The latest offering from Simon Kernick sees the characters of his last six novels meeting for the first time. He tells Stephen Jewell how it happened.
While best-selling crime authors like Ian Rankin and Mark Billingham have dedicated long-running series to a single detective, Simon Kernick's exhilarating thrillers have centred around an ever-changing cast of recurring characters.
Now, in his 10th novel The Payback, the 44-year-old writer pits his three most prominent
protagonists - DI Tina Boyd, policeman-turned-assassin Dennis Milne and elusive gangland figure Paul Wise - against each other for the first time.
"It effectively wraps up all the other books from A Good Day To Die onwards," says Kernick, referring to his 2004 fourth novel.
"All the books have followed on from each other chronologically and they've slowly been coming to the point where all the storylines converge.
"I wasn't sure how it was going to work out. It took a little bit of experimenting, writing 100 pages, chucking it all out and starting again, which happened a few times before I got it right. But when it finally came together, it seemed to work really well, so I'm very pleased with the book. It acts as a conclusion to all the others."
Milne featured in Kernick's 2002 début The Business Of Dying, while Tina Boyd first cropped up in The Murder Exchange the following year. The alcoholic Murder Squad detective earned her nickname "the Black Widow" in Kernick's 2006 breakthrough, Relentless, after her former partner and lover, John Gallan, was murdered by Paul Wise.
"The story of their relationship has been building for quite a while now and I always felt that it was very important to bring it to a head," he says. "I also wanted to bring Dennis into this book but I wondered if he and Tina would be too big as characters to be in the same book together. But it all seemed to fit together very nicely in terms of the idea and the structure of the book."
After the murder of a journalist who was investigating Wise's clandestine activities, Boyd travels to the Philippines where she comes into conflict with Milne, who has been contracted to kill her.
"I'm not giving away too much but there's a scene early on in the book where they meet," says Kernick, who reveals that Milne has steadily become compromised.
"He's now gone completely off the rails and by the beginning of this book, which takes places six years after the end of A Good Day To Die, he's pretty much a full-time hitman. He effectively kills for money now and although he likes to think that he still only kills the baddies, he's become more and more flexible because he owes his employer, who has a hold over him. He's gone over to the dark side and the whole book is about whether he will come back at least partly to the good side."
The Payback is set mostly in Manila, a very different milieu to Kernick's usual London stomping ground.
"I spent three weeks there before I started writing so that I could write about it with a degree of authority," he says. "It's a funny old place. It was flattened during World War II, when it was the most bombed city after Dresden.
"It's since been rebuilt in a pretty basic style with lots of low-rise concrete buildings, endless poverty and immense overcrowding. There's a buzz about it as there's always lots of people on the streets and lots of movement and noise. It feels a lot more dangerous than most other Southeast Asian cities. You see armed guards outside the petrol stations and armed robbery almost seems like a profession for many people."
Kernick is tight-lipped about The Payback's explosive climax and refuses to be drawn on whether he will return to Boyd and Milne in the future. "You'll have to read the book, I can't say much more than that," he says with a grin. "But I certainly have no plans for either of them at the moment, although that could change. If indeed they are still alive."
He also reveals few details about his next novel, a stand-alone, high concept thriller that promises to be his most ambitious work to date.
"It's told from multiple viewpoints and takes place over the course of one day," he teases. "I've started it but it requires much more research than what I'd normally do. It's a bit slow-going at the moment and I'm only three or four chapters in. But I've structured it all up - which I always do before I start writing - so I know pretty much everything that's going to happen.
"I'm fairly confident it will make for a very interesting and exciting, fast-paced read. Of course, I've got another 90,000 words to write, so who knows?"
The Payback (Bantam Press $39.99) is out now.
