One of Britain's leading new thriller writers, Simon Kernick has seen his name on the bestseller lists for a couple of years and will be seeing it again with his just-published ninth book, 'The Last Ten Seconds'.
It follows Sean Egan, an undercover detective out to catch his brother's killer, and Tina Boyd, a Detective Inspector who thinks she has a serial killer in custody. They cross paths, the bodies pile up and either of them could be next.
Before book number one reached the shops, Kernick earned a living as a road worker, barman, stockroom assistant, fruitpicker, "Christmas tree uprooter" and software salesman - although not all at once. The story of how he cracked the big time is enough to convince any aspiring author of the importance of self-belief, a bit of luck and not taking 'no' for an answer.
Harry Guerin: When I was reading 'The Last Ten Seconds' I thought to myself, 'This guy grew up watching lots of 'The Sweeney' and 'The Professionals''. Is that right or wrong?
Simon Kernick: [Laughs] It is, yeah! I love my TV cop shows, TV thrillers - anything like that. These days I'm more into '24' and 'Prison Break'. Actually, to be totally honest, I watched a couple of episodes of 'The Sweeney' the other day. Is it that obvious?!
HG: I think it had a lot to do with the pacing and some of your characters. I was very impressed with the way you blended the action and the suspense.
SK: Plotting - well, obviously they're all about the plot - is a massive thing for me and I spend a lot of time before I even start writing... I'll structure up the whole book, virtually chapter by chapter, so that I know everything that's going to happen. It makes for a slightly more boring writing experience, but at least I'm not going to go off on a tangent. I've got to keep everything really, really tight. And where it starts to go loose, afterwards I'll come back to it with my editor and I'll rip it through again and tighten it all back up again.
I love writing the action scenes and I'm only trying to write what I love reading - and I love reading thrillers. I want something that grabs me and keeps me interested, so that's what I try to replicate in my books.
HG: I always gauge thrillers by 'Do I wish there was another train station before the stop for work?' and I felt that with 'The Last Ten Seconds'.
SK: That's the thing [as an author] that you always want. Again, it harks back to what I like to read. I love those kinds of books. The thing is, it's [writing] not rocket science. I mean, it does require a lot of effort up front, getting the plot right, getting the idea right to start with and then structuring it up in such a way that you can have short chapters and cliffhangers at the end of them.
HG: You're a great advertisement for that piece of wisdom 'If you don't succeed at first...' because you had such a circuitous route into writing.
SK: [Laughs] Hugely. I always wanted to be a writer, ever since I was a very, very young kid. And so I was writing short stories - rubbish short stories - at six or seven and I just developed that. I wrote a really awful fantasy book which was about 84 pages long - 60 pages of which was one giant battle - when I was about 17.
I was never that good or certainly I never did that well at English in school. I left with an 'E' grade A-Level - and that was second time 'round! I did quite a few odd jobs, then went back to college and when I was finally back out in the working world in my mid-twenties I really realised I desperately wanted to be a writer. So I wrote my first crime book [in my] mid-to-late twenties.
HG: But...
SK: [Laughs] Unfortunately it was roundly rejected by every agent and every publisher in the UK. I can't think of any that didn't reject it.
HG: How many are we talking about?
SK: A good 150 - it was a lot. I literally picked up the Writers and Artists' Yearbook'', went through every agent that dealt remotely with crime and sent it to them. And then when I wasn't getting much luck with them I sent it direct to every publisher as well, but unfortunately to no avail.
HG: So what happened then?
SL: Then I went and wrote a second one, which had a bit more of a gangster tone that I thought was quite funny. But I remember I lent it to my mate after I finished it and he took about three months to read it, which is always a bad sign. I knew I was using a very small font when I was writing it, but it actually turned out to be 200,000 words, which equates to about 800 or 900 pages. So it was like 'Lord of the Rings' size and it all took place in about two days! It was an abysmal book.
But there was one chapter in it - which is a pretty poor return - that was actually quite good. It was a chapter where a hitman is waiting with his driver in a motel car park and I just thought, 'Wouldn't it be great if the hitman was a police officer?' And so I wrote that first chapter.
HG: So you had the first chapter.
SK: I was on about page 15 and I sent it to an agent and said I'd written the whole thing! By this time I had 300 rejections so I didn't think much was going to happen! Literally about three days later he sent back, 'I'll have a look at this book, then'. And I was on about page 15.
So in the end [with] my first book, 'The Business of Dying', I had to knock it out in double quick time. Eventually I did get an agent - actually it wasn't that one; he rejected it after a while! But in the end, I think, from starting my first crime novel to being published was eight or nine years I would say.
HG: And did you have armour around you from all the rejections or did it always hurt?
SK: It used to hit badly in the beginning, then it got easier, but then, when I thought I'd got an agent and he rejected it, at that point I was pretty much ready to give up. That was like the semi-fatal blow. But somehow I went back to the book, took a look at it, changed a few things, saw that I'd been going off on a bit of a tangent, sent it to another agent and then everything happened very, very quickly. That was 2001. I got the agent in June and the publishing deal in August. I've never looked back.
HG: You got a big break when Richard and Judy picked your book 'Relentless' on their TV show as part of their 'Summer Reads' selection.
SL: In the early days the books shifted okay but they weren't shifting big numbers, so I was very lucky when I got the big break with 'Relentless'. The difference that made was huge. To put it in perspective, my fourth book, 'A Good Day to Die', had sold 15,000 copies - enough to gain me another contract to write 'Relentless'.
It was thought that 'Relentless' would sell about 50,000 because it had been bought by Tescos. But then with the 'Richard and Judy Effect' it sold 350,000. From that day forth my life suddenly became vastly easier. Luckily, because it was a paperback I'd already written the next one by the time it was picked and had started the one after so there wasn't that horrendous pressure for the follow-up.
HG: You have a new hero in 'The Last Ten Seconds', undercover detective Sean Egan. Is he going to make an appearance in any of your books again?
SK: I don't know. He's named after a guy I went to sixth form college with who suddenly noticed he was in the book when his wife told him! I haven't seen him in about 20 years but he emailed me the other day and said, 'I can't believe you've put me in a book!' I often do that - people I know I just chuck them in the book! I'd like to bring him back because he was quite a good character, but it always depends on if the plot fits. The fact that he's still alive means that he'll probably come back eventually!
HG: So, if Egan isn't in the next book, who is?
SK: The one I'm writing now, I've just started it and I'm actually going on a research trip which for once is going to be quite interesting. I'm going to the Philippines for two weeks - normally my research takes me to South London. It features Tina Boyd, the detective from 'Deadline', 'Target' and 'The Last Ten Seconds'. She's working in an unofficial capacity and has to go to Manila. And it also brings in my cop/hitman Dennis Milne from 'The Business of Dying'. It sort of ties up a number of loose ends that have been running through the [other] books. The great thing for me about writing it is they're two good characters and I'm pretty much of the mind that I'm going to kill one of them off and I don't know which one. I quite like that feeling!
'The Last Ten Seconds' is published by Bantam.
