Many of your previous novels have been grounded in decidedly rural environments, or have been set within relatively small villages or towns; so what inspired you to write a novel set in—and, in a sense, very much about—a conurbation as large and varied as London?
I realised that I’d been orbiting it all my life, and that I was fascinated by the use of space in it. There’s something extraordinary about how you can actually feel in some particular places where one cultural tectonic plate meets another. This series of books are about how population density and the adaptation of cities to their inhabitants creates something tangible. Civic planning equals magic!
Given the UK capital’s current popularity among fantasy writers—most notably China Miéville (Kraken and Un Lun Dun) and Ben Aaronovitch (Rivers of London), which also focuses on a small Metropolitan Police team dealing with magic and the supernatural—were you at all worried about finding a style and voice that was sufficiently distinct to make this particular London your own?
Actually, no, because these books are me getting back to writing in my natural, offhand, voice, the voice I naively used in my Doctor Who books, decades ago, and have rather abandoned to artifice since. This is me just writing. And it feels great. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, to an outside observer anyway, they’ve done better than anything else I’ve done. There’s clear blue water between the approaches of me and Ben, but honestly that’s just accidental. I’m relieved there is, though.
Why do you think you stopped using that “natural, offhand, voice”; were you deliberately stepping away from your Doctor Who and Bernice Summerfield novels, or was it simply because of the books you wanted to write at the time?
I think some of it was an over-reaction on my part, thinking that I couldn’t be good enough to write a ‘proper novel’, so I had to change somehow. And some of it was that the markets I was pursuing needed different voices. I feel like I’ve wasted decades.
I think my favourite lines in the novel are: “You only get one question, so don’t waste it on physics,” and the main characters’ frequent refrain of “We don’t do theology.” In the novel you seem to be playing with ideas about how belief and memory can shape our perceptions of the physical world around us; why does this area interest you?
I think there is a dimension of perception to the physical world, that the ‘psychosocial hypothesis’ (as it’s called in UFO circles), is valid for a lot of things. I’m actually a sceptic (with a c) about much that’s called supernatural, but I also believe in a lot of impossible things. At least I believe they can happen sometimes. I’ve had some rather Dickian (or, indeed, Dickish) contact experiences, and I feel that insisting upon four dimensions, of the many available and unseen to us, as the entire world is a case of us humans protesting too much. I prefer to frame all of this in the language of physics, because I feel that’s our best walking stick, but I also do religion. And a bit of Wicca at weekends.
Although undoubtedly brutal, violent things happen to many characters in the book, I felt that the strongest, most visceral scare came from the idea of there being someone not just “stealing away” children—and killing them, horribly—but also capable of ensuring that their parents didn’t even remember that they had had children. As a relatively recent father yourself, is that the worst thing you could imagine happening to you now?
I’ve imagined a lot of terrible things in the same general area. I wrote the first book before I was a parent, but the hormonal (and actually physical) changes of being a parent also re-wire your brain, so harm to children is now an urgent thing, a call to action. (US TV drama makes so much sense now I have a family!)
Although Detective Inspector Quill is white, male and hitting middle age, the other main characters making up investigative team ‘Operation Toto’ are diverse in terms of their gender, ethnic and social backgrounds and sexual orientation. How deliberate was that on your part?
Utterly deliberate. You can’t just leave a book out at night and have gay men grow in the pages like mustard and cress. You have to *choose* to have anyone who’s not white, straight, etc, in there, because those conditions are still the unconscious default. I think all this ‘they just happen to be gay…’ are weasel words for ‘shut up shut up shut up!’ I don’t ‘just happen to be’ straight, it’s a major part of my life, it’s a part of what defines me, and I think that’s the case for all orientations. And “my characters just happened to be” anything is ridiculous. I wrote this, I chose how everything was. I think authors should stop trying to apologise for deliberately choosing diversity. “They’re not there in a gratuitous way”: I have no idea what that means. What would the opposite of that actually be like? How does one put anything in a novel in a gratuitous way, unless one’s admitting to writing a terrible book?
In the Acknowledgements you mention that the main characters were first created for a possible TV series, but that their story had “changed out of all recognition”; are you happier with how they are now, and that at last they’re ‘out there’ in the world?
Yes, hugely. I’m tremendously satisfied with this book. I rather regret mentioning the TV series, actually, because it’s led to a few reviewers thinking they can detect that in the pages. But no, that’s just how I write novels. The characters are like five (yes, five) parts of who I am, so their voices feel natural to me, and I feel I can always use that little orchestra to tell any story I want to tell. That’s a great pleasure.
Do you worry that your novels are viewed unfairly because of your work in other fields, most notably television and comics?
A little, I think. I hope that’ll go away. I think sometimes people just need to find something clever to say, and that’s an easy line.
No spoilers, but the epilogue clearly suggests potential for a sequel, perhaps many. Are you hopeful of that?
Absolutely. I’m about a week away from sending in the sequel, and I hope to make an ongoing series (with one case solved in every book), like a long running crime series, with the backstory getting gradually revealed, a bit more every time. I hope also to have years in which I can release non-series books, because I’ve got one of those in dry dock as well.
Have you a confirmed title yet for the next book—and, indeed, the series as a whole?
The series as a whole is called Shadow Police. The working title for the second book is Hell is for Londoners.
First published in Interzone #245, March/April 2013.
