Crash: Damaged People and Wrecked Lives.
An Interview with Jack Curtis.
NB. This is a long document. It may be better to save and read off line.

There could possibly be no more fittting place or time to re - run a conversation with Jack Curtis than in a King's Cross pub on a hellish January night waiting for the last train North. In his latest novel Curtis uses just such a venue to play out the entrapment of vagrants by his deranged, but plausible anti hero; The "Confessor" of the title - a man who likes to watch life drift into death and who is keen to find someone with whom to share his strange pleasure. As I leaf through the novel and the night gets blacker and more ugly and the pub slowly empties I begin to eye the door nervously... wondering who the next customer will be.... maybe a bright , personable young man willing to offer someone a roof over their head for the night.........?
Under the pseudonym of Jack Curtis, the poet David Harsent has written six thrillers. Dark, brooding and violent, the Curtis novels (particularly The Confessor) are from the same tradition as the Derek Raymond factory novels and more recent works such as John B. Spencer's Perhaps She'll Die and Ken Bruen's Rilke on Black. They are thrillers with a predominantly urban setting which are concerned with the nature of evil and its manifestations. Apart from dealing with the big questions, Curtis's novels display a rare skill at manipulating tension and are one hell of a good read!
The following converation took place in January at the Orion offices in London.
I wondered if you could start by letting us have a bit of background. Why writing? Why thrillers?
I started writing commercially in 1983 but prior to that I had a reputation as a poet (and still have I hope). I was working in publishing. My day jobs were book selling first, then publishing. And I was getting no writing time, publishing works so that people in publishing can barely find the time to read! So I was getting deeply distressed by all of this business. It was a very flashy life style, but in the end I thought I’ve got to stop trying to earn a living like this. I’ll have to try something else. I was editorial director of an outfit called Arrow, which publish quite a lot of thrillers. I like thrillers, I’d always read thrillers with pleasure, very few bits of entertainment fiction compare to thrillers, and I’d edited quite a lot of thrillers. So I thought why not a thriller? So I gave back the Concord tickets, I gave back the BMW 5 series, (TW. Publishing pays so well?) and my father tried to have me certified. I gave back the expense account and wrote a book called Crow’s Parliament, which I gave to my agent and said, "What do you think?" And he said - "I like the storyline.I think that this could do well." I said "well, it’ll have to because I haven’t got any money left". I’d run out of money almost completely. I had just about enough to let me write the book. The first couple of offers on the book were really depressing - I remember walking down the tow path between Hammersmith Bridge and Barnes Village and thinking "God, I’m going to have to look for another job!". And then suddenly all sorts of things happened, it was a subject of an auction here and it was a subject of an auction in the States and the film rights sold, and so I bought a flat and installed a rather ancient manual typewriter (I’ve got a PC now) and started work on the second one which was called "Glory". And that was, I think, six books ago.
How about the poetry, how did that start? That's if you don't mind saying a bit about it?
Well no, I don’t mind talking about that at all. I don’t know if it will be massively interesting to the people who visit Tangled Web but (TW. Well, you never know - I find it interesting...) Well, I published my first pamphlet of poetry - how many years ago - 1968. My first book, Violet Country, was published in '69 by O.U.P ,under my real name which as you doubtless know, is David Harsent, and it got a good reception and got an Arts Council Poetry Bursary. That's when I quit bookselling, on the basis that I’d got a small lump sum. And I published seven volumes of poetry. I’ve got a new one ready for the press, which I can’t plug because I haven’t got a title anyway, but it won’t be coming out 'till this time next year. My versions in English of a collection of poetry by a Bosnian-Serb poet called Goran Simich are coming out for O.U.P.in March called Scrimping to the Graveyard . All poets need day jobs. It’s impossible. Most teach, some work in publishing as indeed I did , so the only way that I figured that I could actually have a balanced life where I wasn’t having to give myself over completely to a job, was to run my own life. I remember writing to Ted Hughes shortly after I quit my last job in publishing, and he said something like "Stick it for six months and you’ll never work for a governor again!!" And that was about right! So I kind of have this sort of rather wonderful existence, I think anyway, where I’m Jack Curtis some of the year, and I’m David Harsent for some of the year, and it’s perfect because you can’t write poetry all of the time. You couldn’t write three thrillers a year either. I mean that wouldn’t work, even if you had the emotional capacity for it and the sheer staying power for it, the market wouldn’t tolerate it. So it’s a perfect balance really. It means I can be who I am.
do you see any diffrences in worth between the Poetry and Thriller writing?
No, absolutely none at all. Because they’re different things. One is one thing and one is another, you couldn’t ask poetry to compete with the novel which is what the thriller is after all. I’m trying to think of a thriller I particularly admire. Maybe Stallion Gate by Martin Cruz Smith - a brilliant book, and it would be impossible to say "Is that a better book than a collection of poems by Robert Frost?" . They’re not comparable. It‘s a different way of reading. There are good and bad thrillers, there are good and bad poets - that’s the way one judges really, not across the genre.
George V. Higgins (among others) has often been quoted as expressing distaste at the fact that he is classified as a "Crime" writer. Do you have any sympathy with this view?
He wants to be thought of a novelist does he? (TW.Yes) Well there’s this long discussion about ...people for a long time have been championing P.D.James and Ruth Rendell, (mostly when she’s writing as Barbara Vine) and others; but James in particular, saying it’s cruel that they should be taken to be part of a genre because it disqualifies them from not only certain practical things like the Booker prize, but it also disqualifies them in the minds of potential readers who might not read a crime novel or a thriller but who might read if they weren’t deceived by the notion of a genre or felt excluded by the notion of a genre, or offended. But I don’t really think that that’s a very rational argument. It’s an argument that got raised quite some time ago by people like Julian Symons and the CWA in general, because they began to feel , or have felt for a long time, that crime writers were in a ghetto and that they had every right to be taken as seriously as any contemporary novelist. And of course they do, except that you have to remember that they are writing inside a genre with conventions, and other forms of fiction don’t necessarily inflict those restrictions on themselves, if indeed they are an infliction. It’s simply the way that thriller writing works. I don’t think there’s any point in invoking Crime and Punishment and saying, "Well, is this a novel?" It’s a pointless argument. One knows what Crime and Punishment is. And you can tell if a book’s a thriller or has a puzzle factor... whether it might call itself a thriller or not. Martin Amis’ Money; would it call itself a thriller? No it wouldn't. It’s a fine novel, you know, a tremendous one, but it doesn’t have the set up that a lot of thrillers and crime novels have. The notion of a continuing hero, especially a cop, is a set up. Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta - is a set up. The means by which she solves the crime, what she does for a living , the fact that we get to hear about it in every book, it’s a set up. We know it is, that’s what thrillers of that sort do.
I don’t see why crime writing should think badly of itself, because it has set rules. A sonnet has set rules, it’s part of the deal. If you don’t want to have that then you must get rid of Adam Dalgliesh, who ought to have been pensioned off in any case about 25 years ago, (laughs) and then you won’t have this massively senior policeman who writes Nobel Prize winning poetry, going out on the collar, and how relieved we’ll all be. (TW. I’m sure it happens all the time). Ah yes, chief constables are always out there nicking people. Or if they don’t do that of course they go and see their aunties who live in a converted oast house somewhere in Suffolk and knock into a murder. Everyone knows what’s going on with that convention - this is a thriller - this is a crime novel. I love the conventions of the genre, I think that they’re a staple, almost like the conventions of the 19th Century novel. What they permit you to do is to have these enormous characters and enormous motives, and sin and redemption and that’s what The Confessor’s about: The Confessor’s about sin and redemption. And it’s part of the deal to have that structural set-up just as the 19th century novel tended to have a structural set-up which readers identified with and understood.
The Confessor (like the other Jack Curtis novels) is a very dark book. There are no easy solutions. You tend to write about damaged criminals and damaged enforcers. I also understand youre poetry is similarly dark..........
Well it’s obviously just the way my mind works. I don’t set out to write dark books about people with dents in their lives, so it must just be instinct that takes me in that direction. Or a curiosity about such people, or an interest in such dents perhaps.
Is that why you read crime fiction?
It probably is one of the reasons I read crime fiction. I don’t read a lot of fiction to be honest with you. I read my fair share, but if I read 8 books a month, 2 of them might be fiction.
I wrote a book called Conjure Me which was sort of my Crash really. Once I started to write this book, or to fiddle with it, I found that what I was doing was that I was writing a thriller about what thrillers normally offer up as a side order; sex and violence. You know there’s a lot of talk about sex and violence in thrillers but it’s normally a side issue; it’s not the real thing. The real thing is usually the plotting in a strange kind of a way. Anyway, I found I was writing a book that was absolutely about nothing else except sex and violence. That’s not to say that it featured sex and violence, but it used the same kind of convention as Crash. Crash isn’t a book about red cars, it’s a book about wrecked people and I think that’s what Conjure Me was doing. It was the distillation of the dark aspect of Jack Curtis thrillers and it needed to get distilled before I could write Mirrors Kill and most importantly, The Confessor. The Confessor's a somewhat different book to any of the others, it’s totally unreliant on superstructures of plot that the reader unravels, there’s very little of something happening on page 27 which is paid off on page 312. I’ve done that and it’s fun to do. But there’s none of that - there’s detection OK - but really, it’s about people as opposed to the movement of money, or the movement of arms or motives that have to do with greed. It’s a book that’s about a head to head relationship between two damaged people, one who happens to be a cop and one who happens to be a killer. And that’s really the book. There are other things going on inside the book but I think by writing Conjure Me I had to clear the decks and find a way out of that plot superstructure where you know maybe the people who are really behind this are the secret service, or maybe the people who are really behind this are the government because in all the previous books none of that really mattered. What really mattered was the relationship between people. In Crows Parliament it had to do with the relationship between Guerny who’s the guy who gets people out of kidnap situations and the boy that he’s trailing, and the woman who betrays him. The same with Glory: Glory was really about a man who liked to have power over people, particularly over women, and there was a reason for him doing what he was doing and again it was a political reason but in fact it was a fabrication. It was quite a good idea actually, but if I could have gotten away without using it, it would’ve been fine. Sons of the Morning was a slightly different kind of book - about a policeman who’s trying to get his marriage back. Actually, as opposed to people meeting, falling in love, having an affair and emerging at the other end having found the villain, this started off with disruption and breakdown and so on. Again this was a book about obsession and a desire to own; a desire to control, and there was a little shiny steel superstructure in the plot in the background. But then came Conjure Me, this kind of wild, black, trip through diseased minds. Then Mirrors Kill. In Mirrors Kill I used all I’d learned in Conjure Me about the darkness in people just being people.
Michael Winner once asked me to write a film for a million quid and I said "What are you going to do it on your American Express Card, Michael?" and he said "No, I just want a film that doesn’t cost much money." and I said "Well how would I do that?" and he said, "Well, not many cars blowing up - just people creeping around." I suddenly realised that he’d got it absolutely right because people creeping round is what I’m good at, you know? - there are a lot of people creeping around in Mirrors. But, again, I wanted something to do with the international arms trade. But it wasn’t really what the book was about, what it was was a peg to hang it on. It was really a novel about twins; about twinship and about a lethal lack of consideration for anybody else. I still use the word purity with The Confessor. It's a book which relies on no kind of plot props of any kind and it just goes under its own impetus, and I’m much happier with that than any other book, for that reason. I’m not saying that I've had a talent injection or anything! It’the fact that the book has its own kinesis and just goes forward under it’s own impulse rather than being cranked along by aspects of a plot which might be extraneous, or be there as a kind of machine that makes things work. It makes me happier.
So lets get to the nuts and bolts, how do you separate poetry and ficton in terms of work?
. I don’t write poetry when I’m writing fiction, and I don’t write fiction when I’m writing poetry. I simply start a Jack Curtis and write till I finish and I don’t do anything else in the meantime. It does involve quite careful planning. I mean, if a telly script comes up I have to think "I can’t turn this down". But not desperately careful planning. I can usually give myself the time I need for a Jack Curtis and once I finish the first draft in a sense then I can do anything because the rewrites are a mechanical event. I mean you’ve got the thing there, it’s sculpted out, it’s just a matter of fiddling here and fiddling there looking for mistakes. So once the first draft’s finished I can then combine that with doing other things.
How about the research side?
Well, I’m very lucky, I’ve got some great research contacts, in fact there are three acknowledged in The Confessor. I’ve got a senior policeman who lets me sit in murder squad investigation rooms, plus scary things like showing me scene of crime videos. He is tremendously kind and patient and generous with his time. And then there’s a family friend who’s a senior anaesthetist who I can call on for just about any kind of medical info I need and then Ian West who’s a pathologist , the very senior pathologist in this country, who again is happy to have his brain picked just to make sure one gets it right. But I don’t think absolute accuracy is that crucial quite frankly. I think the imagination is often a better researcher than absolute precision but you need to know the area of operation because you need to know where to go next. If you don’t know the first thing about a subject, you can’t write the first sentence you need or the first two or three or four sentences that you need and you might spend a day with someone, talking to them, and it all comes down to a couple of sentences. But you couldn’t have taken the book any further unless you have those couple of sentences in your locker. So it’s crucial for that. For Sons of the Morning I spent two days with people at Sothebys finding about art theft, how to do it and how not to do it and so on and in fact in the end I just skated through it. But you might just say, "He threw a switch and this cut off the such and such". It’s one short sentence, but you’ve got to know what it entails and, in the end, if you do alright the research doesn’t show. But it’s crucial to have such people, even if you want to know how long it takes someone to die when they’ve taken an overdose and what they’ll die of. Not because you need to say so in the book but because you need to know what’s going to happen next. Can your hero go away for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 2 hours. You just need to know. The rest is up to you. The rest is writing.
How about your heroes - do you ever feel like bringing them back?
I’m continually asked about that. I mean I usually tend to leave my principal characters in such a wrecked state at the end of books, I mean they’re so fucked up you know that the notion (laughs)........Robin Culley I think will come back. But somehow, I don’t really feel the need to hang on to my Adam Dalgliesh or my Inspector Wexford. I think that’s one of the true signs of a genre novel in a way, not that I’m knocking it. There’s nothing wrong with genre fiction, but one of the sure signs of genre fiction is that you have recurring heroes, and I tend to shy away from that. I don’t know why, I think it’s just that maybe the fiction as opposed to the crime fiction aspects of my books does sort of bring the characters to what seems to be a definitive end, a definitive loose end quite often but nonetheless the place we ought to leave them.
What about Bullen in Mirrors Kill?
You know, originally I killed Anne (the girlfriend) off. She died in Sarajevo - I killed her off and there was a tremendous howl of dissent from the publishers who said "You mustn’t kill her, you mustn’t kill her, you mustn’t kill her!!!!", and so strong was this howl that I began to feel that maybe a chill came over the book at that stage from which it didn’t quite recover. I think actually now I was right to kill her but I don’t think it matters dreadfully. I think that the only reason was that when he’s at the airport going home - when he’s kissed Paula off as it were - the fact that he’s been incapable of committing to Anne but now that his mother’s dead in a way it’s easier for him to make a commitment - the notion that he’s just about ready in this kind of grudging way - he’s sending these postcards to this woman from various locations saying "Hold on honey" and the last moment in the book is when he sends a postcard from Kennedy airport saying "I’m on my way home" - and the last line in the book is that he thought he’d leave it to her to make the first move - and she’s dead - I mean the irony is tragic. I think it was felt that it was too black, but that blackness is a Jack Curtis moment and I think it would have fitted. I’m sorry that I was persuaded out of it but it’s not enormous, it doesn’t pull the rug out from under the book in any kind of way, it’s just that in one version she’s dead and in another version she’s deeply damaged and has been through a terrible experience and probably isn’t going to have him back anyway. At least in my view. So we’re pretty much in the same position.
How much pressure do you get from editors?
Not much, I mean generally speaking, publishers, editors, Rosie Cheetham here at Orion are pretty content to say "Well it’s your book", and I think that’s right. When I was in publishing there were editors who would try to manufacture a book. They’d get the book and say "This is the raw material - now how do I make it a bestseller?" It all had to do with the reputation of the editor rather than the book itself and they’d ask for certain changes that had to do with what they thought was marketable and what the sales people were telling them was marketable and that kind of interference is intolerable. It’s not anything at all, it’s disguised ambition in which the author is a disposable object. But that certainly isn’t the case at Orion and it wasn’t the case at Bantam either. I mean, you need an intelligent reader to look at your first draft, and say that "This doesn’t work at all", or "I don’t think this comes off". It’s as if you’re showing it to a friend. All writers are going to have somebody they show their work to and I’ve been lucky in that respect. There can be quite considerable pressure. I remember once when I was in publishing I got some author to change his name, because I thought his name was wrong , I’m so ashamed of this, it’s one of those things you wake up in the middle of the night fifteen years later thinking "What a bastard I am, why did I do that". The awful thing was he did change his name. He changed it to a version of what his name was, and gave himself a new Christian name, so he kept one of his names and my theory for this - well I won’t bore you - but it was a marketing theory that I had, and for some reason or other, I must have been in the grip of some sales marketing frenzy at the time. I persuaded this poor son of a bitch to change it and it was his only fucking book, the only book he ever wrote, and it hasn’t got his name on. It’s terrible - I’m so ashamed at myself. If he’s out there with a PC he’ll know who he is and I apologise. Because I always resented it massively in other people and, I think I edited the book rather well. In other words I tried to be what a good editor should be which is somebody standing at your elbow occasionally making a suggestion and hoping that the suggestion’s a good one and that it works for the book. Bugger selling, you know, it works for the book. And I think I did do that. I think that’s the kind of editor I was, but I just have a bee in my bonnet about his name and I’m really sorry about that. It’s certainly not the kind of editing that I approve of or indeed have been subjected to.
Where did your name come from? Jack Curtis?
My grandfather, my mother’s father, was called Jack Curtis. John Curtis was an amateur dramatics fanatic who ran an antique shop just outside Colchester. He looked exactly like Paul Newman - I’ve got photographs, he looked exactly like him and he was a great guy. Apparently much liked locally and he died of TB at the age of 34 or 5. When I was looking around for a pseudonym, I thought "Well this is perfect - Jack Curtis - it feels as if it belongs" if you’re going to have a pseudonym, it’s necessary that it feels as if it belongs. And it does. I never knew him, but my grandmother, his wife, more or less brought me up and I was devoted to her and so it felt right. It’s also quite a good thriller writer’s name isn’t it?
Quite!
The Confessor was published by Orion in January at £16.99 ISBN (1 85797 762 9)
and, at the time of writing all the other Jack Curtis novels are in print in the UK and available in Paperback editions.