Author's Note
Garnethill started as a last ditch effort
to get the idea of writing out of my head. I was working as
a hapless academic at the time but only really had one eye
on my job. I spent a lot of time thinking about writing, composing
lines in my head and day dreaming about hours of blank time
in front of the computer. I wrote the first three chapters
of the book and sent them off to literary agents picked out
of the talking pages by an operator. The first two told me
no thanks and the third asked to see the rest of it. I promised
to re write it and send it on. I had three months.
It was a joy to write. I was doing a PhD and just stayed
at home and wrote. I was smoking heavily at the time and
would get up, bounce out of bed and light a fag, sit at the
machine and start for the day. Sometimes I was there at one
am and Iíd get up and start again at eight the next
morning. By the time I finished my lips were withered from
having a rollie clamped between them. Thinking of it now
the time sequence seems like a bad TV movie, if only I drank
coffee out of paper cups and the chief of police had given
me twenty four hours to break the case.
The agent got me to rewrite it four times. I remember finishing
the last draft before she took it to publishers and thinking
that I should enjoy this pause before the disappointing crash.
Anyway, the first publisher she took it to bought it. I didn't
sleep for a week after I heard. I had to keep excusing myself
at work and hiding in the loo because I when it occurred
to me I would laugh like a drunk sailor on shore leave. Buzz
of a life time.
Within what felt like weeks the book had been sold to a
lot of foreign agents. I was living in a bed sit at the time
and the phone rang one morning at nine am. We were all bums,
no one ever rang us before eleven in the morning. Anyway,
I picked up and it was a movie producer calling from the
Cannes Film Festival to say she wanted to buy the rights
to Garnethill. She kept asking what the beep noise on the
line was. She had never phoned a call box before.
I bought
a fur coat and a cigarette holder, shed my former friends
and have never looked back. In the blink of a mascara-streaked
eye, I was petulantly
throwing a Campari and soda across the fitted white shag pile of my open
plan living room.
Garnethill won the Crime Writersí Association John
Creasy Dagger for Best First Crime Novel in 1998. |
