|
Graham Hurley is an
award-winning TV documentary maker who now writes full time. He
lived in Portsmouth for over 20 years and bases his crime series
there. His novels feature two detectives, D.I Joe Faraday, a
methodical, reflective cop who as the series moves on can see
society breaking down in to chaos and D.C Paul Winter, a detective
from the old school of policing who flouts police procedure when
possible. Despite their differences the two detectives complement
each other and make for entertaining plots.
What seems to differentiate the DI Faraday series is the realism
in the way police work is portrayed. How do you approach that, given
it’s a constantly changing environment? Would you say your
background making documentaries has been useful in this respect?
Trying to draw a bead on the working world of the sharp end
detective is like nailing water to the wall. These guys are under
siege. They have to cope with constant changes in working practise,
in procedure, in legislation, in Home Office and local priorities,
plus a million other things, and it drives quite of a lot of them
barmy. This in itself becomes a pressure with obvious fictional
potential and so I’d be mad as a writer not to try and update myself
each time I set out on a new book. Each of the books is dated, which
helps, and the very fact that I do the procedural groundwork helps
even more because it opens doors inside the Job. I learned early on
that cops resent trespassers who help themselves to the sexier bits
of their trade and get the rest wrong because they can’t be arsed to
do the research. The research, in my view, is key…because once these
guys trust you, and then the relationship often goes a lot further
than procedural accuracy. You’re getting it right in small but
important ways, and that matters to them. Has a background in
documentary films helped? Definitely. Not least because it taught me
a great deal about the virtues of patience: how to get alongside
people, how to listen, how to think yourself into someone else’s
head, how to understand ways in which their working world shapes
pretty much everything else.
Faraday is markedly different to the likes of Rebus. How do you
approach the challenge of writing a policeman who (largely) plays by
the rules? Was it a deliberate decision when the series was first
conceived?
To be honest, I was pretty clueless about the kind of cop I wanted
at the heart of the series. I made Faraday the way he is – straight,
committed, shrewd, solitary, emotional, frequently bewildered –
because I felt easy with him in my head. In a strange sense he was
good, if challenging, company and I suspected that this might be
important if his first outing – in Turnstone – was to stretch into a
series. In that respect the relationship (between him and me) has
worked to our mutual advantage but I discovered very early that
Faraday alone would never sustain even a single book and so I
offered Paul Winter a role and – being Winter – he quickly became
the co-star. Why? Because the devil always gets the best tunes.
The city of Portsmouth looms large in the series and the sense of
place is vivid. How has the city reacted to having a mirror held up
to itself?
A lot of people believe that Portsmouth has become a major character
in the series and that gladdens me. I lived in the city for the best
part of thirty years and – like Winter – it began to elbow its way
into the stand-alone thrillers I wrote pre-Faraday. It’s an
immensely distinctive place – rough, insular, spirited – and I owe
it the same kind of duty of care I’ve described with respect to
working detectives. You have to get it right. You have to get people
who live in the city, who know its funny little ways, to trust you.
And a single false note can wreck that trust. But there’s a problem
here, too, because this isn’t just Pompey, it’s a cop’s Pompey, a
scrote’s Pompey, a villain’s Pompey, and that kind of focus doesn’t
marry easily with other agendas. If you were looking to pitch
Portsmouth as an upmarket tourist venue, I suspect you’d do your
best to bury the Faraday series.
In your latest novel, ‘No Lovelier Death’, DC Paul Winter’s
decision to leave the Job to work for gangster-turned-business man,
Bazza Mackenzie is central. Was it a deliberate move to take the
series in a different direction, or was it something which developed
more organically?
Organic is the word. Living with characters over a series certainly
has its challenges and one of them is the moment when a particular
character develops ideas of his own. This is exactly what happened
with Paul Winter. Increasingly at odds with the new CID culture,
there was no way he’d simply settle into the squeaky-clean world of
booze-free policing and 24/7 accountability. Apart from anything
else, he’d probably die of boredom. And so I had to take him aside,
pour Stella down his throat, and explain the fictional options. A
transfer to the Dark Side was one of those options and he leapt at
it. Typical.
I read that when your agent suggested you write a crime series
featuring a detective, you weren’t familiar with the genre. Has that
changed, and if so, which crime writers do you admire?
It’s true that my little adventures in the crime game were at
someone else’s invitation but it was the publisher (Orion), not my
agent (because I don’t have one). In many respects I’m more than
grateful. Robbed of the freedoms that come with writing so-called
International Thrillers, I had deep misgivings about ending up in
this claustrophobic little genre box but police procedurals – rooted
in a real city - in fact offer more scope than I’d ever imagined.
You can do all kinds of stuff with these books – and if you’re
looking for a preview of what awaits this society of ours then
there’s no better place to be than Pompey. Do I read crime fiction
any more than I ever did? I’m afraid not.
Given that the series stretches to nine books (and counting),
what is it about the crime genre that appeals to you as a writer?
This is a tricky question. Like I say, I don’t read crime fiction.
On the other hand, in crude marketing terms, the word “crime” (with
its implicit promise of story and some kind of resolution) is a
major hook. That hook was absolutely the basis of the original Orion
invitation and to their great credit they’ve stood by the series and
made it work. From my point of view, that’s a comfort as well as a
relief because no one wants to be dumped overboard in mid-voyage,
but more important are the fictional doors that Faraday and Winter,
between them, have opened. A decade in their company has taught me a
great deal about the development of character and the importance of
the relationships they establish and thanks to both these guys,
we’re now in very different territory. For a writer, that’s both
strange and exciting: a responsibility as well as a challenge.
NO LOVELIER DEATH, Orion Hbk £9.99 Feb 2009
Read SHOTS’ review of
No Lovelier Death
|
