Bring on the weirdos

Mark Billingham

Of course, every writer will say yep, they're delighted, thrilled to bits, can't wait to come to New Zealand to meet their fans and flog a few books. Mark Billingham seems to mean it.

He gets to do quite a bit of this gadding about these days. Actually, he says, gadding about — which are my words — takes up around three months of every year. This is the price to pay for being a writer with publishers in about 30 countries, he thinks. But what's not to like? "Well, it's fantastic," says the Birmingham-raised thriller writer, who has the Midlands burr and a bit of the lad in his voice. "You know, they fly you around the world, put you up in nice hotels and you talk about your book ... It's hardly living in a ditch, is it?"

Still, you imagine that for many writers the circuit of lunches and festivals and signings in book shops must be something of an ordeal. "Some people," says Billingham, "are just shy, and writers are just very solitary by nature a lot of the time. And some people, you put a mike in their hand and stick them in front of an audience and they hate it."

Pity the poor writer — perhaps particularly the poor crime writer — who happens to also be a shrinking violet. No such chance with Billingham who must be a publisher's dream come true. He says: "It was almost the second question when the publisher wanted my first book. The first thing they wanted to know was: what was the next one going to be like? Is it a series? And the second question was: Are you happy to promote it?"

And he said: "Yeah, you try stopping me."

He has been pretty much unstoppable since 2001 when his first novel was published featuring Detective Inspector Thorne, the country music-loving, self-loathing, tatty, loser-at-love cop. It helps that Billingham was a stand-up comic in another life. This not only makes for a quirky introduction to the standard author bio — irresistible to publicity-guff writers — it means Billingham is a writer who loves the limelight, as he pointed out to that publisher.

Although, he says, warming up a book crowd is a far more nerve-racking gig than dealing with "four hundred drunks at the Comedy Store. Because they're not drunk — that's the first thing."

Of course they're not. That's because at those lunch-with-the-author things they never give you more than one drink.

And there is the little matter of the mood of the audience. "The audience that has gone to a comedy club is primed to laugh, primed to enjoy themselves: they want to have a good time. I'm not saying that audiences at book events don't have a good time but they can be quite reserved. A lot of book events can be a little bit po-faced and a little bit serious."

Which is why Billingham likes to do 10 minutes of stand-up before a reading. "And that actually tends to work quite well because you make the audience laugh and then read something that's very dark. So the darker stuff's even darker because the audience kind of go: 'Oh, we thought this guy was funny and now he's all twisted'."

The standard question from the floor is: "Why would somebody whose background is in comedy write such dark books?" His pat answer is that, actually, they're not that different. There's punch-lines a plenty, it's just that they're very dark.

"You use the same techniques in terms of misdirecting an audience, and I try to deliver exactly the same thing, which is entertainment. I try to hook the audience quickly in the same way you've got to do on stage — otherwise they start booing. You build to a big finish. You've got to keep the pages turning or the gags coming. So it is kind of the same thing. It's just a slightly different application of the same facility with words."

But his warming-up-the-literary-audience act involves one significant difference: "It's cleaner than a comedy gig."

DI Thorne, who has a mouth on him, would not be impressed with the alcoholic offerings at an author do. Thorne is firmly in the tradition of the genre. He is at once recognisable and, his creator hopes, always capable of surprising the reader.

You have a contract of sorts with your readers to provide the trappings of character. Billingham says certain things go with the territory. "You know, you can look at it uncharitably and call it a cliche or you can look at it charitably and call it a tradition. You can write about a cowboy who doesn't have a horse or a hat or a gun but he's probably not a cowboy.

"And I'm talking to you now about a detective who is a control freak and has emotional problems and has had problems with drink or drugs and he's into music and I could be talking about John Rebus [the Ian Rankin character] or Sherlock Holmes. Do you know what I mean? You are part of the tradition."

The coppers Billingham does know don't have any such problems. "They're all fantastically well-dressed and happily married, they don't have drink problems and they're not haunted by past cases. But I don't want to write about those people."

Well, quite, and nobody would want to read about them. Funny thing, the way people do want to read about murder and sickos and sad, lonely detectives with potty mouths, except in the US where they devour murder, sickos and lonely detectives but object to the bad language.

Billingham gets letters from American readers who "tell me I'm going to go to hell because my characters swear too much. It's weird. They'll happily read about murder and all manner of perversion and evil and yet if you swear at the same time, that's unacceptable, and I find that very strange."

The strange fans, the ones who write letters about going to hell or to tell Billingham that "the enjoyment of an otherwise good book was spoiled by the fact that that particular train doesn't stop at that particular station on a Saturday morning" are part of the rewards of being the thriller writer.

The other reward is money and when asked if Thorne has made him filthy rich, he says, "you ask very direct questions, you New Zealanders. Yeah, I'm doing all right. Ha. [There's some] typical British understatement."

It is only money talk that makes him go coy. He is perfectly frank about those other bonuses: "Crime writers are nutter magnets. Not quite as much as science-fiction writers because they get nutters come dressed as Klingons, but you do get some very strange emails and some very odd people turn up at events.

"However twisted I think I might be because of some of the stuff I come up with, I discover people far more warped than me who don't actually have the therapy of getting it out on paper."

In the interests, then, of making Billingham feel less like a weirdo, I tell him we'll round up a good selection of local nutters to attend his events. "I hope so," he laughs, and he seems to mean it.

SEE MARK BILLINGHAM

Plotting up a Storm: Exhibition Room, Hilton, May 20, 2pm

Sore Sides: Exhibition Room, Hilton, May 20, 8.30pm

Co-Offenders: A Gang of Three: Exhibition Room, Hilton, May 21, 8pm

Books Left on Buses: Maritime Museum, May 22, 4.30pm