Stephen Booth Interview 2009

In April last year Stephen Booth came to Scarthin Books to sign copies of the newly published Kill Call.  Bob Cartwright called in as well to get his copy signed and arranged to do the interview with Stephen which is reproduced below:

Where do you live? And why?

A rural part of North Nottinghamshire. I moved here 20 years ago for my job, when I worked in newspapers. But I’m originally from Lancashire.

Why did you choose to base your books in the Peak District? It’s not exactly a high crime area, and that must restrict the kind of cases you can take up in your books?

There’s more going than you might realise! And crimes in a rural area are often more interesting – the reasons for them can be complex, and go back for generations. But the Peak District has lots of other advantages too. For a start, it has all those wonderful atmospheric locations, a diverse range of settings in a small area, and thousands years of history, much of it visible right there in the landscape. On top of that are all the pressures and conflicts that come from being the second most visited national park in the world. This is because the area isn’t really remote, but has big cities right on the doorstep, and the people of Sheffield and Manchester treat it as their own back yard. This helps me to explore the social divide between rural and urban Britain. There’s even an inherent symbolism in the two geological halves of the Peak District – the White Peak and the Dark Peak, with pretty limestone villages on one hand, and stretches of bleak, empty moorland and twisted gritstone tors on the other. White and dark, good and evil. For all these reasons and more, it was a perfect setting for my kind of crime novel.

Which other crime fiction writers do you enjoy reading? Which writers have influenced how you write or how you view crime fiction?

As a big fan of crime fiction for many years, I suppose my earliest influences were the great British crime writers, from Agatha Christie through Ruth Rendell to Minette Walters (whose books I studied before I wrote my first Cooper & Fry novel ‘Black Dog’). The hard-boiled American stuff never really interested me. These days, I particularly enjoy Peter Robinson, John Harvey, Michael Connelly – I like a series with a strong central character.

Typewriter, Word Processor, or pen?

I’ve worked on computers for many years, and I would probably never have got a novel published without one. I seem to have the sort of brain that responds to the click of fingers on a keyboard. I only use a pen for making notes when I’m doing location research, or for signing books.

Did you enjoy school? What is your most vivid memory of your school years?

Although I was from a working class family, I attended an independent school from the age of 11, under the old Direct Grant Scheme. I hated the first few years, because I was out of place and got bullied a lot. Then two things happened –  my writing ability was discovered, and I turned out be good at rugby. I went on to edit the school magazine, won the short story competition two years running, and was picked for the 1st XV. This turned me into some kind of hero. Very odd…

What educational qualifications do you have? Have you had any formal tuition in creative writing? If so, where and what? Did you find it useful?

I’m the first member of my family to get a degree, but it was only a 3rd in General Arts – and from the University of Central England. I also did a postgraduate teacher training course, but dropped out during teaching practice (nobody had warned us there were children involved). Creative writing classes? No way. I think you learn to write by reading.

Did you always want to be an author? If not, what did you originally want to be and when and why did you change your mind?

I wrote my first novel when I was 12 years old, and from that point I knew it was what I wanted to do when I grew up. It’s difficult just to leave school and become a novelist, so I went into newspaper journalism, as a way of earning a living by writing. That was great experience.

What were the first pieces of writing that you produced? e.g. short stories, school magazine etc.

I started writing so young that I can’t remember exactly knew. There had certainly been lots of short stories, poems, and even plays before that first novel. Yes, I was also editor of my school magazine.

If your house was burning down what would you save?

Wife, cats. Nothing else I’d risk my life for. I don’t gather a lot of expensive possessions round me.

How do you write each novel i.e. – do you block out the narrative first, take each page at a time, create the central character, build a cast of characters?

I have no plan at all. I write around the characters and places until I believe in them completely, then I put them into a situation, turn them loose and watch what they do. So the story then arises out of the characters, rather than the other way round. It’s a much more exciting way to write, and I often surprise myself.

Any anecdotes about the research or writing of your books?

Research is interesting, and it’s amazing what unexpected things you can stumble across, especially on the internet. Once, when I wanted a small bit of technical information on silage bags, I posted a question to a discussion group for UK farmers. One of them recognized my name, though, and I was immediately deluged with suggestions for the best way to kill somebody on a farm, and how to dispose of the body. Some of their ideas were very inventive!

The Peak District seems to be a popular setting for tv series, are there any plans for your books to be converted to the screen?

There’s been lots of interest over the years, and even some time spent in development (in fact, there’s a finished script for ‘Dancing with the Virgins’). But we’ve never quite made it to the production stage, unfortunately. That seems to be quite a common story in TV.

What is a typical writing day?

A day with no writing getting done! I’m at my desk most days, but there are far too many distractions, and too many other things to be done that get in the way of the writing (VAT returns being my least favourite). I find I write best at night, when there are no distractions.

You have just launched a new book? Can you tell us a little bit about it?

‘The Kill Call’ is the 9th novel featuring my young Derbyshire police detectives DC Ben Cooper and DS Diane Fry. As with most of my novels, it’s the result of several ideas, themes and locations coming together in my mind and forming the spark for a story. In this case, the book involves fox hunting, illegal horse trading, the legacy of the Cold War, and Derbyshire’s famous ‘plague village’ of Eyam. The link between them is the idea of the kill call, which is the signal blown on a hunting horn for the hounds to go in for the kill. Fox hunting was bound to crop up in my books at some time. There are still violent clashes from time to time when saboteurs turn up at a hunt. And I was intrigued by the fact that, four years after the anti-hunting legislation came in, there’s more active support for hunting now than there ever was. I suppose country people just don’t like being told what to do…