Michael Jecks: November 2008 Archives
ITW United Kingdom Chair Michael Jecks recently chatted with 2007 Thriller Award winner Nick Stone about his new thriller, The King of Swords.
You've had phenomenal success with your first novel - did that come as a shock?
More like a sense of grateful bewilderment. Gratitude that so many people liked what was basically a dark and bleak book with a not entirely sympathetic protagonist to root for - and bewilderment that they did.
What was it that stopped you from writing after school?
Not many writers start out writers, surely? They fail at others things first, don't they?
I wanted to write from the age of 11 or 12, I think. Crime fiction too. Call me precocious, a pioneer even, because the first thing I wrote was a crime-horror hybrid where all the characters - including the hero - turn into vampires.
You were a headhunter in FMCG, I believe?
Yes, for my sins. Wretched job, wretched people. Imagine Sartre's No Exit - for morons. Nothing stopped me from writing, exactly. I tried to write and hold down a full time job for twelve years. Never pulled off the combination - largely because I never found a job I particularly enjoyed, until I stopped looking. When I was writing Mr Clarinet, I worked as a part-time paralegal at the London criminal courts. That was bliss. Working murder trials. Liaising between criminals, lawyers and cops. The real deal, in other words.
I'd imagine your father was delighted when you began to write?
He's very supportive, yes. He used to be an Oxford Professor, but he got fed up with the mixture of petty bureaucracy and dire penury that characterizes the British academic system. He also thought British students were mostly dumb, ignorant, semi-literate and - above all - boring.
Dad had a choice between following his peers and pupils to well-paid jobs in the US, or going to Turkey. He picked Turkey because you can still smoke there. Dad is what Tom Wolfe would call "a champion smoker". Plus his students actually want to learn, which makes a huge difference.
You've had phenomenal success with your first novel - did that come as a shock?More like a sense of grateful bewilderment. Gratitude that so many people liked what was basically a dark and bleak book with a not entirely sympathetic protagonist to root for - and bewilderment that they did.
What was it that stopped you from writing after school?
Not many writers start out writers, surely? They fail at others things first, don't they?
I wanted to write from the age of 11 or 12, I think. Crime fiction too. Call me precocious, a pioneer even, because the first thing I wrote was a crime-horror hybrid where all the characters - including the hero - turn into vampires.
You were a headhunter in FMCG, I believe?
Yes, for my sins. Wretched job, wretched people. Imagine Sartre's No Exit - for morons. Nothing stopped me from writing, exactly. I tried to write and hold down a full time job for twelve years. Never pulled off the combination - largely because I never found a job I particularly enjoyed, until I stopped looking. When I was writing Mr Clarinet, I worked as a part-time paralegal at the London criminal courts. That was bliss. Working murder trials. Liaising between criminals, lawyers and cops. The real deal, in other words.
I'd imagine your father was delighted when you began to write?
He's very supportive, yes. He used to be an Oxford Professor, but he got fed up with the mixture of petty bureaucracy and dire penury that characterizes the British academic system. He also thought British students were mostly dumb, ignorant, semi-literate and - above all - boring.
Dad had a choice between following his peers and pupils to well-paid jobs in the US, or going to Turkey. He picked Turkey because you can still smoke there. Dad is what Tom Wolfe would call "a champion smoker". Plus his students actually want to learn, which makes a huge difference.
Continue reading Nick Stone and The King of Swords.
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