 |
Trevor Wood has lived in Newcastle for nearly thirty years and considers himself an adopted Geordie, though he still isn’t fluent in the language.
After sixteen years in the Royal Navy he worked as a journalist and spin-doctor for the City Council, and also became a successful playwright.
Following an MA in Creative Writing at UEA specializing in crime fiction, the first in his Jimmy Mullen trilogy was published by Quercus in 2020, and won both the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger, and the Crimefest Debut Crime Novel Award, and a fistful of honourable mentions including the shortlist of the Theakston’s Crime Novel of the Year and the
Paul Torday Memorial Prize.
https://trevorwoodauthor.co.uk
Lynne: A lot of water has flowed under the proverbial since we were last in touch nearly two years ago, for the world at large and more especially for you. A highly successful trilogy, two major awards, the shortlist for several others – how does it feel to have become an overnight success?
Trevor: Ha! At my age it doesn’t really feel overnight! Obviously it was wonderful that The Man on the Street received so many accolades. When you put your debut novel out there, the best you can realistically hope for is that enough readers buy it and enjoy it that you can continue to write and get more books published; anything else is the icing on an already fine cake. There are a few more prizes up for grabs in the crime world than other genres, I think, but there is also a lot more competition, so you can maybe dream of getting a mention in a longlist somewhere; but the CWA Dagger award was a huge bonus. I was thrilled to make the longlist but to win it was a complete shock, and then to get shortlisted for the Theakston’s Crime Novel of the Year alongside such brilliant writers as Elly Griffiths, Chris Whitaker, Abir Mukherjee and Brian McGilloway was mind-blowing.
Lynne: The adventures of Jimmy Mullen and his cohorts were only intended to be a standalone novel, but they proved so popular they turned into three books. Are you done with them now, or can we look
forward to meeting them again at some point in the future?
Trevor: That’s true, which goes to show that you never know what’s around the corner! The Man on the Street was turned down by so many publishers that there were times that I thought it might never happen. So though I think the trilogy is the end of the story, who knows? Maybe the last line of the third book, Dead End Street, will prove prophetic (people will have to read it to find out what that is!) And of course, if everything else I write in the meantime falls flat I may have to return to Jimmy and his friends if I want to keep getting published! As a teaser I am toying with throwing in a guest appearance from one of the characters into the book I’m currently working on.
Lynne: A detailed knowledge of Newcastle was a key factor in the Jimmy books. The location in your new book, You Can Run, is a remote and sparsely populated Northumbrian village: quite different from a bustling city. You appear to be every bit as familiar with every sinister alley and hidey-hole in it; is it based on a village you know, or pure imagination?
Trevor: It’s a fictional village but an amalgam of several real places. During the bits of lockdown when we were allowed out, I spent a lot of time walking around the vast swathes of Northumberland looking for the perfect location, but nowhere was quite right. After lockdown I spent a week in a small village called Snitter, and wandered all over that area as well to get a real feel for the place. In the end I knocked up a badly-drawn map, which has thankfully been rendered into a proper map by a proper artist which is used in the book. For those who know the area, my fictional village, Coldburn, is in the National Park area somewhere to the west of Rothbury and a kind of mash-up of Holystone and Elsdon.
Lynne: Something else that’s completely different is the protagonist. Jimmy is a middle-aged man; Ruby is a teenage girl. I couldn’t help wondering if you’d set out to write a book for young adults, but got carried away in a different direction.
Trevor: No. Quite the opposite really. I realised that a lot of my favourite crime books had a young protagonist (Doug Johnstone’s Breakers and Joe Lansdale’s The Bottoms to name but two) and wondered if that was something I could carry off. I tried the voice out in a short story for the Afraid of the Shadows anthology and it seemed to work well, and then I sent some early chapters of You Can Run to a couple of YA writers, to make sure both that the voice was OK and that I wasn’t inadvertently writing a YA book. They were very positive about both aspects so I pressed on. I think the fact that the main protagonist is surrounded by several older characters, many of whom have a voice in the book, takes it well away from YA. That and a smattering of extreme violence!
Lynne: When we were last in touch you described your writing method as ‘completely organic’. Did you have any idea where the story was going when you started to write it?
Trevor: I’m afraid it was my usual ‘make it up as you go along’ approach. I knew how it started but that was about it. I think I originally envisaged it as some kind of road trip where Ruby and her friend Lucas are fleeing from danger pursued by enemies unknown, but it very quickly become obvious that keeping them trapped in the village added a lot more tension and gave the book a more claustrophobic feel.
Lynne: Is Ruby another product of your imagination, or is there some research in there somewhere? It’s not as if there’s a lot of personal experience to draw on there!
Trevor: A lot of imagination, a lot of reading other books with teenage narrators and some sound advice from my daughter who, though a little older than Ruby, is much closer to her age than I am. She’s doing a PhD in
criminology, so not only does she mix with younger students, she’s also a handy source of information. She’s always been one of my early readers anyway, as her proof-reading skills are exemplary!
Lynne: You Can Run is packed with interesting, one might even say quirky, characters, some good, some bad, most a fertile mixture. Do they all come out of your equally fertile imagination, or do you rely on keen observation as well?
Trevor: A bit of everything. I like to work hard on my secondary characters anyway, but I wanted the older villagers to be particularly strong. I think older people are often incidental in crime books, with the obvious
exception of Richard Osman’s series, and I wanted to bring them centre stage. (My wife has described You Can Run as ‘The Thursday Murder Club meets Deliverance’!) I think the recent success of Happy Valley on TV has shown in particular that there’s a lot of interest in older women characters, and I like to think that Margaret from You Can Run would fit into that world perfectly. And I see Danny as a distant cousin of Jimmy Mullen’s, whose life took a different turn at some stage.
Lynne: I had a sense several times when I was reading You Can Run that I was hearing a snippet of Trevor Wood’s view of the world we live in. Is that how you regard writing fiction – as a way to get some points across to your readers?
Trevor: Busted! I think you have to be careful that the characters have their own voice, but we are living in pretty frightening times, and as the book is set very much in the present day, I wanted to capture some of the issues that I think we should all be concerned about: abuse of power, accountability and so on. It’s also important to reflect some of the problems in remote rural areas if you’re setting your book there, and the proliferation of second homes and Airbnbs is having a damaging effect on some towns and villages, so I wanted to show that too. I must be the only crime writer whose books to date have all featured housing issues!
Lynne: Something else you said last time was that everything you write begins with one small idea. If it’s not giving too much away, what was the small idea that lit the fire under You Can Run?
Trevor: I kept having this vision of a teenage child seeing their previously reclusive yet peaceful parent commit a violent act. I wanted to know what that was all about, so that child became Ruby, and after a lot of trials and tribulations, she eventually managed to answer that question for me.
Lynne: Once again, you set out to write a standalone novel. Now that you’ve solved the mystery of Ruby’s past, can you envisage giving her and Lucas more adventures in the future?
Trevor: There is, deliberately, a cryptic ending to the book which could feasibly lead to another story. A couple of early readers said they would like to see a sequel too – so maybe Ruby and Lucas will go on that road trip one day!
Lynne: What can we expect in the future with your name on the cover? Is your next project already
under way, or are you waiting for that small idea to strike a spark?
Trevor: I have just agreed a new two-book deal with Quercus, who I’ve been with from the start, for the first two books in a new police procedural series with a twist. I haven’t quite worked out how much of that twist will be revealed in advance so you’ll have to be patient on that score. I’m about halfway through writing book one, but as usual, I have no idea where the story is going yet!
Lynne: If the book is as intriguing as that little teaser, it’s really something to look forward to! And since I’ve had a sneak preview of You Can Run, I can confirm that it’s as original and unputdownable as the Jimmy Mullen trilogy, though in a completely different way. The best of good luck with it, Trevor, and thank you for taking time to talk to Mystery People.
The trilogy featuring Jimmy Mullen and his homeless friends is published by Quercus:
The Man On the Street
One Way Street
Dead End Street
You Can Run was published 16 March 2023. To read a review click on the title.
Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives in Oxfordshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.
No comments:
Post a Comment