The Book You Have to Read: “The Dolly Dolly Spy,” by Adam Diment

(Editor’s note: This is the 69th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s must-read choice comes from the pseudonymous British journalist-turned-author Tom Cain. Cain has so far produced three well-received thrillers: The Accident Man [2007], No Survivors [2008, published in the UK as The Survivor], and this year’s Assassin. His original and controversial, three-part short story, “Bloodsport,” appeared in The Rap Sheet in August.)

Four years ago, or so, when I was really struggling with the first 30,000 words of what would become The Accident Man (and I do mean struggling: it took two years to come up with anything even vaguely suitable to show to publishers), my long-suffering agent, Julian Alexander, suggested I should read some books by a British writer called Adam Diment. They’d been written back in the mid- to late-1960s and they featured a posh, dope-smoking, babe-shagging, terminally fashionable young spy called Philip McAlpine. Julian thought I’d enjoy them and maybe get some inspiration, too. I said I’d check them out.

That was easier said than done. After he published his first book, The Dolly Dolly Spy, in 1967, Diment was very briefly very hot. The London Sunday Times told its readers that “Adam Diment is 23; his hero, Philip McAlpine, is based on himself. That is to say he’s tall, good-looking, with a taste for fast cars, planes, girls, and pot.”

The following year, like the Beatles, Diment hit the hippy trail to India where he studied at an ashram. By 1971 he was living in Rome. After that: nothing. But I am getting ahead of myself ...

Desperate for something, anything to get me out of my unproductive rut, I trawled the Internet for Diment’s books. And the first thing I discovered was that he gave great title. The Dolly Dolly Spy was followed by The Bang Bang Birds (1968), The Great Spy Race (1968), and Think Inc. (1971). Something about those names took me right back to the London of my childhood, and the covers were more outrageous and evocative still. The Dolly Dolly Spy’s jacket is, like Philip McAlpine himself, a neat combination of James Bond (blood, bullet holes, and a blonde in a bikini) and the counterculture (a block of hash resin, a razor blade, and two smoked joints). But the cover of The Bang Bang Birds (shown at left) is entirely original. It features a chorus-line of machine-gun-toting girls, naked except for knee-length boots, drawn as a psychedelic cartoon.

This was real time-capsule stuff, a perfect evocation of the look and attitudes of its era, and I loved it. Within a week I’d bought hardback first editions of all four of Diment’s books. When they arrived, I discovered to my delight that the writing matched the packaging. Diment is the lost boy-genius of British thriller writing.

The first thing that’s great is the attitude. Diment was educated at Lansing, a private boarding school in West Sussex, right on the south coast of England, where he must have been an almost exact contemporary of the lyricist Sir Tim Rice. So, like the Old Etonian Ian Fleming, he writes in a slick, slangy style that never quite disguises the classical education--Diment would have studied Latin from the ages of 8 to 15--that lies behind it. And, like Fleming, Diment is cloaked with that confidence, tipping over into arrogance that marks the English public schoolboy.

He writes in the first-person and his character of McAlpine is not afraid to say precisely, caustically, and often very wittily what he thinks of anything or anyone he encounters. But right from the start of The Dolly Dolly Spy--written, remember, by a 23-year-old first-timer--there are passages that suggest Diment had the makings of a seriously good novelist. Here McAlpine is, for example, describing his on-and-off girlfriend Veronica Lom:

Her experience, which includes a large number of love affairs, modelling jobs, minor television appearances, two abortions and a wide range of kinky and interesting episodes, hangs around her like a halo. There, you would say on seeing her, is a girl who has seen life. Paddington pot parties, a hundred odd secretarial jobs like her present one--which end because her boss starts to twitch his fingers a bit--a film part which curled up and died on the cutting room floor. Following the flotsam of the jet set across Europe: Paris, Cannes, St Tropez, Venice, Sardinia, Baden Baden, Paris, Rome and back to Paris. The modern, cuffed airport waiting rooms. Dull flights, indigestible high altitude food and the grimy bodies of travel.

That paragraph is 124 words long. And it tells me precisely who this girl is. McAlpine’s MI6 boss, Rupert Quine, is an even finer character. He’s snide, vicious, utterly camp, and quite willing to resort to blackmail to make McAlpine do what he wants. When McAlpine first meets him, the diminutive, gnomic Quine is wearing a light green suit: “the impression he gave was of a dandified mouling stoat.” Quine looks McAlpine up and down and says, “Well, it’s nice to see you after reading so much. Your picky doesn’t do you justice, luv.” Then he produces some drugs, found in McAlpine’s flat, and explains that if McAlpine doesn’t accept the assignment he is about to be offered, he will be sent to jail for drug-dealing. Along the way, he calls McAlpine, “lovey,” “sweetie,” and “honeychile.”

Rupert Quine is really not at all like M.

And that, for me is the really fascinating thing about Diment’s work. His stories are thoroughly Bond-esque: his first assignment is to go undercover as a pilot in an airborne smuggling operation run by former members of the Waffen-SS. But everything else about him reminds one why Ian Fleming’s death in 1964 was--from the point of view of his literary reputation and Bond’s survival as a global icon--so astonishingly well timed.

Bond is a man of the ’50s, whose attitudes can be traced back to Fleming’s days as a fashionable young man in pre-World War II, 1930s London. Had he kept writing into the mid-’60s, Fleming would have been utterly overtaken: Agent 007 would have been clueless in the world of the Beatles and the Stones, miniskirts, Flower Power and demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Adam Diment, however, was utterly in his element and his four books are to Bond what Sgt. Pepper was to The Sound of Music: a signal of something clearly rooted in the past that is, at the same time, utterly new.

Or to put it another way, Diment’s man McAlpine is Austin Powers, but for real ... and played by a cool, handsome, upper-class Englishman, not some irritating little tit from Ontario.

READ MORE: “Adam Diment,” by Steve Holland (Bear Alley); and in Glorious Trash, Joe Kenney reviews all three of the Philip McAlpine novels released in the United States.

Cain Makes a Killing

Beginning tomorrow, The Rap Sheet will post--in three parts, over three successive days--a never-before-seen short story called “Bloodsport.” It’s the work of Tom Cain, the pseudonymous British journalist turned author who has already won praise on both sides of the Atlantic for his first two thrillers--The Accident Man (2007) and No Survivors (2008, published in the UK as The Survivor)--and has a third one just out in Britain called Assassin.

Like those novels, “Bloodsport” stars the shadowy figure of Samuel Carver. Cain describes the plot of this first-ever Carver short story this way:

Samuel Carver is an angry man. The protagonist of The Accident Man, The Survivor, and Assassin, whose specialty is creating deniable assassination by means of unattributable “accidents,” has just discovered that one of his former brother officers in the SBS (Special Boat Service) has been killed in Afghanistan. The man died very horribly and painfully in the hands of the Taliban, lost for want of the helicopter that should have airlifted him to safety.

Suddenly, a situation that has long been a matter of principled outrage to Carver has become very personal. So he reacts in the way that he knows best. He decides to make a bad thing happen to what he believes is a bad person; the person he holds responsible for the death of his friend and many other fine soldiers--the prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

In the tradition of Rogue Male and The Day of the Jackal, Carver stalks his prey. In this case he does not choose the boulevards of Paris as his hunting ground, nor the hills and forests of Germany. Instead he goes to the hills of northern England, where the prime minister is taking his
summer holiday.

I first heard about “Bloodsport” during last weekend’s Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, when I fell into conversation with Cain himself. The Accident Man was one of 14 books shortlisted for the 2009 Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, and he had come to see whether it would beat out its estimable competition. (It didn’t; Mark Billingham walked away with the award for his 2007 novel, Death Message.) During our time together, Cain mentioned that he’d penned a Carver short story, but didn’t know how best to use it. Its subject matter is extremely topical, given the recent controversy surrounding the shortage of British helicopters on the Afghanistan and Iraq battlegrounds, the ever-increasing unpopularity in the UK of the so-called war on terror, and the sagging poll ratings for Britain’s Labour government. However, he admitted that it might rub some people the wrong way, and so few on this side of “the pond” would even consider publishing it.

After reading his story, I contacted Rap Sheet editor Jeff Pierce to see if he was interested in taking “Bloodsport.” We e-mailed back and forth a few times, talked once on the phone, and agreed that Cain’s story deserved to be read. Uncut. In three parts. On this page. Cain was excited to hear that his work would see the light of day.

To help introduce “Bloodsport,” I’ve written up an interview I conducted with Tom Cain during the Harrogate festival. During our discussion, I asked him more about “Bloodsport” and whether it’s destined to kick off a whole series of Samuel Carver short stories. We talked about his having recently joined The Curzon Group of British thriller writers, and about the current, abysmal state of print journalism. And I asked him for background on Assassin, a novel that has been earning some great reviews, including one in the e-zine Shots that begins:

Sam Carver--the “Accident Man”--is back, and appears to be going about his old trade of killing people. But is it really Carver out there, first knocking off a despicable people-trafficker, then a gangland money-launderer? For his MI6 contacts, Grantham and his subordinate, Bill Selsey, the killings certainly carry the Carver hallmark, and the description of the killer matches him to a T. Yet he has supposedly sworn off the killing game for good. So what’s going on?

Coming as this does just prior to U.S. President Lincoln Roberts’ intended public stance against the evils of people-trafficking, with an open-air speech in Bristol, it is a distraction nobody in the security world wants.

Unknown to them all, Damon Tyzack, a former SBS colleague of Carver’s and a man who lost his job because of Carver’s recommendation, is now a hit man with a very high-powered employer, with strong links to people- and drugs-trafficking gangs across Europe. And they do not intend standing by while the U.S. president talks war.

Furthermore, Tyzack hates Carver with a venom.

Our interview follows. It provides a good set-up for reading “Bloodsport,” which as I said before, will begin running tomorrow on this same page. Stay tuned.

Ali Karim: You’ve been out and about a lot over the last year, putting in showings at Bouchercon in Baltimore last fall, and more recently at ThrillerFest and the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival. So tell us a bit about your adventures on the convention trail.

Tom Cain: Mostly, I just moan about how totally jet-lagged I am! I seem to have lost the knack of crossing the Atlantic and functioning when I get to the other side. Until I can recover it, I think I should probably attend horror/fantasy conventions instead, because I’m basically a zombie. That aside, by far the best thing about the convention scene to me is the chance to meet other writers, bloggers, retailers, and of course readers. Over the past couple of years, I feel I’ve moved from being an individual, working in my office, to a member of a group of like-minded individuals. Best of all, I’ve made a lot of good friends.

AK: At Harrogate last month, The Accident Man was shortlisted for the Old Peculier Award. How do you feel about success in winning awards versus commercial success?

TC: Well, commercial success is what pays the bills, so I suppose that has to be the main aim, particularly when times are so hard--in general, and in our business, in particular. But these days, big sales are getting harder and harder for anyone outside a very small, elite group to find. So awards are a way of raising one’s profile and, with any luck, [one’s] prestige within the thriller-writing field. That, in turn, may lead to more critical attention, which is one way of increasing sales. Plus, it’s incredibly fulfilling, on a purely human level, to think that one’s work is enjoyed and rated highly by one’s peers. Who wouldn’t like that?

AK: The Old Peculier Award nomination is a measure of your appeal in Britain. But how have the Americans reacted to your first two novels, The Accident Man and No Survivors?

TC: I’ve been incredibly pleased, touched, and I guess honored by the reactions I’ve had from other writers and from the specialist booksellers, magazines, and blogs. Not to mention the people who’ve read my books and enjoyed them. Unlike in the UK, many regular American book-buyers haven’t reacted to the novels one way or another as yet, because they haven’t known about them enough, I guess. That’s the real issue I have to confront and deal with over the next couple of years. Perhaps I need to work harder in the U.S. to build up the readership, especially in today’s tough publishing environment. Of course, if the Accident Man movie ever gets made, that could change, and fast!

AK: Considering the controversial aspects of your work, what with the death of a popular princess in a Parisian tunnel in The Accident Man, followed by a manically fundamentalist Christian nutter who tries to bring on “the Rapture” in your second novel, were you nervous about reader reactions?

TC: Well, I’m used to writing about controversial subjects as a journalist and (though this hasn’t happened for a while). I’ve faced about as much in the way of abusive reviews, snide profiles, and general media poison as any writer is ever likely to get. I’m pretty much immune to it now. My only concerns would be if I actually wrote something that attracted the attention of the authorities (ever more possible as antiterrorism laws are used to stifle free speech), or I somehow antagonized a special-interest group--or a criminal one, come to that. I wouldn’t want my family to get caught up in any crap of my creating. But, hey, I’ve just written a short story about an attack on a British prime minister, so clearly any worries aren’t inhibiting me thus far!

All that said, I’m pretty careful not to give offense just for the sake of it. Carver is not a remotely political character, the books take no party/political line, and I do let my villains state their case. I always admired the way that The West Wing, while it clearly offered a liberal Democratic fantasy of a hero president, at a time when the real one was George W. Bush, often gave really good arguments to its Republican characters. So I try to let the devils have some reasonably good tunes ... and it’s kept them quiet so far.

AK: So why was the UK title of your second book, The Survivor, tweaked to become No Survivors for its U.S. release?

TC: Actually, it was more like No Survivors got tweaked to The Survivor for the UK release. It was just a case of different publishers having different views on what would work best for the book. My personal choice was No Survivors, because I felt it was more dramatic. On the other hand, I have to admit that The Survivor makes more sense, since it describes the set-up of the book more clearly; it’s more positive; and it also follows The Accident Man as being a descriptor of a person. So in the end, I was easy either way.

AK: Your third Samuel Carver novel, Assassin, has been gathering some great reviews since its release last month in Britain. Did you feel as much pressure in writing this new novel as you did in writing No Survivors, that oft-dreaded second novel?

TC: Yes and no. Yes, because there was a helluva lot of personal/family stuff going on in my life which I can’t really talk about, but which hugely impacted my ability to work. No, because I felt much more confident as a writer; I wasn’t boxed-in by the plot, the way I had been with No Survivors (starting a book with your main protagonist immobile and out of his mind is NOT recommended for an easy life!). And I was absolutely determined to make [Assassin] much simpler and more direct in its structure and plot. No Survivors was incredibly complex, in the way it interwove multiple plot strands. Assassin is far more stripped down. I always compare it to a band that’s just made an arty, complex concept album. Next time they get into the studio, they think, “Fuck it, let’s just rock!”

AK: I did miss Carver’s sidekick in this third book, the exotic Russian spy Alix Petrova. Without giving too much away, tell us: are we going to see her return sometime?

TC: Hmm. I can’t say for sure and I don’t want to give too much away. But I am definitely toying with something Alix-related. Won’t be Carver #4, that’s for sure, because I’ve already started that without her ... But I definitely do have something up my sleeve. I like that girl, that’s for sure, and I wouldn’t mind seeing her again ... Though my wife absolutely hates her. Can’t think why!

AK: In Assassin, Carver’s turned from being a “poacher” to being a “gamekeeper,” now advising high-profile people on how to avoid assassination, and the narrative is peppered with fascinating trade-craft. How much research was entailed in getting that trade-craft just right?

TC: I had some communications with the U.S. Secret Service, and I did all the usual location-scouting and technical research. But to be honest, this [book] was much less research-heavy than the previous two, because so much of the story was character-driven. Assassin isn’t so much of a big, sprawling conspiracy-fest as The Accident Man or No Survivors. It’s much more of a down-’n’-dirty battle between two men--with a beautiful, feisty, funny woman caught (of course!) between them.

AK: Assassin finds Carver traversing America and Europe on the trail of an old colleague-turned-foe in a deadly cat-and-mouse game. There are plenty of complicated twists. So can we assume that you worked from pretty detailed plotting notes?

TC: Nope. When I write a book I have a basic idea of what it’s about, who the main characters will be; [I have] a few key images in my head and a rough sense of how it has to end. Aside from that, though, I never do treatments, chapter outlines, character notes, anything. I just let it rip and see what happens.

It’s scarier that way, because you have no safety net and there’s always the fear that you don’t have enough of a story--I have precisely that terror right now, in fact, about Book 4. But all the best stuff I’ve ever written has come as a surprise to me. It’s just sprung from the dark recesses of my subconscious. So I just trust that the surprises will keep on coming. And then I count on 30 years as a professional writer to provide the discipline to make it fit together on the page. Still, I was relieved to hear Lee Child describe his equally spontaneous working method at Harrogate just recently. Good to know I’m not the only one.

AK: The problems of U.S. presidential security have been highlighted since Barack Obama moved into the White House earlier this year. Was his campaign for the presidency your springboard for Assassin?

TC: I had the rough concept of Assassin by the time that the Democratic Party primaries started, back in February ’08. I knew that there would be a trafficked woman as a main character, and I wanted to have a president who set out to abolish the terrible global evil of 21st-century slavery. I also wanted that president to be African American, because it seemed to be a very powerful image to have a descendant of slaves battling slavery today. An immensely powerful black character saving a helpless white one--Lara Dashian, the girl with whom the story starts--was just interesting to me. Then Obama suddenly became a global superstar and I realized that people might think I was writing about him. I started having to junk a lot of stuff. For example, there was a chapter in which my character, Lincoln Roberts, was interviewed by Time magazine and he set forward this whole idealistic, impassioned belief in restoring the moral standing of America as the “city upon a hill” ... and the next thing I knew, Obama was making speeches that were freakishly similar.

So actually, the only security issue I had about Obama was that I wanted to strangle him for pinching all my best lines and making me rewrite my character!

AK: There is a great deal of detail within your book’s back-story about people-smuggling and the sex trade. Can we assume that your experiences as a journalist provided the background for all of that?

TC: Only insofar as I’d been to a couple of the locations I used in the slavery sections of the book, principally Dubai. Oddly enough, I’d gone there in the winter of 2006, when I was desperately trying to finish The Accident Man. I was rundown, the weather in England was cold and depressing (nothing new there, then), and I just wanted to lock myself in a hotel room, somewhere warm, so I could write, have the occasional swim, and live off room service. I ended up in Dubai. This was at the absolute height of the construction-boom there, when they were essentially building the equivalent to all of Manhattan in one go. The image of the place really stuck with me. As for the slavery itself, I just read books (credited in my acknowledgments, I might add), tracked down a ton of articles, films, etc. online, and used my imagination. And again, I really concentrated on character. I really wanted Lara to be a believable, sympathetic young woman. The other thing I realized is that sex-trafficking is one of those phenomena where no matter how wild our imagination, the truth is even more bizarre and disgusting. The more unbelievable an incident is in the slavery sections of Assassin, the more likely it is to be based on something true.

AK: Carver’s nemesis here, Damon Tyzack, is an interesting character and perhaps the dark side of “The Accident Man.” Had you visualized him before the plotting, or did he appear once the plot was crystallized in your mind?

TC: Tyzack was definitely a character who evolved. His genesis came when I was doing a mad late-night radio talk-show promoting Accident Man. I was sitting in my study in England, talking to a host in California and phone-in callers from all over the States, and I was having a helluva time getting anyone to grasp the point that the book was a novel and that, the [Paris tunnel] crash aside, I’d made it all up. Anyway, the host seemed to think I was some kind of expert on the lives of real-life assassins and he said, “So how does a guy get ahead in that career?” And while I was trying to think of an answer aside from “How the fuck would I know?” he provided one of his own: “I guess they just kill the guy ahead of them.” So then I said, “Thanks, you just gave me my next book!” That’s where Tyzack started: a guy who wants to kill the next guy up the ladder. I saw it as a metaphor for corporate life. Anyway, Tyzack changed, as I decided that I wanted his motivation to be more personal, more of a long-held grudge against Carver. But the crucial change--which I owe to the wonderful Peta Nightingale, who reads and edits my stuff at my literary agents, LAW [Lucas Alexander Whitley]--was that instead of Tyzack being an obviously psychotic brute (as he had been), he became in many ways superior to Carver. He’s much more socially confident, posher, wittier and, as he points out to Carver, he doesn’t really do anything Carver hasn’t done too. So he’s much more of a challenge to Carver’s idea of himself (and our idea of him) as an essentially good man, obliged to do bad things. Tyzack forces Carver to examine his character and his actions--but in the course of a particularly sadistic interrogation, naturally, rather than a fireside chat.

AK: Tomorrow, The Rap Sheet will begin serializing “Bloodsport,” the first Samuel Carver short story. Tell us how that story came about.

TC: It arose from my appalling addiction to Facebook. At some point in one of my endless online chats, someone said something about Gordon Brown, our prime minister, who is about as popular in the UK as Bush was in the U.S., and I joked, “Maybe I should send Carver after him!” (or words to that effect). And then I thought, “You know what, maybe there’s something in that ...” And from there it all went spiraling into madness!

AK: Like The Accident Man, “Bloodsport” contains a very controversial premise. Were you worried about writing the tale, or publishing it?

TC: I was bloody nervous when someone at The Curzon Group, an alliance of British thriller writers, pointed out that anyone deemed to be inciting acts of terrorism was liable to arrest and, if found guilty, lengthy imprisonment. But when I looked at what I’d actually written, I thought that it was very clearly not an incitement to anything, so then my panic subsided. And luckily, the lawyers agreed.

AK: I really enjoyed reading “Bloodsport,” as it packs a powerful punch and message. Is it also perhaps the first step toward more Sam Carver short fiction?

TC: I think so. I really enjoyed doing it and I loved the speed that the Internet allows--much more like journalism than regular novel-writing. I mean, I go nuts waiting for my books to come out, especially the editions outside the UK, which can be delayed up to a year. There’s such a danger of becoming outdated as the whole process grinds on. With this, I could have an idea and--bam!--there it was. I’d have got it out a week sooner too, if ... no, better not go there! Anyway, I think Carver will definitely have more of these instant, mini-adventures.

AK: I assume you’re familiar with Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male and Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal ...

TC: Oh yeah, absolutely ... and “Bloodsport” is following on from both those books in the sense of it being about a lone hunter stalking a political leader. That said, Rogue Male is one of the most important books in thriller-writing history--you can see the assassin genre being created right there in front of your eyes. And for me, Day of the Jackal is just about the best thriller ever written. It breaks so many rules: the hero is a totally unsympathetic character, whose identity remains unknown even when the books ends; and the ending is inevitable, since it is a historical fact that President [Charles] de Gaulle was not assassinated. Yet it still grips from the first sentence to the last. “Bloodsport,” by contrast, is a very slight piece of whimsy. It’s a little nibble, as opposed to a socking great steak. But I hope it’s a tasty, spicy little nibble!

AK: Let’s go back to your mention of The Curzon Group. Are you involved in that group’s so-called airport tour?

TC: Well, I’ve joined and I blog every Monday. As for the airport tour, which I think is a great idea, I honestly don’t know how much I can be involved--this year, at least--for the family reasons cited earlier. But if they do it again next year, and let me tag along, I’ll certainly be there.

AK: If I can be frank, the purpose of The Curzon Group is to promote British thriller writing--but I think the Tom Cain novels are very “American” in terms of the writing style, even if they are British in origin. What are your thoughts on the differences between UK and U.S. thriller fiction?

TC: I’m quite torn between the two sides of the Atlantic. As a person, I’m very British. I sound British when I speak. I had a very traditional upper-class English education (paid for by the government, but that’s another story). On the other hand, I lived abroad from my earliest childhood, I’ve worked abroad a lot--particularly in the States--and I have a lifelong love of America. To this day, I watch far more American TV series than British ones. I’m as passionate about the Washington Redskins as I am about West Ham (with just about equally disillusioning results). And I read for more American than British writers.

I think the kind of action thriller I do, though there are a host of British precedents, is essentially an American form. England is not a country big enough or wild enough to contain a thriller. Why else is Jack Reacher American? It’s no coincidence that one of the worst [James] Bond books, Moonraker, is the one set in England. Bond needs fancier locations. So does Carver. What Brits do well is seediness, grubbiness, despair, decay, intimacy ... grubby little crimes committed in a country going down the crapper. I can see the merit in that, but it’s never been my thing.

AK: Considering that the Samuel Carver novels are very tightly edited, giving them a fast and visual style, is there any more news on film or TV rights yet?

TC: The whole movie situation is a typical Hollywood tale and I can’t really go into details. Paramount had the original option. That is now in play elsewhere. Suffice it to say that there is reason to hope for some positive news within the next few months, or even weeks.

AK: And as a former journalist, what are your thoughts on the terrible state of the print media? David Simon, a former Baltimore reporter and creator of the TV show The Wire, has said that he fears for society when journalists were being laid off, because they are our society’s watch-keepers.

TC: My thoughts are virtually suicidal. David Simon is right. If you get rid of proper, professional journalism you risk giving unfettered power to politicians, corporations, and anyone else who wants to screw us around without being held accountable. Plus, as a professional writer, I get very, very angry with the notion that there is essentially no such thing as copyright any more, and no reason for anyone to pay to be informed or entertained. I have the old-fashioned idea that I want to get paid for my work, my craft, and my decades of experience. I’ve yet to hear a good moral justification of the notion that I, or anyone else, should not be paid.

AK: I see that you’re on Twitter as well as Facebook. How are you getting on with all this new technology?

TC: I don’t know too much about the technology, but I am addicted to Facebook. I went up to Harrogate recently on the train, five hours there and back. I spent at least three hours of each journey online. I did not open a book. I realized then that, as professional writers of fiction, we are in deep, deep shit. So whatever I say about the unfairness of our situation, we may just have to get used to it.

AK: I know that you are extremely well read in the thriller-fiction genre. Can you tell us what books have passed over your reading table that really impressed you?

TC: This is a helluva corny answer, but the truth is, I bought [Stieg Larsson’s] The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo months after everyone else. I went through the early sections, which are slow, dreary, and lacking in any tension whatever and thought, “Why the hell has everyone got so excited about this?” Then [protagonist] Lisbeth Salander appeared, and I got it. She is such a rare thing: a totally fresh, original character. To be honest, I still don’t give a monkey’s about anything else in that book or the sequel. But I’m gripped just because of her.

Surviving the Second Novel

You may recall that last year I got very excited about a debut thriller called The Accident Man, by Tom Cain (aka journalist David Thomas). It was a work that heralded the beginning of a series featuring Samuel Carver, a shadowy figure who works for British Intelligence in an unofficial (and deniable) capacity arranging convenient “accidents” for enemies of the state. The Accident Man focused on a conspiracy involving the automobile death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in a Paris tunnel. The rights to that yarn were sold globally and the book kicked up something of a hullabaloo, being released a decade after the tragic accident that took the life not only of Diana, but also of Dodi Al-Fayed and their driver, Henri Paul.

I wondered at the time just how Cain might follow up that high-concept first novel, as we all know the trouble popular new authors can have when they sit down to pen their sophomore works. This summer, we finally have the answer. New in UK bookstores is The Survivor. And thankfully, it will not disappoint those readers who were so taken with his debut.

The Survivor starts out with a flashback, focusing on Carver’s third mission, after he left Britain’s elite Special Boat Service. That 1993 assignment was to sabotage a plane carrying the elderly Waylon McCabe, a grotesque character who, apart from having a warped vision of Christianity, busies himself as an industrialist amassing a fortune from war and oil. Although his airplane crashes in the far reaches of Canada, McCabe survives, and then proceeds to plot his revenge not only on Carver, but on humanity in general. The Survivor then flips back to the conclusion of The Accident Man, where Carver is in therapy recovering from both the physical and mental injuries he’d sustained in the story. After that, we’re asked to follow parallel plots, one set in Carver’s hospital ward, the other built around an American and Russian conspiracy that could destroy our planet. The Russians are seeking to recover their agent, Alix Petrova--who has become Carver’s lover--and use her on a mission. Alix, meanwhile, is uncertain whether Carver will recover from his injuries, but she remains deeply in love with him. And as this story progresses, there’s a little problem with regard to a cache of suitcase-contained nukes that went missing after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. McCabe and his cabal realize all too well that these devices could be awfully useful in their plan to call forth the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Tense, terse, and fraught with anxiety, The Survivor draws upon the pulp-thriller heritage to navigate a story that makes you zip through the pages as if your life depended upon reaching the conclusion before your heart gives out.

I’ve bumped into Cain/Thomas at several events over the last year, including the Crime Writers’ Association’s Dagger Awards ceremony, and have always enjoyed his insights into the thriller genre. When I encountered him again recently in Cambridge for the annual Bodies in the Bookstore event, I couldn’t resist snagging him for a short interview that covered the controversies surrounding The Accident Man, how he developed the plot for The Survivor, and the plot of Samuel Carver’s coming third adventure.

Ali Karim: So, after all the excitement over The Accident Man, can you tell us how sales of that book went in the UK and America? And I believe the novel sold in many other countries, too.

Tom Cain: The honest answer is, I don’t exactly know. I spent the first four weeks of the hardback edition fanatically tracking sales, drove myself nuts, and then stopped doing it for the good of my health. I know that the UK edition almost reached the top 10 in both hard- and paperback (it peaked around 11 or 12 in both charts, damn it!), but haven’t a clue about overseas, where it’s been sold into well over 20 territories now. The general feeling I get is that it wasn’t the super-monster hit that some people--including me, obviously--had hoped for. Frankly, the Diana connection turned out to be more of a hindrance than a help. But on the other hand, it was a very solid debut. I think they’re expecting to do around 100,000 paperbacks in the UK, and that’s not a bad base from which to launch a series of books. I got a deal for books three and four, so people must have faith in it, long-term.

AK: I saw you on a panel last year at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, where the Princess Diana motif courted a bit of controversy. Are you suggesting now that the Diana connection caused real problems for your book?

TC: On balance, yes. I don’t think that it was an issue of taste--certainly not for anyone who actually read the book--because the name “Diana” appears nowhere in The Accident Man. It’s more that she has gone from box-office gold to box-office poison, at least in this country. I suspect most people would rather let the poor woman lie in peace and have done with talking about her, which is fair enough. To be honest, the book caused much less controversy than I, and everyone associated with it, had expected. But in the long-term, I think that’s a good thing. It meant that the book was judged on its own merits, and that I had a more normal start to my thriller-writing career. Massive publicity might have generated more immediate sales. But it might not have been good to be known as “that Princess Diana bloke.” There was a different problem in America, on a corporate level, in that suits at one major publishing company and a major Hollywood studio held off buying The Accident Man--which they would have done on creative grounds--because they were frightened of adverse public reaction. It didn’t matter, because I got other, equally good deals, but it was a factor. Certainly, the sales force at Viking, who publish me in the States, are much happier with the second book--which is going to be called No Survivors over there--because they see it as a simpler sell, with much less baggage attached. And also, they think it’s bloody good!

AK: And what about from the “dark forces” that you inferred--at least in the fictional world you created--were behind Diana’s crash in the Paris tunnel? Did that complication incite any reaction?

TC: Well, I had been rather worried that I might, by pure fluke, have hit upon the actual truth behind Diana’s death. Outing a real homicidal Russian oligarch might have proved injurious to my health. Luckily, I must have been talking tosh, because--touch wood--there has been no comeback. The one thing that did happen, though, was that I was introduced to an actual witness to the crash. His story--which culminated with an extraordinary character assassination, designed to discredit him, at the inquest into Diana and Dodi’s death--did make me think, for the very first time, that there really might have been a conspiracy. But I think it’s a conspiracy of officials to silence debate on the issue of the crash, rather than a conspiracy to cause the crash itself.

AK: What’s happening with the U.S. film rights to your first novel?

TC: Accident Man was and still is a high-concept property. What, precisely, is happening, though, is really hard to work out. Suffice it to say that what with the writers’ strike, the possible actors’ strike, and the usual games of musical chairs among studio executives, the development process is even more hellish than usual. So I’m pretty sure something’s going to happen, but right now I don’t know what. It may still be a movie franchise, though there’s now talk of doing a 24- or Dexter-type TV series. I’m less bothered by the medium than I am by the quality of the people who make it. In other words, I’d far rather have a cracking TV series than a rubbish film.

AK: After writing such an audacious debut work, did you have any issues tackling the notoriously difficult “second novel”?

TC: Oh yeah, big-time. I spent last year’s Harrogate driving my poor editor, Simon Thorogood, round the bend as he gradually became more and more aware of the fact that I did not have a clue about what I was going to do for that very difficult follow-up. It was, to be frank, an absolute bastard to write. It went through endless revisions and was being edited right up to the last possible moment, which explains why the UK edition has a fair few bloopers (they have, I hope, all been caught in the U.S. version). The weird thing is that when we gave the proofs to people to read, no one got any sense of the grief required to get the thing done. Simon Thorogood, my U.S. editor, Josh Kendall, and I all had the same experience, which was people coming up and saying, “I really like the new book,” and us going, “Er, really? Are you sure?” because we simply couldn’t believe it. What I’ve learnt from that experience is that it takes an unbelievable amount of blood, sweat, and tears to make something look completely effortless.

AK: I thought the opening of The Survivor shared some themes with Ian Fleming’s Thunderball. In both, the protagonists--Samuel Carver and James Bond, respectively--are recovering from traumas they incurred during their preceding adventure. Are you a Fleming reader?

TC: I am a massive Fleming fan, and as soon as you mention Thunderball I can see the link. The truth, though, is that it hadn’t occurred to me when I was writing. If anything, I was thinking more of the transition from the end of You Only Live Twice into (I think) The Man with the Golden Gun, because that involves Bond losing his memory and his sense of self, which is sort of what happens to Samuel Carver.

AK: I enjoyed your comments during the Fleming centenary panel discussion at CrimeFest in Bristol last month. Care to share your thoughts of Sebastian Faulks’ new Bond novel, Devil May Care?

TC: Hmm. Well, here’s my problem … I was not over-impressed with Devil May Care, and that’s putting it very politely. I would happily go into detail, were it not for the fact that I’d love to have the chance, one day, of doing another Bond, and showing what happens when someone who loves the Fleming books, loves the craft of thriller-writing, and does not feel that the genre is beneath him treats 007 with the respect he deserves. So I probably should not offend the Fleming estate, should I? Instead, I will let Sebastian Faulks make my point for me. He said, of his commission to write a Bond book, “It’s like asking someone who writes complex, symphonic music to write a pop song.”

Were anyone to suggest that that was condescending garbage, I would not necessarily be inclined to disagree.

AK: Let’s get back to the opening of The Survivor. Having Carver in recovery allowed for more detail on the conspiracy plot that provides the backbone for this new book, and allows the reader to focus more on your secondary lead, Alix Petrova. Were you conscious or worried that your protagonist was off center stage for so long?

TC: Absolutely. The fact that Carver is all messed-up at the end of The Accident Man, and then has to be put back together at the start of The Survivor was the real root of most of my problems with this book. I had to find a way of keeping readers gripped, even though the hero of the book was incapable of any action. This was a huge, huge issue for my editors and agents, who all (perfectly reasonably) took the view that if people buy a book because its hero is Samuel Carver, they want to see their man up and doing from the word go. I got around the problem, to some extent, by having a prelude, set five years earlier, in which you see him setting up an “accident” that doesn’t work out quite as he’d planned. This then sets in motion the events that will play out in the rest of the book. But what’s interesting is that you, like other readers, haven’t seen it as a problem. You’ve seen an opportunity to do other things and focus on other characters. This means, I think, that once Carver gets going, all the set-up work has been done, so the flow of the action is pretty well uninterrupted for the final two-thirds of the book. Also, it enables Alix, the heroine, to function as an independent character, which is really important to me. I very much want the women whom Carver encounters to be active protagonists, not just screaming arm-candy.

AK: I thought that Alix Petrova could actually carry her own series, as her back-story is fascinating. I also felt that as her creator, you seem to like her a lot ...

TC: Alix is a really interesting character to me, for one major reason, which is that she refuses to die. I had originally planned to kill her two-thirds of the way through The Accident Man. But she survived into the final act. Then, I was certain that she would die at the end of the book, mirroring the death of the princess at the beginning, as the price Carver paid for that earlier killing. Turns out he paid the price himself. So then we get to The Survivor and she was absolutely, categorically going to snuff it, but ... well, I can’t say without spoiling everything. Suffice it to say that she will not be the lead female character in the third book ... but that does not mean we’ve seen the last of her. I do like her, and I’m quite proud of her, too. Of course, she’s a stereotypical character in some ways--gorgeous Russian spy-chick: not exactly a new idea!--but I’d like to think she has complexities which take her beyond that cliché. And I like the idea of her own series ... thanks for that!

AK: In The Survivor I noticed that your writing style has subtly changed. You use shorter and more terse chapters, and switch points of view in a manner more pronounced than in The Accident Man. Was this a conscious decision, or an unconscious one?

TC: A bit of both. The multiple POVs were forced on me as a result of Carver’s semi-absence from the scene, and also the complicated, multi-layered nature of the story line. The short chapters often started out longer, but got tighter and tighter with every edit, as we worked to give The Survivor the same relentless pace that was one of the main characteristics of The Accident Man. So that was deliberate. I actually like short chapters. They’re looked down upon by many critics because of the associations with supposedly down-market authors like James Patterson and Dan Brown (though if I had those guys’ advances and royalty checks I wouldn’t [care] what any critic thought). But to me, they’re closer to the rhythms people are used to from contemporary movie and TV editing. The length of shots and scenes has become radically shorter on-screen, because viewers assimilate information so much faster. That being the case, I think you have to provide readers with a comparable kind of kinetic energy on the page as well. I like keeping the focus moving. And there’s also that chocolate-box effect with short chapters. People say, “I’ll just have one more ... and another ... and another ...”

AK: Tell me how the plot of rogue suitcase nukes and religious nutters threatening Armageddon came to you.

TC: Well, I can trace each individual strand quite easily. The whole fundamentalist Christian angle, and the notion of “the Rapture,” which is their term for the moment when the believers will physically be gathered up into Heaven, was inspired by an article I read in Vanity Fair (and which I credit in the book, in the interests of full disclosure). I already had that notion a few years ago, and was going to use it in a plot line involving a U.S. president, that I later abandoned. So I recycled it this time around. The fact that parts of the book are set in Kosovo was simply a consequence of it being set in 1997-98. I looked around the world at what was happening then, and the biggest issue seemed to be the former Yugoslavia, so I had that in mind as a possible backdrop. The combination of religious Armageddon and civil war led me naturally to think about nuclear weapons, and by pure chance, rooting around online, I stumbled upon a news story about a Russian general telling a U.S. TV show, on 7 September 1997, that his country had lost 100 suitcase nukes. Well, The Accident Man ended on 6 September 1997, so that was too good to be true. So, those were the basic ingredients of the story. How they coalesced into the final plot, though, is a total mystery to me!

AK: Waylon McCabe is a great villain in this new book. But were you at all concerned about using an extreme Christian religious fundamentalist as a bad guy, considering how incredibly divisive religion can be these days?

TC: Yes, I was. Particularly in America, where there’s such a huge, devout Christian congregation. Luckily, no one over there has raised an eyebrow. This could be because the only people who’ve read it have been godless New York liberals. Or it could be because anyone who reads the story can clearly see that McCabe is not bad because he is Christian. He’s bad because he’s a psychopath. A particularly warped view of Christianity just happens to be the vehicle he harnesses to express his lunacy. But I was careful to have other characters who explicitly put forward other, more moderate views of Christian faith. Apart from anything else I think there’s quite a lot to be said for the ideals preached by Jesus Christ, even though I do not personally believe he was the Son of God. It’s just a pity so much of what he said is used as an excuse for barbarous extremism. But then, Karl Marx probably feels pretty bad about the things people have done in his name, too.

AK: Speaking of bad guys, how about The Sheik, a Middle Eastern power broker who also features in this tale?

TC: Well “the Sheik” is simply the name by which his closest followers refer to Osama bin Laden, who is (I think!) also mentioned by name. No Al-Qaeda terrorists appear in the book, but the presence of Islamist terrorism hovers above and around the story. One of the ideas raised in the book is the way in which American foreign policy, in the ’80s under Reagan and the ’90s under Clinton, created the conditions that produced America’s (and our) enemies today.

AK: The story really hits its stride in the last third of the book, where all the plot strands come together, with a few surprises en route. Holding such a complex tale in your mind must have driven you mad. How hard did you plot, and did you have pads of notes?

TC: Yes, it did drive me--and everyone around me--completely round the bend! I don’t actually take a lot of notes. The way I track plot lines and scenes is more with flow-charts and lists that let me see who’s where and doing what at any given time. By the end, though, the book was being ripped apart and put back together on such a frequent and radical basis, that it was really hard to keep track ... as very, very eagle-eyed readers may notice!

AK: Being a journalist, your fiction-writing style is dispassionate and presented almost as if The Survivor were a fact-based novel. So, how much research was entailed in delivering this particular story?

TC: There was a lot of research, into everything from the construction of small-scale nuclear weapons, to the beliefs of fundamentalist Christians, to the precise role of fish-tank-oxygenating tablets and nail-varnish remover in putting together a homemade bomb from everyday household items. I try, within reason, to make the plot as plausible as I can. It would, for example, be possible to sabotage a particular form of executive jet in the way that I describe in the book. I wouldn’t recommend or condone such an action, nor would I ever reveal the precise type of plane, but it’s possible. That said, I think it’s really important to have fun and make stuff up as well. Some writers are real research anoraks and won’t put anything in a book unless they’ve personally visited every location and treble-checked every fact. But this is a book that sits in the fiction section. It’s not meant to be true. I won’t willingly put in something I absolutely know to be false; but I’ll certainly stretch the boundaries of possibility right to the breaking point. That said, perhaps the most implausible thing in The Survivor--the fact that there are giant underground bunkers at Prishtina [International] Airport in Kosovo, filled with Yugoslav fighter jets--is, in fact, completely true. Or was true a decade or more ago, anyway.

AK: I enjoyed the recent piece you wrote about Armageddon terror for the Daily Mail-owned London Standard. How did your assignment to write that piece come about?

TC: My journalist alter-ego, David Thomas, was called up to write a piece after the government’s terrorism adviser, Lord Carlile QC, said that Britain might be vulnerable to airborne terrorist attacks, using private jets. David naturally referred the Mail to Tom Cain, who had just written a novel which culminates in, er, a terrorist attack using a private jet. And he was happy to oblige with a snappy short story detailing precisely how such an attack might take place. Speaking of research, I got a lot of help from the RAF, who were willing to tell me about their counter-terrorism capability, but only on one condition ... they had to win!

AK: I heard you appeared at ThrillerFest this summer in New York City. Care to let us know how you found that conference? And how did it compare to the British Harrogate and CrimeFest conventions?

TC: Well, I only spent a day actually at the conference itself, and I was very, very jet-lagged at the time. So my impressions are less well-informed than they might be. But my overall feeling was that the conference accurately reflected the county in which it was held. A large number of the people there were as kind, helpful, open-hearted, and generally likable as most Americans, in my experience, are. And a small but significant percentage were the biggest, most pompous, most ignorant, and self-deluding assholes on Earth. Again, this pertains to the general population. I saw one seminar on fighting techniques that was worth the cost of flying to New York, all by itself. And I saw another, on the research required to write a Washington-based thriller, that reduced me to absolute fury, because some of the people on it were such overweening jerks ... Basically, all human life was there! Harrogate, though, remains the most fun that any thriller writer can legally have.

AK: Tell us: What has passed over your reading table recently that you particularly enjoyed?

TC: Well, I met my namesake Chelsea Cain at Bodies in the Bookstore in Cambridge recently, and read her debut novel, Heartsick, on the train home. I thought it was great, a really original take on the serial-killer genre. For such a sweet woman, Chelsea has one sick mind! Speaking of New York, I met a writer there called Tasha Alexander. She has a heroine called Lady Emily Ashton, who’s a Victorian aristocrat-detective. The books (the most recent is called A False Waltz) don’t remotely pretend to be hard-core detective fiction: they’re just as much historical rom-coms. But they are very witty, very clever, and very charming--much like Ms. Alexander herself. And right now, I’m halfway through Charles Cumming’s Typhoon, which I’m really interested in, because he covers a similar sort of territory to me--spy-based conspiracy drama--but from a more literary perspective. The pace is much slower than my stuff. You don’t get the action a Samuel Carver story provides. But because Charles takes his time, it means that the detail of place and personalities is more intense: you can really smell Hong Kong, where much of the story is set. There’s a moment when one of his characters is woken by a radio alarm clock. Me, I’d deal with that in half a dozen words (in fact, I do in The Survivor). Charles gives you a potted history of the 13 years during which the character has owned the radio, gently drawing you deeper into the man and his story. Plus, Charles Cumming doesn’t have to invent the spy stuff because he used to be a spook. I’m enjoying [Typhoon] a lot.

AK: And so now, after two well-received books, Samuel Carver is established as a major character in the thriller genre. Care to tell us what happens to him in Book Three?

TC: Well, I don’t want to give too much away. So let me tell a brief anecdote. I went on an American radio phone-in show to talk about The Accident Man. Despite all my attempts to explain that it’s just a story, neither the presenter, nor the callers could be shaken from the conviction that I was describing an actual conspiracy, and an actual assassination, carried out by an actual accident man. At one point, the presenter said, “So, Tom, tell me, how does an assassin move up the career ladder?” I thought for a while, wondering what I could say apart from, “I haven’t a bloody clue.” But before I could answer, he carried on, “I guess he just has to kill the guy ahead of him.” And then I said, “Thanks. You’ve just given me my next book.”

A Harro-ing Good Time

I have already shared a few comments here about this year’s Harrogate Crime Writing Festival. But two admirable crime writers give us still more in this week’s British newspapers. First comes Mark Timlin (Answers from the Grave), who writes in The Independent about the wonderful time he had:

Crime fiction is the largest genre in publishing, and there’s a lot of money to be made if you hit the top. I realised that last year when I saw a famous crime writer friend of mine drop two grand in a couple of boutiques in the high street on clothes and accessories, while half an hour earlier I had been debating whether I could afford an Oscar Peterson vinyl album for a fiver in a second-hand shop in a less salubrious part of town. But that’s the breaks. And no, I decided I couldn’t.

This year the weekend kicked off on the Thursday with an all-day symposium on how to write and market a crime novel, including talks on plot, characterisation and setting by [Simon] Kernick, Greg Mosse, Laura Wilson and Natasha Cooper. I’m not so sure about writing classes myself. I think if you need to write, you’ll write. But others are all for them, and that’s what makes horse races. I think the £100 fee for the day would be better off spent on a pile of crime novels. Reading is the best way of teaching yourself writing, I reckon.

In the evening, the award for Crime Novel of the Year was presented, with a big party afterwards. The winner was Two-Way Split by Allan Guthrie, published by Polygon, a small Scottish independent press who consistently fail to send me review copies. Everyone I spoke to told me that Guthrie is a big talent, so it looks like a trip to WH Smith’s for me as soon as possible.

As a matter of fact, it’s a pity they do that presentation and party on the Thursday evening, as most delegates haven’t arrived yet. The rest of the weekend is crammed full of panels of writers, publishers, agents, and anyone else with knowledge of the crime scene. The most popular session was about how to make a historical novel accurate, with Lindsey Davis among others. The queue to get in snaked through the hotel foyer and out into the car park, where it mixed with the dedicated smokers banned from enjoying their nicotine fix indoors. I’ve got to say there are few more ridiculous sights than that of grown men and women (and you can count me in as one) wandering around outside under umbrellas just to smoke a cigarette. Sad too, because what fictional genre has more of a relationship with tobacco than crime? Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler and Humphrey Bogart, I’m sure, must be spinning in their graves.

Meanwhile, we have the pseudonymous Tom Cain, author of The Accident Man, giving readers of The Telegraph an amusing take on attending his first crime-writing conference--and incidentally letting slip his real name:

Over the rest of a long, long weekend there will be author interviews, panels, parties, writing clinics, an award ceremony and even a crime-writing quiz night. Harrogate is by far the biggest event in British crime writing and it attracts the best names in the business. Recent star guests have included P.D. James, Kate Mosse, Michael Connelly and Reginald Dalziel and Pascoe Hill. This year’s big four attractions are the 45-year-old American crime superstar Harlan Coben, who sells almost three million books a year; the British but New York-based Lee Child, whose Jack Reacher books sell at the rate of one a second; Val McDermid, creator of Dr. Tony Hill, hero of ITV’s The Wire in the Blood series; and Frederick Forsyth, who has spent more than 35 years at the top of the thriller-writing trade.

Aptly enough, I have arrived as a double agent. So far as the organisers are concerned, I am Tom Cain, author of a newly published thriller, The Accident Man, whose mission is to take part in a ‘New Blood’ panel of first-time writers. Little do they know, however, that I am also David Thomas, undercover reporter. Well, not until I apply for my press pass, anyway.

Cain/Thomas seems also to have had a great time, and just happens to mention the highly covered Harrogate Quiz, which, if memory serves me correctly, was won by a team on which yours truly participated:

And so we stagger on to the final event before the frolics draw to a close: a massive crime-writing quiz, contested by authors, publishers and fans alike. ‘The winner gets this magnificent cup--not to keep, merely to be photographed with,’ announces the quizmistress [Natasha] Cooper.

She is assisted in her work by Simon Kernick. He appears to be having trouble enunciating his questions. But both as the man who will be chairing next year’s festival, and as one of the most eminent representatives of the new generation of British crime writers, Kernick is profoundly aware of his responsibilities. So he makes a sincere apology to his peers with words that sum up the very essence of what happens when hundreds of the nation’s most gifted wordsmiths gather in a single place to analyse and celebrate their craft.

‘I'm sorry if my voice is slurred,’ Kernick says, with earnest sincerity. ‘I have been drinking heavily.’

You will find Timlin’s complete Harrogate report here. Cain’s recollections are located here.

Praising Cain, Part II

Yesterday, I wrote about my recent discovery of The Accident Man, a stunning thriller (due out in the UK in July) that incorporates the 1997 traffic-accident death of Diana, Princess of Wales, into a larger tale about contract assassinations, the tenuousness of truth and trust, and revenge. My excitement over that novel led me to call Patsy Irwin, director of publicity for Transworld (which will publish Accident Man), and ask that she put me in contact with the book’s pseudonymous British author, Tom Cain.

Just 30 minutes later, while I was still rigging up my tape recorder, Cain rang me on my cell phone. I had the chance during our subsequent discussion to ask him about how this debut novel took shape, his extensive world travels, his opinions on conspiracy theories, and the plenitude of action sequences incorporated into The Accident Man.

Ali Karim: So, Tom, are you the guy called “David Thomas,” who interviewed Lee Child in The Telegraph last month?

Tom Cain: You might say that. … I couldn’t possibly comment!

AK: Can I assume at least that you are a follower of Lee Child’s thrillers?

TC: Big time! So much so, in fact, that it took me about a year, working on the earliest drafts of the first 40,000-odd words of The Accident Man before I could stop writing sub-Child prose and relax into my own style and tone of voice. I read your various Rap Sheet pieces about Lee with great interest. Like you, I have found him to be a remarkably generous and helpful man. We met last summer [July 2006] when he was over in the UK and had a long conversation about thriller-writing that was a great help to me. At that point, I’d just sold Accident Man (to my total amazement, since it had had a very difficult birth, indeed), and Lee’s advice and encouragement really helped me finish the damn thing.

AK: In your novel, I notice that protagonist Samuel Carver has some battered thriller novels lying around his safe house in Switzerland. So, beyond Child’s work, are you also an avid thriller reader? And which of those books have left a dent in your mind?

TC: Absolutely, always have been a big thriller fan. So going right back to my boyhood, I’d have to say the [James] Bond books were a huge love and a continuing influence (much more than the films, by the way: I completely lost interest as the films parted company from what Fleming had written, though I think that [the new] Casino Royale was a brilliantly realized attempt to reconcile the original book with 21st-century film-making and storytelling). I was also a massive Alistair MacLean fan from the age of 10 or 11, particularly HMS Ulysses, The Guns of Navarone, and also Fear Is the Key, which had an incredibly sexy cover, back in the day--which put all sorts of ideas into my pre-teen mind. Since then, my tastes have pretty much run the gamut of crime/thriller-writing, though I have particular soft spots for Elmore Leonard (the greatest prose stylist of our age, if you ask me), Carl Hiaasen, Dennis Lehane, and James Lee Burke as well as Child, of course. I’ve also got to put in a word for Wilbur Smith: not the most fashionable name among the thrillerati, I know, but the guy really knows how to create excitement, create an epic backdrop and convey historical/geographical/natural/political information. Plus, he’s been incredibly generous in his enthusiasm for The Accident Man, so he must be a good man! Oh, and I’m an obsessive Flashman fan--again, he’s hardly a modern thriller hero, but George Macdonald Fraser is a fantastic writer, whom any aspiring author can learn from.

AK: Tell us a little about your early life and what made you wish to write fiction, especially thrillers.

TC: Well, there’s one completely autobiographical element in The Accident Man: when I describe Sam Carver’s first day at an English boarding-school, aged 8. Basically, that was my first day, right down to doing military drill before breakfast, and it screwed me up pretty much the way it screwed him up--though I took the view that the pen is more deadly than the sword, when it came to assassinations! My early story is that my father worked all over the world and I was educated back in England, at the government’s expense, so I’m basically a middle-class boy with an upper-class education. I was always better at writing than anyone else. So much as I would have loved to have been a rock star or footballer, being a top author was always my best--and only--hope for any kind of stardom. Throughout a 25-year career in journalism, it was always my hope to come up with a book that stood a chance of being a hit. And it was always going to be a genre-fiction book, rather than a “literary” novel, because I’ve barely read a “proper” book in my life. Whether The Accident Man will prove to be that hit, only time will tell.

AK: Were your parents bookish?

TC: My dad was always a keen, and very wide-ranging reader. It was his Fleming novels I was stealing to read. But he was also into guys like Pynchon, Bellow, etc. Since Dad also turned me on to the Beatles’ White Album and Aretha Franklin, I guess I have a lot to thank him for.

AK: The Accident Man seems far too polished to be a debut. So is it, really? And what have you written previously?

TC: I’m glad you think Accident Man is polished--it sure didn’t feel that way through the two-years-plus during which I was trying to get enough half-decent words together to send to a publisher. About four months before the submission was sent out to would-be purchasers, I was summoned to a meeting with one of the partners at my literary agency, who began a three-hour bollocking with the worse, “It’s painful enough to read a bad writer. It’s even worse reading a good writer, writing badly ...” Mind you, I never thought it was quite as bad as he did! But he did have a couple of incredibly insightful and valuable ideas, so the book has got a lot better since then. As to your question--at last!-- it’s by no means the first book I’ve written, though it is the first thriller and was by far the most technically demanding thing I’ve ever done. I’ve previously written one comic novel (about a young man who goes into hospital to have his wisdom-teeth out and is given someone else’s sex-change by mistake), two or three serious non-fiction books, some lighter books and thousands (literally) of newspaper and magazine articles. I guess I’ve published 200,000-plus words a year for 20-odd years ... so it all adds up.

AK: About your day job: I see you’ve traveled widely. So tell us more.

TC: Just your basic, hard-working freelance journalist, going wherever he can get a gig. I’ve been lucky enough to have been paid to fly all around the world to meet fascinating people and attend amazing events ... if you’ve ever seen the Cameron Crowe film Almost Famous, that was pretty much what my early career was like. As I got older I switched from interviewing rockers to politicians, businesspeople, athletes, and lots of writers. Not too swank, or anything, but ... I’ve hung out at Rolling Stones rehearsals; sung Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” with David Gilmour playing guitar, and sung old Beatles songs all night with Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox; swapped baby-photos with Steven Spielberg; had dinner-a-deux with Kylie Minogue [and] lunch with Liz Hurley, and partied with the starlets at the Hot d’Or porn awards in Cannes; accused Don King to his face of being a pussy who let a woman go to jail, taking a fall for him; and asked F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone if it was true that he personally “dealt with” the muggers who robbed him and his wife (he replied, “I’ve never killed anyone in my life”); watched Larry “Hustler” Flynt in a casino at 4 a.m., betting four hands of blackjack simultaneously, with 50-grand on each hand (Leonardo DiCaprio was at the same table). ... I’d have made a lot more money being a banker, but in terms of having an interesting, stimulating time I’ve been unbelievably privileged.

AK: Being widely traveled, let me ask: what are your favorite cities, and why?

TC: London, because it’s my town; New York and L.A., because they deliver exactly what you’d want them to; Sydney, because it really is worth the journey; Tokyo and Kyoto because they combine ancient and modern, Western and Oriental, trashy end exquisite, familiar and completely alien; Rome (out of season) and Munich, because if I could speak a word of German I think it would be a great place to live. I could be persuaded by Geneva, too. I love the way that those Central European cities are right at the heart of things: you can get to Alps, beaches, Berlin, Venice, Milan, all in a day’s drive.

AK: How did you get involved with your publisher, Transworld? And were its people concerned that this thriller of yours involves the death of Princess Diana?

TC: This is an odd story. As I said, two years of apparently fruitless effort had left me and my agent, Julian Alexander, completely confused about what we had. So Jules came up with a cunning plan. He basically said, “There are 10 companies in London who could publish a book like this. So I’ll send it to three of them and if they reject it, we’ll try to work out why, put that right and send it to another three, and so on. With any luck, we’ll have fixed all the problems before we run out of editors.” Well, the book went out to the first three companies (including Transworld) on a Wednesday. On Friday morning, Transworld rang up and said, “Take The Accident Man off the table. We want it, and a sequel.” And that was that! As for Princess Diana, she was never an issue for Transworld. Of course, they must have been aware that the premise of the book would generate a certain amount of interest or even controversy; but right from the start, they were much more interested in the character of Samuel Carver, thinking of him as someone who could be developed, just as Lee Child has developed Jack Reacher. That was weird for me, because I approached this by thinking of the situation first--a man at the end of the Pont de l’Alma Tunnel, watching a black Mercedes approaching him, preparing to take it out-- and only then asked myself: Who is this guy? On the general question of Diana, one U.S. publisher and one U.S. film studio got nervous about the concept of writing a thriller inspired by her death. But that was boardroom suits who’d not read a word of the manuscript. I have yet to meet anyone who’s actually read the damn thing who’s remotely offended. And that’s because I went to a huge amount of trouble to make sure that they wouldn’t be--for example, the word “Diana” appears nowhere in the book (it did once, by mistake, in the proof copies--but I’ve dealt with that!).

AK: Was there any intervention from the legal people?

TC: Not so far. There are no allegations made about any real people, so I don’t think there’s any potential for legal action, unless I’ve given one of my homicidal bad-guy characters the name of a completely innocent, real-life individual. My fingers are absolutely crossed, so far as that is concerned.

AK: Were you apprehensive about establishing the backdrop for The Accident Man, what with the conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Princess Diana?

TC: The biggest apprehension I had, and still have, is that I might--by some appalling fluke--have hit upon the actual reason Diana was killed and the actual people who did it ... in which case, they may come after me as well. So, just in case anyone in the know is reading this, I just want to say, for the record, that The Accident Man is pure fiction, and I MADE IT ALL UP!

AK: This novel makes mention of Skull and Bones, the Bilderberg Group, the Bohemian Grove, et. al. So are you a grassy-knoll type of guy?

TC: I tend to agree with (ex-Pulp singer) Jarvis Cocker’s song, “Cunts Are Still Running the World.” The conspiracy of mean, violent, greedy, power-crazed, stupid individuals seems to be the one that has the most power, now as always. That aside, I’m pretty skeptical about most theories--I don’t, for example, think that the U.S. government or the Israelis were responsible for 9/11: I’m perfectly happy to believe Osama when he says he did it. Also, I favor Lee Harvey Oswald for the Kennedy hit. BUT ... I am really interested in the phenomenon of conspiracies, I think they’re incredibly rich material for fiction and they deal with the same thing that interested me when I was thinking about The Accident Man--the way that there are events which everybody knows about on one, seen-it-on-TV level, but which remain completely mysterious on other, deeper levels.

AK: So, let me ask you the same question I asked Michael Marshall not long ago: What are your top three conspiracy theories, and why do they interest you?

TC: Here are three I’m pretty close to believing:

• Bogus, quasi-scientific alarmism about manmade global warming (in which I categorically do not believe, for all sorts of actually scientific reasons too many to list here) is a conspiracy by politicians to create the atmosphere of fear needed to raise more taxes and increase their power; by special-interest groups who are now the establishment, not the rebellion; by scientists desperate for big-money government grants; and by big businesses who can see big bucks in “green” products and services.

• Timothy McVeigh did not act alone in Oklahoma.

• There’s an official cover-up going on in the Diana case--though whether they’re covering up a murder or their own incompetence and embarrassment, I’m less sure.

AK: Have you seen the documentaries 9/11: In Plane Site and Loose Change 2, which consider the events of September 11, 2001, to be part of a wider conspiracy?

TC: I haven’t seen them, but I have seen a lot about them. And all I can say is that anyone who thinks that the U.S. government, whether led by George Bush or Mickey Mouse, would seriously consider slaughtering thousands of its own citizens and threatening its economy by flying passenger jets into New York skyscrapers just as an excuse for war is in need of therapy. There is, of course, a connection between Washington and Osama, and it dates back to U.S. support for the mujahedin in Afghanistan. To that extent, Osama is an American creation ... and to that extent the U.S. reaped on 9/11 what it had sown 20 years earlier. It’s also indisputable that US foreign policy has alienated billions of people around the world and acted counter to the true interests of America and Americans. So it’s not surprising that people who do not have access to cruise missiles, nuclear submarines, and tank armies respond with the only means available to them. But that’s where the connection ends.

AK: The Accident Man shares a theme with another audacious debut, Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal (1971). Are you a follower of Forsyth’s work, too?

TC: I read The Day of the Jackal twice when I was thinking about Accident Man. I think it’s a fantastic piece of work--not least because it’s unbelievably exciting, even though you know what the ending must be before it even begins; and it breaks all the rules of character arcs, because the Jackal remains just as mysterious and unexplained at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. But structurally, Jackal is like a mirror-image of Accident Man, in that it ends with the key assassination attempt, whereas I begin with it.

AK: You obviously did a lot of research for this book, what with mentions of ECHELON, the Dazzler, the modus operandi of European secret services, etc. Can I assume you have sources?

TC: Well, I grew up in an intelligence/political atmosphere because my father, who was a diplomat (and a proper diplomat, not a spy in disguise) was seconded for several years to the British government’s Joint Intelligence Committee, and my mother is a politician. Also, I was a child in Moscow, a late-teenager in Washington, D.C., and a young adult in Havana, Cuba. So some of that stuff is just sitting in my brain. A ton of other material came from researching online, books, newspaper cuttings, etc. I did have a number of private sources to whom I spoke, about whom the least said the better. But in the end, I never forgot that this was a story. I don’t think novelists should ever be ashamed just to make it up. It’s much, much more important to write a gripping, involving, even moving story than to get hung up on facts and technicalities. This isn’t journalism, after all, and I should know ...

AK: There is a lot of sex in Accident Man. Is that another area where you did wide research?

TC: I’ve been married for 20 years ... so, no!

AK: There is a great deal of action throughout this novel. Do you enjoy writing such sequences, and do you find writing them cathartic? More than the sex scenes, perhaps?

TC: Yeah, the action was fun. But it was also incredibly demanding--just making sure you’ve got everyone in the right place at the right time for each punch and bullet drives you nuts! That said, the torture scenes at the end of the book flowed incredibly easily and naturally--which is kind of worrying, looking back. There was also an unbelievably sick, violent murder scene which got cut from the book on the grounds of good taste. I was actually laughing as I wrote that, as one horrendous outrage followed another. So it was cathartic--but possibly not in a good way. As for the sex vs. action thing: I’d say there was a strong S&M sexuality running through the torture scenes ... yet another worrying message from my subconscious.

AK: The brutality here is written in a dispassionate manner, almost as if some of your characters put little stock in the value of life.

TC: I didn’t set out to be dispassionate. It was more a case of wanting to write taut, spare, economical prose: just tell the story without too many fancy flourishes. I don’t like prose that tries too hard, any more than I like actors who constantly remind you that they’re acting. Just tell the damn story, that’s my motto. One of my least favorite thriller-stylists was Robert Ludlum (though I liked his plotting a lot). I always found his stuff incredibly turgid and overwrought on a sentence-by-sentence basis. Oddly enough, he was an actor before he was a writer--maybe that was the problem. All that said, I’d like to think that there’s real emotion in the central relationship between Carver and [beautiful Eastern European spy] Alix [Petrova]. I hope that’s what keeps readers wanting to find out what happens to them.

AK: Transworld Publishers is very excited about The Accident Man. But this creates something of a dilemma: since you’re writing under a pen-name, are you going to remain in hiding or are you planning to promote this book?

TC: Well, I’m not going to be one of those guys like John Twelve Hawks (The Traveler), who lives in hiding and makes a big deal out of being mysterious. I decided to give myself a pseudonym because (a) I thought “Tom Cain” looked a lot cooler on book jackets, and (b) it was really liberating, creatively, to be writing a new kind of material under a new identity. It’s also a gas to have an alter-ego. Why should Bruce Wayne and Batman have all the fun?

AK: I’ve heard that global deals on your novel are clinched, along with film rights. How involved are you at the business end of writing thrillers?

TC: I’m interested to the extent that it’s exciting to think this might--just might--be a big hit (though it’s also scary to think it might equally well not be, which would be pretty crushing). I’ve got a family to feed and this is my business, so I take a close interest in the deals that are made in my name. But all that said, I’ve spent more than 20 years taking any writing work I can get to make ends meet. That’s involved a fair bit of hack-work over the years, doing stuff purely for the money. I genuinely can’t see any point in going into novel-writing if I simply re-create that situation all over again. I’m doing this because there are stories I want to tell and I won’t compromise those stories just to keep publishers, or even readers happy. As a reader, I love long series of books about the same character. As a writer, I seriously doubt whether I will ever be able to stay too long in the same territory. For example, there’s a book I’ve wanted to write for years that’s set in Japan, 300 years ago. It’s violent, sexy, passionate; I think it could be a huge hit ... but it’s got fuck-all to do with Samuel Carver!

AK: Thrillers, in some circles, are dismissed for sacrificing character in favor of propelling the plot. However, The Accident Man has some very vivid characters, above and beyond the leads, Carver and Alix. How important is characterization for you?

TC: Well, to tie up a few ideas I’ve mentioned in earlier answers, the irony is that the characters started life purely as vehicles for telling the story that I had in mind: the concept of the book came first. But the more time I spent writing The Accident Man, the more interested I became in these people and the more they became the heart of the book. This takes me back to my mention of Wilbur Smith. He writes action-adventures that are fundamentally love stories, and I’d almost say that Accident Man is the same. (So was War and Peace, for that matter--it’s not a new idea). As you pointed out, there’s a ridiculous amount of action in the book, so you get plenty of bangs for your buck. But there’s also this central romance in which both of the characters are desperate to fall in love, but hardly dare to do so, because they don’t know if they can trust each other or themselves. Those scenes were the points at which I became emotionally engaged as a writer and as a human being. Beyond that, I also got a lot of pleasure from creating little cameo parts. I tried to give even the most minor characters a bit of hinterland--for example, there are a couple of young MI6 agents who put in a brief appearance, shadowing Carver in Geneva. They have their own mini-relationship. It’s just a way of creating a bit of empathy between readers and characters.

AK: Do you feel any pressure in writing the sequel to Accident Man?

TC: Do I feel pressure? Just a bit! And the more that people tell me how much they enjoyed The Accident Man, the scarier the job of matching and, if possible, topping it in Book Two becomes. (Note: this doesn’t mean you should stop telling me you liked The Accident Man, by the way!) I have been brooding about a couple of possible sequels for the past few months, and I’m getting closer to figuring out what I’m going to do. Jeez, it’s a bastard, though ...

AK: Will you be involved in adapting your story for the big screen, or will you leave that to the Americans?

TC: I’d love to write, or co-write the screenplay, if they’ll let me. I write the book in a very cinematic style, so it would be a natural jump from one medium to the other. Plus, I’d like to be able to protect my work, if such a thing is possible. On the other hand, there’s something to be said for letting someone else deal with all the hassle of Hollywood, and just getting on with Book Two.

AK: And what do you do to relax? What are your passions, beyond writing?

TC: I’m an obsessive West Ham United fan--a tricky thing to be over the past few months of a completely insane, catastrophic football season. I love singing very badly to very good music. And then, of course, there’s my family--they’re what I care about most.

Author photograph above by Pal Hansen.

(Part I of Ali Karim’s report on Tom Cain and The Accident Man can be found here.)