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John Harvey |
Crime pays for John the diamond writer
The top crime writing award, the Cartier Diamond Dagger, has been awarded to John Harvey – the crime writers’ crime writer. Matthew Lewin spoke to him
JOHN Harvey is not one of those writers who blows his own trumpet, and his response to winning the Crime Writers’ Association top prize was typically muted.
“I was very pleasantly surprised,” was his spectacularly understated reaction, “especially when you look at the list of people who have won it before. I suppose you are going to be on a list, this is the one to be on.”
It is indeed. Previous winners have included P D James, John Le Carré, Elmore Leonard, Ed McBain, Colin Dexter and Eric Ambler – the very top names in the business.
And the award is only the latest recognition that in recent years Harvey has become one of those authors whose popularity ensures that his name appears on his books in much bigger type than the titles.
“I find it all a bit embarrassing,” he says. “When I see one of those 16-sheet posters about me in Tube station, my inclination is to look away,” he told me at his home in Oakford Road, Kentish Town.
And none of it has happened by accident. The fact is that Harvey is one of the most experienced writers in the business, and has written more books than just about anybody except Barbara Cartland. He is not sure whether his new book is his 97th or 98th.
After he saw the light and gave up teaching English and drama in Stevenage and became a writer, he spent the first five or six years of his new career churning out books about soldiers, mercenaries, cowboys and private detectives – at the astonishing rate of 12 or 13 books a year.
He freely admits that some of them were “truly awful” but he obviously learned a thing or two in the process and he went on to more significant work. His first big breakthrough was with his novels about his slightly melancholic, jazz and cat-loving Nottingham police detective, Charlie Resnick, some of which became successful TV plays.
He went on to win the CWA’s Silver Dagger in 2004 for his book Flesh and Blood, which also received a top American award for the best British crime novel published in the US.
And now he’s won the Diamond Dagger for his new book, Gone to Ground, which is to be published by William Heinemann in March at £12.99. He will receive the award at a big event in May.
It’s a superb “police procedural” introducing an excellent new sleuthing team, Detective Inspector Will Grayson and his sergeant, Helen Walker, investigating the murder of a gay academic film historian, in a case where nothing is as it appears to be. “They are new characters, who I have only used previously in one short story, and I wanted to convey a sense of there being a history between them, an element of shared past, in terms of their rather sparky relationship,” he says.
All this does not mean that he has abandoned Charlie Resnick. On the contrary, he is already busy on his next novel which will feature a collaboration between Resnick and another new character, a London private detective (and former professional footballer) Jack Kiley.
The days are long gone when he could turn out 3,000 words a day. Nowadays he is happy to produce 600 to 800 words when he sits down to write in the morning after taking his daughter to school.
“More recently it used to be 1,000 or more, but I’m just getting slower. I used to be able to write a book in three months, but now it takes six or seven.
“But, you know, even when I am not actually writing I am still thinking about the story, not always deliberately; it just comes into my mind.
“I try to walk on Hampstead Heath for an hour or so two or three afternoons a week, and without me really trying to, the story starts percolating. So the next morning I am usually all ready to start writing.
“For me the key thing is to get the first hour in early, before I’ve done anything else, and if that goes okay I know I’m going to be alright for the rest of the day.”
Another big feature of Harvey’s work is the way he reflects his own passion for music in his books. Resnick loves jazz, and that enables Harvey to wax lyrical about the likes of Thelonius Monk.
His new character, Will Grayson, likes more modern music, including the work of singer songwriter Beth Orton, who gets a rave review for one of her concerts in the new book.
He says: “I think that if music is one of the things you are interested in, and you can write about it in a way that might enthuse other people about it, then I think it’s a good thing to do.
“I’ve done that right from the early days. It means that I am engaged with the work, and it’s not something separate from my life.”
• John Harvey’s Gone to Ground will be published next month.
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