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First British Edition Bantam (2000) |
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Birdman
| About The Author Mo Hayder was born in Essex. After leaving school at fifteen she worked as a barmaid, security guard, film-maker, hostess in a Japanese tearoom, educational administrator and teacher of English as a foreign language in Vietnam. She now writes full time and lives in London with her partner, Keith Quinn. In her Own Words Inspired by the author's own experiences of the darker side of life, Mo Hayder’s debut novel, Birdman, turns a spotlight on a sexual psychopathic killer operating in South East London. The subject matter is hard-hitting and she is learning to get used to people’s reactions. 'Yes, it's shocking, but not when compared to some of the real life crime I've researched. A lot of that is so gruesome you couldn't fictionalise it - it would sound ridiculously over the top.' Even so, Hayder likes to stick close to reality in her writing. To capture the authenticity of a murder incident room she spent time with the Met’s specialist team AMIP. 'These men and women deal with the most horrendous crimes on a day to day basis. It's astonishing that they manage to stay so down to earth.' Hayder particularly enjoyed researching the forensic detail. 'I've got a strong analytical streak. My father's a scientist so I've probably got that from him.' However, she didn't always follow her father's example. In fact she positively disliked growing up in a family of intellectuals. 'Academia seemed such a dusty, unreal world to me; as far as I was concerned real life, glamorous life, was out with the shop girls in the high street, fags all day and having unwanted pregnancies. When I got a police record, aged 14 (for her involvement with a fairground fight) I considered it a far greater achievement than getting a university place.' Not surprisingly she left home just before her 16th birthday and headed for London, surviving on part time bar jobs. In Birdman, the victims of the eponymous killer all live on the edges of society, and it was during these early years in London that Hayder encountered some of the people she would later use in her characterizations. 'My boyfriend was a session musician and that famous triumvirate of sex 'n' drugs 'n' rock and roll really exists - through him I met prostitutes, drugs dealers, strippers: all the faces that surfaced later in Birdman. The darker side of human nature is a constant theme in Birdman - even the lead character, Detective Inspector Jack Caffery, is deeply flawed - an obsessive who struggles to maintain a veneer of normality in his relationships. 'It's difficult for me to write 'feel good' characters,' Hayder admits. 'My writing is all about me wriggling my toes in life's gutters, excavating and examining the worst in the human condition.' She traces the genesis of this tendency to the torture and ritual murder of an acquaintance in Paddington. 'The real impact of this killing didn't hit me immediately. It wasn't until later, until what happened in Tokyo, that I began to brood over it.' After a short marriage, she hurriedly tutored herself through two A levels, sold her car, and bought a one way ticket to Japan. 'I was free falling - I had no idea what I was going to do out there - I think I vaguely imagined I might become a geisha. Luckily I was a breathtaking liar - I borrowed my brother's life story and told people I was an Oxford scholar. No-one checked up and soon I was writing pieces for the English language column of the local newspaper. I'd make up the most ludicrous stories, no-one spoke English so they didn't know any different. It started to make me think about my ability to spin a yarn.' Later she took a job working as a hostess in a Tokyo night club. One night one of the other hostesses was raped and subjected to a brutal attack. 'I was profoundly shocked. I was working 80 hour weeks, had almost no friends and was reading far too much Mishima, so I was ripe for being disturbed. I found myself obsessing about what the rapist had been thinking - why he had done it, what was in it for him. The Paddington murder came back to haunt me.' To this day, Hayder remains fascinated with the reason some men feel compelled to inflict brutality on others. 'It's a conundrum I will never unravel because I believe it operates deeper than at a societal level. I'll never understand it and so I'll always write about it. It's a compulsion.' The dark themes that had taken root reappeared later. After a spell travelling in Asia, Hayder went to e USA to do an MA in film making. She specialised in claymation. 'But no matter what film I set out to make, however nice and Wallace and Gromity I made the little clay characters, somehow they always ended up in a bloodbath. A friend was a psychiatrist at the CIA and after watching my films she treated me quite differently. I got the distinct impression she thought I was a timebomb just waiting to go off.' The films, however, saw Hayder make her mark on the independent film scene. 'I started winning awards - I was amazed. I thought "Ha! People like this stuff. There's something in this."' She headed back to London, took a job as a security guard and started writing in her spare time. Birdman was the result. As a first time novelist, she had no idea how Birdman would be received. 'Of course I had fantasies of huge advances, international sales, lots of attention,' she says. 'But I didn't really believe those could become a reality.' Quite a surprise, then, when Birdman became an overnight success in the publishing world, one of the most talked about novels at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and bought by publishers in 10 countries. 'It was an overnight success - one day I was patiently getting up and going to work, next day I was receiving champagne and flowers and getting frantic phone calls from journalists in Frankfurt. Talk about a head turner.' Hayder left her part time job and is now concentrating on her second book - another DI Jack Caffery novel which she says 'continues down the same path of human evil and skewed sexual fantasy.’ | Bibliography
Jan 00
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Birdman
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