The Crime of it All

Your debut, The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam, was published to great critical acclaim in over ten countries. How did you come to crime fiction and how did this crime novel come to you?

I often find it hard to go back and pinpoint the exact factors that led to me writing The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam – I tend to think that instinct and a certain degree of luck play a big part in any form of writing – but there are certain things I’m aware of.

Prior to The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam I’d written 3 novels, one of which could be described as literary fiction, with the other 2 being what might be called ‘mainstream’ fiction. However, throughout this period, I found myself increasingly interested in reading crime fiction – especially American crime fiction, with some of my favourite authors including Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke, Lawrence Block and James Ellroy. I’d guess that for every 5 books I read, 4 were crime. As I read more, I became keen to write a crime novel of my own, but something that always held me back was a concern that I wouldn’t be able to solve the ‘mystery’ element of a crime novel. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why my lead character in The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam became a writer who happened to be struggling with the plot of his latest novel…

Another reason for having a writer as my main character is that I’m interested in meta-fiction, and I’m a huge fan of novels about writing, or books within books. One of my favourite authors is Paul Auster, and another favourite novel is John Colapinto’s About the Author. Their work influenced my approach, and perhaps the idea of talking about the ‘rules’ of the crime genre by having a character who was himself an author was also a mechanism that enabled me to check that I was adhering to those same rules.

Another important factor was the influence of travel fiction. As a teenager, my dream was to be a travel journalist, and while I never followed that through, I’d always enjoyed reading travel literature and memoirs. I was conscious of the importance of place in crime novels, the way in which a particular location can become almost a character in its own right, especially over the course of a series of books. With that in mind, I thought it might be interesting, and offer something new, to attempt to write a series where each individual title was set in a different international city.

Of course, that meant I had to have a character who was able to move around freely, which was another reason for giving Charlie the profession of a mystery writer. Still, that wasn’t quite enough to hang a novel on, and so I decided to give him a dual role. By looking at the books I tended to read, I was conscious that I was particularly fascinated by novels told from the perspective of a criminal, which led me to hunt around for a suitable – and moveable – vice. To begin with, Charlie was going to be a hit-man, but that raised problems of tone. The classic character of the English gentleman thief seemed a much better fit.

A final factor was style. I’d begun to write a few pieces in a more anecdotal, confessional tone, and it seemed to suit me. It also fit with the character of an unrepentant thief, as well as enabling me to explore the humour in the situations Charlie finds himself in. Humour is important in my books, and it reflects a conscious decision on my part. Again from looking at my reading, I realised that although most of the crime novels I was reading tended to be comparatively dark, the ones I increasingly looked forward to were comic in nature. My hope was to write the kind of book that a dedicated crime fan might look forward to reading in a similar way, but that also appealed to readers who weren’t quite such avid crime fans.

Funny you should mention travel literature. Is it fair to say that your Good Thief’s Guide series has combined the traveler’s favourites, local colour and the mystery of the unknown?

I’d like to think so, and as I mentioned, this was certainly my intent. The titles are themselves a pun on Rough Guides, Lonely Planet Guides etc. What’s interesting to me now is how much the location I select for each title in the series affects the character of the books. This is down to both the physical geography of the chosen city, as well as its image and nature. For instance, I think of The Good Thief’s Guide to Paris as a more leisurely, sprawling novel than The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam, which is partly a reflection of the cities themselves. Likewise, The Good Thief’s Guide to Vegas is perhaps a more compressed, faster novel, reflecting the pace of life in Sin City, as well as being slightly more outlandish and wacky. To my mind The Good Thief’s Guide to Venice, the fourth book in the series, is more reminiscent in tone of Amsterdam, which makes sense – in my mind at least – because I think the two cities share many similarities.

Are your books ever accidentally bought as tourist guides?

Only when they’re shelved wrong – which has happened! But to my mind, the books are very squarely crime novels, which is something I’m proud of.

Speaking of proud achievements, let me ask you about your acquaintance with Charles E. Howard. How close are you?

Charlie is very definitely a separate person from me, and we’re really quite different. I’m risk-averse and painfully law-abiding, whereas Charlie is neither of those things; in fact, he revels in breaking rules and taking chances. I guess we share a similar sense of humour – it’d be hard not to – but he has the opportunity to deliver lines I’d only think of hours after the event. I suppose he’s another side of me – a version I’d never dare to be – and he’s all the more fun to write about because of that.

How did Charlie come to you?

Charlie was the outcome of a number of decisions. I wanted my character to be English, and I wanted him to be educated and articulate, but at the same time I never wanted him to take life seriously – hence why he’s from a wealthy background, and has never had to do a hard day’s work in his life. Really, though, once I had the character of a gentleman thief who was also a writer, and once I knew that I wanted to try and inject some humour into my books, I’m not sure that he could have ended up sounding any different.

As a villain, Charlie would have been right at home in one of Ed McBain’s 87^th Precinct novels. Did this literary tradition inspire your character and the subject matter of breaking and entering as a form of artistic crime?

As I’ve said, the crime fiction I most enjoy reading about is concerned with the perspective of criminals or ‘outsiders’ – and I’d class tough-guy PI’s in that category. As a result, I wanted to follow this tradition, rather than, for example, writing a police procedural. I spent quite some time casting around for the right vocation for my criminal, but the practicalities of needing someone who could travel freely made me think that an international assassin or a burglar would be ideal. The burglar shaded it because it enabled me to write about a character who could select his own ‘jobs’, and get into trouble on his own terms, without the need for him to be ‘hired’ to perform a particular task.

One of the main reasons for writing about breaking and entering was that it’s not a profession that many people know much about! On that basis, I was able to give free reign to my imagination without having readers correct any mistakes in my thief’s approach to picking a lock or tricking open a safe. More to the point, though, it was really fun for me to put myself in a position where I had to think about stepping over a moral line and doing something that most of us would never dare to consider. It seemed to me that if I found the nitty gritty of burglary interesting, then other people might too.

As readers, if not as citizens, our judgment of crime often depends on our sympathy with the criminal. How do you make sure Charlie is and stays a sympathetic criminal?

As a writer, I have to work very hard to create a situation where the reader roots for Charlie. On the face of it, and on any rational scale, what he does is reprehensible, so it’s a real challenge to create an artificial situation where his actions seem justifiable, or at least understandable. Intriguingly, one of the techniques I’ve found useful for achieving this effect is to have Charlie be absolutely brazen about what he is doing and why he’s doing it – in other words, to have him acknowledge his greed and his moral failings, without remotely apologizing for them. It’s as if Charlie’s unashamed honesty enables him to be forgiven when he transgresses. Mind you, it also helps that Charlie is always involved in solving crimes that are more heinous than his own – most often murder.

It would be fascinating to discover just how ‘bad’ Charlie’s behaviour could become before he loses the reader’s sympathy altogether – which is one of the reasons why I’ve opted to have him kidnap someone in The Good Thief’s Guide to Venice.

Would you ever send Charlie to prison?

I’m really not sure. Part of Charlie’s appeal is that he always gets away with his crimes – even if his triumph is somewhat different from what he might wish for. That said, he could make a great character to base a prison-break novel around…

As we root for Charlie to escape the law, do you think we’re satisfying a desire to transgress? Or are we reaffirming our conviction that the corrective system is not meant for ‘harmless’ crimes?

Probably both, and no doubt more besides. I think there is something to the idea of Charlie satisfying an urge to transgress – it’s certainly one of the reasons I enjoy writing about him, so I’d suspect it’s true of people who enjoy reading the books too. Also, I’m conscious of always balancing Charlie’s crimes against much more serious crimes that are committed around him, by much less sympathetic characters. Without this contrast, I suspect that securing any sympathy for Charlie would be almost impossible.

Is there such a thing as a victimless crime?

No, I don’t think so. But there is such a thing as a crime with a victim who doesn’t merit our sympathy. That’s what I play with in the Good Thief books. The individuals Charlie steals from are either deserving of the crime, or are so wealthy that they’re unlikely to suffer from the loss, or are engaged in crimes of a more dastardly nature.

As a lawyer your training is in getting innocent people out of legal trouble. As a writer you apply this skill to shepherding a proven criminal. Does that ever conflict with your professional ethos?

Not at all. I should say that I never practiced criminal law, but even then, I don’t think this kind of consideration would have concerned me. It’s the difference between fiction and reality, and on top of that, the Good Thief books are very deliberately structured to exist in a kind of exaggerated reality, with a nod to the conventions and rules of crime fiction, where normal parameters of behaviour and the repercussions of such behaviour don’t apply.

Have any of your friends from the life of law admitted a fondness for the life of crime as you write about it?

Not directly. Although every one of my friends who has worked as a lawyer shares my view, at least occasionally, that the profession is unbelievably dull!

What inspires the many moments of situational comedy in your writing?

As a reader, I think there’s a great deal of pleasure to be had from finding humour in the bleakest of circumstances – see, for example, Allan Guthrie’s novels. But one of the things I most enjoy in fiction is having my expectations turned on their head. I’m a huge Chandler fan, and one of the things I really love about his writing is how he is able to start a sentence on one basis, and then switch it around to lighten the tone. This is something I’ve tried to do myself, to varying degrees of success, both on a sentence-by-sentence level, and in larger scenes. To me, a lot of humour comes from the reader being surprised and knocked off their guard.

When you choose the settings of Charlie’s capers, do you travel to them as a tourist with an eye for local scenery or as a criminal with an eye for local security?

It’s a mixture of things. I usually visit the cities I’m writing about 3 times – once while I’m at the planning stage, and twice during the actual writing of the books. To some extent I visit as a tourist, and this is important, because as an Englishman abroad, Charlie is always seeing things from the perspective of the ‘outsider’. But I do also spend a lot of time searching for security flaws and possible ways for Charlie to steal things – which sometimes appears to be alarmingly easy!

You have yet to write The Good Thief’s Guide to The Isle of Man, but has your cultural background already informed your writing?

I think your own culture has to affect the way you write, the way you view the world, everything. If there’s one element of the Manx people in my books, it’s perhaps the tendency to deflate a situation with a choice piece of understatement – an unwillingness to engage with how serious or stressful a situation really is.

There is no retirement age as such in Charlie’s profession. For how much longer are you going to write the series?

I’d love to continue writing about Charlie for many books to come. But the exact number will depend on my publishers…

CLICK HERE FOR THE ONE BOOK EVERYBODY SHOULD READ: The Good Thief’s Guide to Venice

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