It’s a question crime writers are often asked: ‘How would you feel if the deaths in your book came true?’ Thriller writer Max Kinnings recently found the events of his latest book coming all too true…

When I saw the news earlier this month that part of the Central Line on the London Underground had been flooded, I took to Twitter to say: “Didn’t realise the Central Line had flooded today. Bloody reality trying to steal part of my storyline.” I was referring – albeit flippantly – to my new novel, Baptism, in which Christian fundamentalist terrorists hijack a London tube train and breach an underground river in order to flood a section of the Northern Line. It’s a high concept plot device that hopefully makes for a terrifying and above all plausible scenario for a thriller.

But until it happened, I didn’t realise quite how plausible the scenario might be. Although the river in the novel is a fictitious one, there are a number of underground tributaries in London such as the Walbrook, Fleet, Effra and Tyburn. There is also an intricate labyrinth of sewers and water mains of various sizes and states of repair that weave in and around the tube network. The Central Line flooding is not the first and will, unfortunately, probably not be the last such incident. Since the 1960s, water levels have been rising in London due to a number of factors, such as the inexorable rise in sea levels generally, and more specifically the closure of industries that in the past had extracted huge volumes of water for processing, cleaning and cooling purposes. Prior to the building of the Thames Barrier in 1986, many tube tunnels were fitted with floodgates to protect stations in the event of the Thames breaking its banks and they are still maintained in the event of flooding caused by heavy rain or other factors today.

Entering an underground environment, especially one so vast and intricate as the Tube, plays on our darkest fears. It’s not just flooding that might give the Tube traveller pause to think about their mode of transport. The London Underground has also played host to murders, fires, crashes and most recently – and most terrifying of all – terrorist attacks. In 2005, I happened to find myself in the tube train behind the one in which Jean Charles de Menezes was tragically killed by armed police who mistook him for a terrorist. Trapped in the tunnel for nearly an hour, I witnessed the unravelling of tube passengers’ carefully constructed social façades. It was a frightening experience but one that, as a writer, I knew I could use.

The London Underground is a place that evokes polarised views and opinions. Some love its ease of use and quaint architecture; to others, it is a place that makes them feel nervous, dislocated and claustrophobic, locked in some of the deepest and narrowest underground railway lines ever built. It is this fear and discomfort that I wanted to play upon when I wrote Baptism. Readers of thrillers want to be scared and in that regard, I don’t think I’ve held back. I just didn’t realise how close to reality the events of the book might become.

www.maxkinnings.com 

He may spend a lot of time poring over new crime fiction for newspapers and magazines, but Barry Forshaw (whose latest book is a guide to Scandinavian crime fiction, Death in Cold Climate, and whose next book is British Crime Film) makes a point of dusting off some favourites in the few gaps that appear in his reading regime. Here he talks us through a few classics we may have missed. 

The Murder Room

P D James

The doughty Inspector Adam Dalgliesh finds himself in a private museum on Hampstead Heath. One of the family trustees has been brutally murdered and the future of the museum is up for grabs. As so often with Holland Park’s most venerable novelist, the handling of violent death in a closed-off setting is consummately handled and The Murder Room is vintage PD James.

The Mask of Dimitrios

Eric Ambler

Eric Ambler’s most famous book gets better with the years: The crime novelist Latimer hears about the evil Dimitrios in Istanbul when looking at the latter’s dead body, freshly retrieved from the Bosphorous. And Latimer makes the mistake of trying to find out the truth about the murdered man. Wonderfully atmospheric, with a narrative that commands from the first page, this is probably the most authoritative of Ambler’s political thrillers.

Dark Hollow

John Connolly

John Connolly’s Every Dead Thing, featuring Detective “Bird” Parker, was a highly unusual entry in the field, written in a quixotic, arresting style. But Dark Hollow is equally unorthodox. Connolly remarked that he wanted to give this book a very sinister feel, rather than just a gruesome one. Bird returns to the wintry Maine of his childhood, where a woman and a child are savagely killed. Disturbing and unsettling fare.

The Ministry of Fear

Graham Greene

London in the Blitz is brilliantly conjured by one of the greatest of English writers in this dazzling piece. Greene claimed a contentious division between his ‘entertainments’ and his ‘literary’ work, but the moral issues here are as rigorously handled as anything by Greene in his more ambitious novels. Arthur Rowe, full of guilt after the death of his sick wife, is plunged into a dangerous world of murderous, shadowy figures. Possibly the author’s most sheerly enjoyable novel in the ‘thriller’ vein.

The Naming of the Dead

Ian Rankin

What would British crime fiction do without Ian Rankin? Apart from anything else, it would be somewhat lopsided in terms of the sexes, as there are markedly more Queens of Crime than Kings. And of the latter, Rankin is undoubtedly the ruling monarch, as The Naming of the Dead reminds us. Rankin was inspired by a variety of media scare stories about the G8 meeting of world leaders in Scotland in 2005, and perceived that this would make the perfect background for one of his novels.

We continue with the feedback and reports from the crime convention that kicked off Crime Writing Month. Janet O’Kane reports on the panel ‘Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know’, moderated by Donna Moore, with panellists Helen Fitzgerald, Douglas Lindsay, Michael J Malone, and Damien Seaman. 

I’ve often wondered how writers greet the news that their CrimeFest panel moderator will be Donna Moore. Are they jubilant at the prospect of being quizzed by someone who tends to ask the most imaginative and challenging questions of the entire event? Or are they thrown into blind panic, knowing how much ‘homework’ they’ll be set beforehand?

Douglas Lindsay must have known what to expect, having been on Donna’s panel last year which required him to read out a specially written story featuring an animal. You can read the blood-spattered result here: http://www.barney-thomson.com/blog.asp?blogid=4876 . In 2012, Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know kicked off with each panel member providing the audience with their own alternative biography and the opening of a spoof cosy-crime story. Needless to say, their creations were anything but cosy, and who would have guessed that Michael is the estranged love-child of Alex Salmond and Dame Edna Everage? After that, making an elevator pitch for their latest novels must have been a doddle.

Michael and Damien spoke about the joy and challenges of being first-time published novelists. Michael wrote his book, Blood Tears, then discovered another Michael Malone wrote in the same genre. Not just that, one of his books featured the same MO and the man himself ‘looks like he could be my dad’. As a result, Michael had to change both the MO and his name. Damien, whose novel The Killing of Emma Gross is available as an e-book, said he’s ‘having a ball’, but admitted he has a lot to learn. His excitement on spotting he’d jumped several thousand places up the Amazon sales chart was short-lived, when his publisher Blasted Heath pointed out this was because he’d sold five books.

Asked why they were attracted to writing crime, the panel came up with a wide variety of reasons. Helen reckoned that by killing people in her imagination, things don’t seem so bad in real life. Her books are often hard to categorise – the most recent, The Donor, centres around a father’s terrible choice concerning his daughters – but ‘I always kill someone’. For Douglas, whose most recent novel, The Unburied Dead, is a departure from his Barney Thomson series, it felt ‘the natural thing to do’. Somewhat bravely, Damien said he isn’t especially fond of reading crime, finding it ‘depressing’, but is a big fan of films like Pulp Fiction and Fargo. For Michael, writing crime was a ‘happy accident’. He was already a published poet and had written two novels which had gone nowhere when he dreamt about a killer who did a curious thing, cutting his own eyelid so he appeared to be crying blood. When he woke up he knew he ‘just had to use’ this.

Kicking off a discussion about real-life influences on their writing, Damien related how a trip to Berlin renewed his interest in history, which he had studied at university. It was there he sought out the story of a serial killer on which to base his book. Michael stayed closer to home for his novel, setting it in Glasgow and involving events in a Catholic orphanage. He has personal experience of such an institution, and although he didn’t intend writing Blood Tears to be cathartic, it turned out to be. He is now trying to avoid sending a copy to his aunt who, at 84, is both an avid reader and a nun.

Helen saw no reason to deny that her work is heavily influenced by her own circumstances, saying ‘you write about what’s going on in your life’. She has two children, and families feature often in her books. Having a 15-year-old partly explains why she writes for young adults as well, although she also considers that her writing style suits this age group.Douglasinsists he ‘just charges in’ and writes, mixing up death and comedy. However, he was seriously affected by the killing of someone he knew, and didn’t write any murders for about four years as a result.

This wide-ranging panel went on to discuss topics like the responsibility a writer has to the reader, how they approach research, and what they are currently working on. Fans of Barney Thomson were disappointed to hear that Douglas has no immediate plan to bring that character back, while Michael is hoping he’ll be able to fob off his aunt, the nun, with his upcoming non-fiction book on modern-day, successful Scots. Crafty as ever, Donna also asked the writers to own up to the worst reviews their work has received, than read out some she had researched herself. Helen particularly remembered one of her books being dismissed with ‘The only good thing is it’s mercifully short’. Finally, each author was asked which of ‘mad, bad or dangerous to know’ they were. Douglas refused to answer, claiming to be ‘offended I was even put on this panel’.

This was an entertaining panel that benefited from bringing together an eclectic mix of authors under the direction of a well-informed and imaginative moderator.

Blog: www.janetokane.blogspot.com

Twitter: @JanetOKane