You are here

Mike Carlson's Take on Happy Days

Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - 18:09

IRRESISTIBLE TARGETS


 


Wednesday, 15 February 2012


GRAHAM HURLEY'S HAPPY DAYS


Joe Faraday is dead, having killed himself at the end of Graham Hurley's previous novel, Borrowed Light, but his presence hovers over Happy Days, the twelfth and final Faraday and Winter book. Paul Winter needs to sort his life out—working for Bazza MacKenzie has become hazardous: he's decided to stand for Parliament in Portsmouth North, and he's running out of money since all his legitimate investments are tanking. And Winter worries increasingly about the murder that he witnessed in Spain coming back to haunt him. The death of Faraday, whose relationship with Winter was problematical, especially after Winter's turn to the dark side, but remained friendly in a quiet kind of way, has helped spur these re-evaluations.

In a way, the key scene of the book is Faraday's funeral, at the Portchester Crematorium, where the officious boss Willard makes a touching speech, and where Hurley's writing is precise and moving, understanding Faraday and letting him go, just as those at the funeral would have to do, but also showing how he still touches the lives of those left behind. The first section of this book may be the best writing in the series; the grief of Faraday's son JJ, mixed with his understanding of his father, and the way that, at the reception, the wheels of the plot go into motion; cops being cops, and Paul Winter being Paul Winter.

That's where Hurley moves into a different gear. One of the series' great strengths has been its willingness to engage directly with the urban problems of Portsnmouth—often from the point of view of those outside the police—social workers, youth workers, ordinary folk. Bazza's Pompey First party and political campaign give him plenty of scope for one last scan of the harbor, and a cutting take on the realities of local politics. If there's an influence here, it's The Long Good Friday, the efforts of a villain to go respectable, the ego behind such moves, and the blind spot he develops as his original empire begins to crumble. Hurley is very funny with the campaign stunts cooked up by his advisers, a kind of south coast West Wing operation – and it's really the overwhelming swagger that he's built for MacKenzie over the years that makes this work.

Bazza's need for cash could open him up, once and for all, to the police. His plan to salvage a million quid from a northern drug baron, Skelley, who in an earlier book wound up with Bazza's emergency store of cocaine. Winter is the middleman, but Winter also wants to get out, and Jimmy Suttle, protege of both him and Faraday, is the link to yet another undercover operation again MacKenzie. Suttle and his journalist wife Lizzie have a new baby, Winter is the godfather, and Suttle wants to get away from Pompey altogether and out to the country.

Complicating matters is Winter's ongoing relationship with Bazza's former mistress Misty,
and Lizzie's journo friend Gillian, who's hanging around Bazza's campaign and getting more involved than she should. When the campaign starts to go tits-up, as Bazza would say, it's because Bazza has offended some of the young Pompey scrotes—the young Bazzas whom he think's he's left behind. And as the cash-flow crisis gets work, Bazza goes into debt to Cesar Dobroslaw, his equivalent in Southampton. When Pompey's top villain has to ask a scummer for help, you know he's in big trouble.

In the end, however, Hurley's books are about the people, and Winter brings events to a head by making things personal. The story finishes with another death, and Jimmy Suttle moves off to the Devon & Cornwall constabulary, and a new series. Over the past 12 years, Graham Hurley's Portsmouth novels have been among the very best British crime fiction, and as I've written many times before, deserve to be better-known and more appreciated. Seen as a self-contained story, with Pompey at the centre, I can't think of anything that matches it.

Happy Days by Graham Hurley
Orion £12.99
ISBN 9781409101253


Posted by Michael Carlson


Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to Facebook

Thumbs Up from Mark Timlin

Monday, February 13, 2012 - 08:50

Here's the latest review - this time from long-term fan Mark Timlin.  Hope he makes a full recovery...


 


HAPPY DAYS by GRAHAM HURLEY (ORION) Published 2nd February 2012 H/B �12.99


I wrote this review in the day room of the Milward Ward at the The London Hospital in Whitechapel where I spent a lovely nine hours last week waiting for an operation to chop lumps out of me that in the end never happened. But that's another story. The day room had the aspect of a Dickensian slum which perfectly fitted the area in which it is located. The walls were full of holes, the heating system was prehistoric, and the carpet on the floor fulfilled the expression: "You could eat your dinner off it." In fact I think someone had, but forgot to mop up the gravy. The only light spot being when two young women came in to the check the cleaning. Do me a favour loves. If that place had been cleaned in living memory, it was the memory of an Elephant-Long. I fact, by lunchtime I felt like a poster boy for MRSA.


Believe me Brothers, when you're admitted to the Urology department of Barts and The London you're drinking in The Last Chance Saloon.


The only good thing about my wait was that I was able to read HAPPY DAYS, the final instalment of the wonderful Faraday and Winter novels set in Portsmouth.


By coincidence Detective Inspector Faraday was so far into that same establishment, that he's found dead by page ten. Brown bread. Deceased. No longer of this earth. Mortal coil shuffled off. And I hope that's not giving away any secrets. But if it is - C'est la vie. Or more likely mort.


So to the story, if you're still with me . . .


After all these years Pompey has altered big style.


Bazza Mackenzie, Faradays old enemy has gone legit and has an eye on a seat in Parliament. Just another crook amongst many as far as we can see.


Paul Winter, ex-copper and Bazza's right hand man, is running scared because of all the changes, and doesn't like them one bit. He's fat, he's bald, he's getting on, and he wants out, so he agrees to turn grass on his boss, where he's handled by D/S Jimmy Suttle, who I think might turn up in more of his own books in the future.


But then things change again. Bazza goes skint, and the end game begins.


Hurley is still a master of Police Procedural and Happy Days is a superb example, even without Faraday as the main character, including the political machinations which take up a big lump of the novel.


Why this series hasn't translated to TV when so many lesser examples of the genre have, like the dog rough Rosemary and Thyme, the mind numbing Blue Murder, and worst of the lot the execrable Vera, is as much a mystery as some of the plots of these pot boilers themselves.


R.I.P. Faraday.


 


(From Crime Time)

From the Sabotage Times

Monday, February 13, 2012 - 08:42

Over a decade ago, Graham Hurley was made an offer he couldn’t refuse – a three book deal with Orion. The catch? These books had to be crime novels. The problem? Hurley, a documentary maker by trade was no fan of the genre. But shadowing the detectives for a period with no preconceptions triggered an awareness of what could be achieved. Fast forward to 2012 and the publication of “Happy Days” sees Graham Hurley bring his critically acclaimed Portsmouth-set police series to a close.
Opening with “Turnstone”, originally tagged solely as a “DI Faraday” novel, it’s a mark of how Hurley’s multi-narrative viewpoint widened, that by the series’ conclusion, the roles of former DS Paul Winter and the police’s long term target, Bazza Mackenzie, are every bit as integral. Throughout the twelve books, DI Joe Faraday remains a lonely man, doomed to destroy the relationships he craves. Bringing up his deaf son, JJ, as a lone parent following his wife’s death, Faraday is a man who feels the world, even if he doesn’t necessarily understand it. The other side of the coin is DC Paul Winter. Winter is brash and loud, and although he recognised that he has to play by the rules, he also knows that those rules sometimes have to be bent a little. If this makes it sound like an identikit police series, and that’s not the intention as Faraday and Winter are fine creations who develop and change in the most believable of ways, then Hurley’s trump card is the introduction of major league criminal, Bazza Mackenzie.
From “Cut To Black” onwards, Mackenzie is the police’s long term major target and they only have one shot to bring him down before he’s beyond their reach, his money invested in regeneration projects around the city. But Mackenzie remains one step ahead of the police, leaving them empty handed and red faced. With the stakes increasing, “The Price of Darkness”, sees Winter go undercover to bring Mackenzie down, but a dangerous job becomes even more so as Winter, not unsurprisingly discovers he has a taste for the dark arts of the criminal world. At the start of the following novel, “No Lovelier Death”, Winter, disillusioned with the police force and seeing Mackenzie now part of the city’s elite, leaves to work as his right hand man. This reveals the true moral complexities inherent within the series. Although Mackenzie is a man of violence and crime, his true terrifying nature comes from the fact that he understands the power of being legitimate, a paradox Winter is painfully only too aware of.


The series stands an overview of the UK over the last decade – feral children running amok, the war in Iraq, the economic meltdown, immigration, even the changing nature of Premier League football – it all features.

The final essential character in the series is Portsmouth itself. A claustrophobic island city on the south coast of England with a proud sea-faring history, Hurley’s pulls no punches in a frank assessment of a city that now has multiple social problems, but remains a place where pockets of hope can be found. What you won’t find is a serial killer who kills in ever increasingly inventive fashion or comic book villains. Hurley’s trump card is allowing the city’s belligerence and unique identity to bleed into the characters, making them products of their environment. The location and characters come together to create an unrelenting sense of grim realism with no gimmicks. The series stands an overview of the UK over the last decade – feral children running amok, the war in Iraq, the economic meltdown, immigration, even the changing nature of Premier League football – it all features. Although the series features extreme violence and death, it’s entirely fitting with the world the characters inhabit. Portsmouth stands as both a unique and typical city.
With “Happy Days”, Hurley ties all the major characters and themes to a satisfying close. Mackenzie, with his business empire crumbling to dust in the recession, seeks real power by running for Parliament in the local elections. As this become all-encompassing and he continues to lose his business grip, Winter sees this as the opportunity he needs to leave his employment. Except you don’t leave the employment of people like Mackenzie by politely handing in your notice. The price to be paid is certain to be high. For Hurley and his characters, there’s only one certainty – there’s no going back. With his next book, “Western Approaches”, set to kick off a new police series in the West Country, Hurley is promising a tighter focus. There’ll be less emphasis on the work of the police and more a look at how these hard times affect us all. This time the lead detective will be a younger man with a family, trying to muddle his way through life. Not bad for a writer who was initially reluctant to commit to a series of crime novels. 

The Sunday Observer Salutes Le Cop Anglais

Monday, February 13, 2012 - 08:38

Pompey meets Le Havre in French TV crime hit


British writer Graham Hurley's detective duo are proving popular across the Channel



Filming for Two Cops Down at the Docks, which is set in the port city of Le Havre.


Graham Hurley has sold more than half a million books and been translated into nine languages. Last Wednesday he was in a bookshop in Portsmouth, where his most popular series is set, signing copies of his 12th and final novel featuring Detective Inspector Joe Faraday and Paul Winter, a fellow detective who becomes increasingly disenchanted with police work and eventually goes over to the other side.


On the same day 100 miles away, a crew of 60 were filming the third of four 90-minute TV adaptations of the Faraday-Winter books. The first two drew impressive audiences of just under four million, the next two will be finished by spring for broadcast at the end of the year and a deal has been signed for numbers five and six.


The rights have already brought Hurley a five-figure sum and "been a game-changer for me", he said. The cameras were not rolling in Pompey, though. The series is being filmed across the Channel in Le Havre – in French, for French TV. "Le Pompey de Graham Hurley transposé au Havre," as Le Parisien says.


BBC4 and Sky have been widely praised for showing crime dramas from Sweden, Denmark, France and Italy, and have been rewarded with impressive viewing figures. Now Hurley is redressing the balance and exporting his stories. The French have "pinched" one of Britain's popular fictional detectives and turned him into a capitain.


For years, the former documentary-maker tried to persuade British companies to film Faraday. His work has been praised by the Financial Times and the Guardian, and there has been interest, "but it takes years". As for the French, within two months of contacting Hurley they had signed a contract, found a TV station, chosen actors, appointed a scriptwriter and started filming. "I went over with my wife," said Hurley. "It was great to see the traffic stopping in Le Havre for the filming of one of my books."


Why opt for Faraday and Winter in a country that takes crime fictionmore seriously, and where there are so many writers to choose from? "They told me the books had significant social content and were politically committed," said Hurley, who is fluent in French and regularly speaks at crime-fiction festivals in France.


Faraday would fit well into one of the gloomy Scandinavian books that are so popular here. He is summed up by Winter in one of the later novels as "dogged by a reputation as a weirdo loner with a passion for birdwatching and a deaf-and-dumb son". He lost his wife to cancer, is a deep thinker – especially when out looking for a pectoral sandpiper or a black-tailed godwit – badly dressed, anti-consumerist and becomes convinced that, for all the police efforts, society is falling apart and "anarchy rules". "Family breakdown, substance abuse, domestic violence, crap education – there's plenty of all of that in Pompey," said Hurley. "The community is in a state of near collapse. The police are always there to see it first."


Social workers and young offenders feature prominently in the series and Hurley pays great attention to police procedure – especially the ever-changing guidelines and time-consuming paperwork. It could almost be the detectives themselves complaining through Hurley's fiction: he has exceptional contacts throughout the Hampshire force.


Winter is also a widower, but he is different – abrupt, pragmatic, jovial, a Stella drinker to Faraday's Guinness. The real star of the books is Portsmouth, where Hurley lived for nearly 30 years before a recent move to Devon, the setting for a new series on which he is working.


"Without Pompey, the books would never have been written," he said. The series is set in the 00s and there are constant references to the social problems of Britain's most densely populated city, and its "rough, gruff, wry humour". Portsmouth football club features prominently, and many of the villains are former hooligans. As Dickens's birthplace, the city was a focus for the bicentenary celebrations last week – but outsiders have not always warmed to it. General James Wolfe wrote in 1758: "The necessity of living in the midst of the diabolical citizens of Portsmouth is a real and unavoidable calamity. It is a doubt to me if there is such another collection of demons upon the whole earth." The city's official motto is "Heaven's light our guide". The unofficial one, said Hurley, is "If in doubt, have a fight". He is, he said, "not the most popular man in the tourist office".


How does this work in France? There is no translation for "mush" (a Pompey term of affection), "scrote" (the opposite) or "scummer" (anyone from Southampton). Can the city be exported? "I was intrigued by the move to Le Havre," said Hurley. "But they have done a good job. What holds true for Portsmouth also holds true for Le Havre. There are similarities: neither city is fashionable, they are both at the end of the railway line, relatively uncursed by money. Sharp-elbowed places, robust." Could you move other English detectives – Morse to Rouen, say, or Rebus to Marseille? "Rebus, maybe yes. But I'm not sure about Morse. You can't get away from those dreaming spires."


Jacques Salles, the French director of the Faraday episodes,, titled Two Cops Down at the Docks, said: "When I read Graham Hurley's books I immediately thought of Le Havre. A huge port, the same kind of atmosphere – same causes, same effects." Salles made an adaptation of a Val McDermid book for French TV two years ago, in two 90-minute episodes. He is excited about doing more of Hurley's work, and said that the TV audience for the first two was "a tremendous success" because they were up against a hugely popular show on France1. The French treat crime writers, Hurley among them, with great respect and have dozens of literary festivals for policiers. "Being from Pompey, at first I thought they were taking the piss," said Hurley. "The festivals have been a very civilised and civilising experience. I remember a coach load of people from Nantes coming to a festival in a remote town in Brittany, the European capital of pig breeding, and they'd know more about my characters than I did. The housewives love Faraday: they all want to mother him."


Attending the festivals helped popularise the books – and now, with the TV series, sales in France have risen. Wouldn't it be ironic if the French TV episodes appeared on BBC4 with subtitles. "Oh yes, that would be good," said Hurley. "I'd laugh – in French." Would the people of Portsmouth laugh with him? Maybe not, because Le Havre has a dark secret they will not like – it is twinned with Southampton. 


 


 


 


 

A Pompey Must

Saturday, January 28, 2012 - 17:59

This is a blatant plug for an artist I much admire. His name is Nigel Grundy and he's spent a great deal of time turning various corners of Old Portsmouth and Southsea into unforgettable drawings. I have a couple of his prints hanging on my study wall. We live in Devon now but a glance at Nigel's take on (for instance) The Slipway at Point, or The Hard at Portsea, or Castle Road, Southsea, takes me straight back to my Pompey days. This guy has an exceptional and very rare talent - and if the Faraday books have whetted your appetite for finding out more about Portsmouth, then Nigel's new book "Requiem" is a must. Each of the 70+ drawings comes with a page of the best kind of history: affectionate reminiscence salted with fascinating facts. It pains a writer to say so, but "Requiem" is conclusive proof that a picture is worth a thousand words.  www.imagesafloat.com

More Top News from La Belle France

Saturday, January 21, 2012 - 14:40

Producer Jacques Salles,  from Paris-based production company Geteve,  has confirmed that filming for the next two Faraday adaptations will begin in Le Havre on 7th February.  The chosen titles?  "Blood and Honey" and "One Under".     Jacques is confidant that the new films for commissioning channel France 2 can build on the success of "Les Anges Brises" and "Les Lignes Blanches".  "We can fine-tune the scripts and the performances...",  he says,  "...but the thrust of the series remains exactly the same.  Socially-committed crime fiction,  feeding off the perfect industrial setting.  This is as close to Pompey as we French can get."

Faraday RIP

Monday, January 16, 2012 - 11:59

Faraday, RIP

More than decade ago, thanks to an invitation from Orion, I became a crime writer. This wasn’t a corner of commercial fiction I’d ever regarded with much enthusiasm but the fridge was getting emptier and – to be frank – I couldn’t afford to say no to a three-book contract. But where to start? One answer would have been the crime shelves of my local library but that would have been a short cut to pastiche fiction and so I fenced off a couple of precious months and set about getting alongside working detectives.
Tough call. Some of these guys, the least reliable, were brimming with war stories. Others regarded me with tight-lipped suspicion. One or two let slip the dark secrets at the heart of most CID work: that it’s repetitive, hideously bureaucratic, and often immensely frustrating. To my intense disappointment, none of these sharp-end detectives had ever had dealings with a serial killer. Neither were they up to speed with torture, anal rape, or any of the other staples of post-watershed TV crime drama. Welcome, I thought at the time, to the world of the minor key.
And yet not all was lost. By the end of my two months, I’d become to sense the kinds of pressures these guys were under. Many were intensely paranoic. Collectively, they’d circled the wagons against the marauding armies of real or imagined enemies. These included local politicians, Home Office civil servants, Health and Safety ninjas, their own line managers, the suits at headquarters, New Labour ministers besotted with moving the legislative goalposts, plus the likes of you and me with our bleats about pisshead youths and the night-time economy. This was bad enough, but in-house the knives were often equally sharp. The buzz words were transparency and risk aversion. You kept your eye on the clock and and your back to the wall. God help the detective who took a gamble or two.
None of this stuff – undoubtedly real - did much for my vision of page-turning fictional drama and yet a larger truth was beginning to dawn. That these guys, along with the silent armies of para-medics, firemen, and – would you believe – teachers, were prime witnesses of a very different kind of drama. Call by call, job by job, especially in a city as intimate and tribal as Portsmouth, they were watching a society tearing itself apart.
But how to draw a fictional bead on this process? The answer had to be through character. And so I invented a D/I – Joe Faraday – and a rogue D/C, Paul Winter. Faraday stepped onto the page as a solitary, a single-parent who’d spent the last twenty years bringing up his deaf-mute son, a working cop who found solace in the world of bird-watching. Winter, on the other hand, came fully-formed from a D/C I’d known in the seventies.
His name was Dave Hopkins. I met him first on the football field. He was centre forward for the Pompey CID team. He broke every rule in the book, kicked you half to death, and blagged offside goals when the referee wasn’t looking. Pompey CID were the poster team that year and they owed the championship to Dave Hopkins. On the field he was a monster. In the bar, afterwards, he made you forgive every bruise, every wind-up, every foul. He was ruthless, effective, and had immense charm.
The first book, Turnstone, appeared in hardback in the autumn of 2000. The guys in the CID room, the ones who’d buttoned their lips, liked what they read. This stuff wasn’t pretty. It didn’t make them look heroes. On the contrary, the book often painted an alarming picture of just how often things go wrong. But that was the truth of it, as they were the first to admit. My contacts list fattened by the week. As did my liver. Faraday and Winter, to my immense relief, were definitely doing the biz.
The series began to gather speed. A second three-book contract followed the success of Angels Passing. By this time I was on more than nodding terms with Faraday and Winter. Story by story I was trusting them with more of the narrative decisions and they repaid my faith in spades. In their very separate ways, both characters became prisms through which the books – and therefore the readers – could explore the kind of society we’d become. And as the top dressing of procedural acronyms fell away, I began to feel a real curiousity about where these two guys were leading me.
Early on, it had become obvious that Faraday had sacrificed his private life to J-J, his son. As a direct result he was clueless with women. Here was a guy with the kind of emotional intelligence that scores big time in the interview suite, yet he couldn’t hold down a proper relationship. Woman either mothered him or fled in despair (this trait, incidentally, went down well with French female readers who definitely regarded him as a worthy cause). Winter, on the other hand, bedded a small army of inappropriate women and rarely spent a second regretting it (this went down less well with the same French readers, for whom Winter was un Ros-Bif typique). But either way, in my head or on the page, a strange dynamic had begun to work, making these two very different men allies in the on-going war against the encroachments of civic and emotional chaos.
In this respect, Winter was always going to be the survivor. In mid-series, with a typical disregard for possible outcomes, he turned his back on his colleagues and crossed to the Dark Side. This, I have to tell you, was Winter’s idea and not mine. In fictional terms it offered all kinds of richness and for that I was deeply grateful. My rogue cop was at last driving a decent motor. The Men in Blue became The Filth. And as drug baron Bazza Mackenzie’s irreplaceable lieutenant, he even had a laugh or two.
Faraday’s growing disenchantment with the Job, essentially no different to Winter’s, led him to a bleaker place. As book followed book, he became more and more isolated. J-J had fled the nest. His emotional life was a car crash. The Job was becoming impossible. Even a summer evening with the night-jars in the New Forest offered little more than the long tramp back to the car. Was this man becoming a depressive? Just a bit.
Then came Borrowed Light, book eleven. Lin and I happened to be in the Middle East when the Israelis set about the Gaza strip in earnest. It was a bad moment to be white and Anglo-Saxon in Syria and Jordan, and worse still in the Sinai Peninsula. Ruined Palestinian kids, some of them with terrifying burns, were shipped out to the Egyptian hospital at El-Arish. Hearing about this stuff, watching the graphic al-Jazeera feeds in countless cafes, it was impossible not to think about Joe Faraday and the three-book relationship with a French anthropologist that had come to mean the world to him. Her name was Gabrielle and she was with him when he decided to snatch a week’s birding under the migration routes that criss-cross the Sinai.
The outcome of some books is cemented in the first line. Joe Faraday was asleep when he went through the windscreen. From that point on, I now realise, he was doomed.
In hospital, in El-Arish, Gabrielle was at his bedside as he fought his way back to consciousness. Already, she’d toured the wards of maimed kids. And already, she’d chosen the one she wanted to adopt.
In due course, mended but not whole, Faraday found himself back on the Major Crime Team. Four bodies in a farmhouse fire on the Isle of Wight kicked off a particularly challenging enquiry. Gabrielle was still in Sinai, way beyond his reach. Even his son appeared to have become a stranger. Page by page, as the darkness thickened, it began to dawn on me that I was writing a book about a man going mad.
At this point came another realisation, equally bleak: that my sole responsibility was to shepherd my series lead to an end of his choosing. Not mine, you understand, but his. And as the finale of the book approached I became increasingly curious about what lay in store. What would Joe decide? What would he do? The answer, all too suddenly, came in the shape of two dozen Co-Proximal and a decent bottle of Cotes-du-Rhone. I wrote this terminal scene and stared in disbelief at the PC screen. After more than a million shared words, our ways had finally parted. Life had ganged up on Joe Faraday. The man, bless him, had called it a day. It was August 4th, 2009.
The volume and sheer vehemence of reader reaction came as another surprise. A long-term fan in California accused me of murder. A reader in Stevenage said I’d been responsible for a month of sleepless nights. A woman in Wellington, New Zealand, pleaded for some kind of Reichenbach Falls miracle resurrection. As the e-mails kept flooding in, reader after reader was aghast that I could be so unfeeling, so clincial, so cruel. As best I could, as you might imagine, I pleaded the case I’ve tried to outline above. That every author must go with the grain of the characters. Regardless of the consequences.
Happy Days drops the curtain on the Faraday series. The man deserved a decent send-off and he gets it. As do Paul Winter and Bazza Mackenzie. But with the loose ends knotted and a spin-off series under way, Joe Faraday’s death remains a source of deep, deep regret.
Do I miss him still? I do. Do I mourn his passing? Of course. Could I have done anything about it? Alas, no.

***

End of Series Interview with Nick Quantrill

Tuesday, January 3, 2012 - 14:57

1) “Happy Days” brings a definite conclusion to the series – how easy was it for you to draw a line under it? Did you always have an exit plan in mind?

Under the circumstances, easier than you might think. To be honest, I never expected the series to survive beyond the first contract (for three books). The fact that it did, and went from strength to strength, has been a surprise and a deep pleasure. But my lead guys were starting to show their age and because I’ve alsways tried to keep the series as authetic as possible, there came a time when they had to step off the page. We’d also baled out of Portsmouth (after thirty very happy years) and several visits to the Old Bruiser (aka Pompey) simply confirmed how quickly a city – and its police force – can change. So it was curtains, alas, for Farrars and the gang.

2) As a reader, the characters (I’m thinking Faraday and Winter) seem to develop and change in such a believable manner. Was this the result of deliberate planning, or was it a more organic process?

Nothing deliberate, I’m afraid. Part of the novelty of this little adventure lay in the fact that I’d never written series before. What that boils down to, aside from a whole load of technical challenges (like backstory), is the company you keep on the page. These characters – thank God – grew and deepened from book to book until they became alarmingly real. By mid-series, I was starting with an idea, or a proposition, or a title, or a half-heard conversation on a bus, and literally handing it over. That, I freely admit, was an act of faith. But the guys never let me down. One postscript, of course, is the decision Faraday himself made in “Borrowed Light”. I’ve yet to get over it.

3) Would it be fair to say that your experience of working on television documentaries gives you an edge when it comes to writing crime novels? Did the television experience bleed into the writing process?

Very much so. I came to crime fiction with some reluctance and was in a muddle about what to do. Should I read everything ever written (and end up penning thin pastiches), or should I go back to my TV documentary days and invest a lot of time and effort in trying to work out what it feels like to be a sharp-end cop (or villain)? The latter option turned out to be the hardest research ask of my entire life, especially as far as the cops were concerned, but I sense from reader and reviewer reaction that it’s paid off in spades. The other TV bonus lay in the writing itself. TV makes you think in pictures: vividly rendered scenes anchored in punchy dialogue. This approach has definitely impacted on the books. Hence, I suspect, the eagerness of the French to go full circle and put Faraday on the screen.

4) A lot of police novels seem to feature serial killers and all manner of unlikely crimes. The Faraday series very much bucks that trend and seems so much more vivid for it. For example, Bazza Mackenzie, the bad guy, seems all the more disturbing because he understands the power of legitimising himself. Is that fair comment?

Totally. After the twelve Pompey books, as you might imagine, I have a contacts file brimming with coppers. These are guys whose collective experience you’d probably measure in millennia but not one of them has ever met a serial killer. This was a bit troubling at the research stage but the harder you look beneath the surface of the Pompey cop’s working day (or night), the more you realise where the drama lies. These are stories in the minor key - families in crisis, kids off the leash, everyone on the piss – but this is stuff that pretty much everyone can relate to and – says me – help make the books a credible read. As far as Baz is concerned, his journey from the drug baron to parliamentary candidate has been a real fascination, not least because – once again – it mirrors real life. Totter round a selection of National Trust stately piles, huge spreads the length and breadth of the kingdom, and you quickly realise that the seed fortune often came from piracy, or slavery, or smuggling, all of them deeply unrespectable. Bazza survives in the rich tradition of robber barons. Bless him.

5) Did you have any involvement in the recent French adaptations of the Faraday novels? As European crime programmes seem to be popular, are we likely to see these in the UK any time soon?

The answer to any involvement on my part is no. They chose the books to adapt themselves and simply got on with it. I had early sight of the scripts and was delighted. They made a real effort to capture the spirit and essence of the series, and were generally faithful to the characterisation. This kind of respect is rarer than you might think. The production itself was – to me – magnificent. They spent a lot of money, and it showed on the screen. The viewing figures were excellent (and climbed for the second adaptation) and they plan to start shooting on two more books next month. Will their work ever make it over the Channel? Stay tuned…

6) In “Happy Days”, DS Jimmy Suttle is again to the fore and will soon star in your next novel, “Western Approaches”. What made you decide on Suttle to carry the new book?

For a number of reasons. Firstly, he’s younger rather than older and could easily survive another dozen books. Secondly – and importantly – because he’s recently married, with a young daughter, and must cope with the kind of contemporary relationship pressures that weren’t really a part of the Faraday books. This new series, set in the West Country, will have a tighter personal focus than the Pompey books which – for me – is a real challenge. Fewer acronyms. Less of an emphasis on policework and procedures. More exploration of what these giddy times are doing to us all. Not least, to Jimmy Suttle. “Western Approaches” is now complete in First Draft and will publish in either 2012 or 2013. Once again, stay tuned…

Top News From France

Tuesday, December 13, 2011 - 14:27

Jacques Salles,  the producer from Geteve responsible for the recent adaptations of "Angels Passing" and "Cut to Black",  has confirmed excellent viewing figures for both productions.  Transmitted on France 2 on 11th and 18th November,  "Les Anges Brises" and "Les Lignes Blanches" scored audiences of 3.76 and 3.9 million respectively.  Jacques is especially pleased that the second film built an even bigger audience than the first.  "These are very fine figures,"  he said.  "We far exceeded the normal audience share for new crime fiction and I can confirm that filming for the next two films - based on "Blood" and Honey" and "One Under" - will go ahead in Le Havre early next year."


As the French say,  "Chapeau!"

Chronological List of French Pub Dates

Wednesday, November 2, 2011 - 17:04

Ahead of the transmission (on France2) or the first two Faraday adaptations,  French readers are asking for a full list of books from the series available in translation.  So here it is...


 


Disparu En Mer       Published in hardback by Editions du Masque in September 2003.   Published in MMP (Mass Market Paperback) by Gallimard in Folio Policier in September 2004


 


Coup Sur Coup      Editions du Masque in September 2003.   Folio Policier in September 2004


 


Les Anges Brises du Somerstown     Editions du Masque in September 2004.  Folio Policier in September 2006


 


La Nuit du Naufrage     Editions du Masque in February 2006.  Folio Policier in October 2007


 


Les Quais de la Blanche     Editions du Masque in April 2007.   Folio Policier in September 2008


 


Du Sang et Du Miel     Editions du Masque in May 2008.  Folio Policier in September 2010


 


Sur La Mauvaise Pente    Editions du Masque in October 2009.  Folio Policier in June 2011


 


De l'Autre Cote de l'Ombre     Editions du Masque in May 2011.  Folio Policier in 2013


 


No Lovelier Death  (sans titre francais en ce moment)    To be published in 2012


 


                                              

Pages