarice Starling, Agaton Sax, Thomas ‘Babe’ Levy.

Where and how do you write? Do you have any unconventional habits?

At the moment I’m lucky enough to have my own study. This might change as my three boys grow ever bigger. Sometimes I’ll nip out to the coffee shop in the village if I have to get a chunk of work done fast (fewer distractions). I have to wash my hands before I sit down to write (some would say I really ought to be washing them afterwards too, if not during). And I like to listen to lyricless music (so classical, jazz, soundtracks, ambient). I like to write longhand with a nice fountain pen containing some funky ink colour, or directly into a dedicated writing application (Scrivener and Ulysses are current favourites).

Do you prefer print or e-books?

Print. I own a Kindle because I thought it would be handy to carry lots of books away with me on holiday, but I almost never use it. I prefer the heft and texture of a block of paper between my fingers.

What is the most beautiful book you own?

There’s a limited edition of Clive Barker’s
Weaveworld
from Earthling Publications, which is rather beautiful. And an illustrated edition of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
I’m fond of. But I think the book that means the most to me is a copy of
Treasure Island
(Paul Hamlyn, 1967) with a gorgeous deep green cover. It contains some hair-raising illustrations by Josef Hochman. My dad gave it to me for my second birthday. It’s getting a bit tatty now, but it’s the one book I own that constantly turns my head.

How many Joel Sorrell books will there be and are you writing any other books?

I’d love to write many more Joel novels. I always wanted to create a series character, and I think he has legs, although part of me wants to do something unspeakably cruel to him in
Hell is Empty
, which will be the third book in the series. I’m also working on a ghost story set in France, informed by events that took place in 1944. It’s kind of
The Shining
meets
Eye of the Needle.

Can you give us the one-line pitch for the next Joel Sorrell novel
, Sonata of the Dead
?

Members of a secretive militant writers group are being murdered and Joel Sorrell must infiltrate it to find out why when he discovers that his daughter is involved in their activities and next on the killer’s list.