An interview with Mark Billingham

Originally a stand-up comedian and actor, Mark Billingham became a best-selling writer with the publication of Sleepyhead, his first crime novel, in 2001.

Although still doing the odd stand-up show, Mark now concentrates on writing books featuring London-based detective Tom Thorne. The second novel in the series, Scaredy Cat was published in 2002, followed a year later by Lazybones. Mark has just published the newest Tom Thorne novel, The Burning Girl and he recently spent some time talking to our Techie.

Did you always want to be a writer?
Yes I think so. I can remember doing the 11 plus in school and the big thing was this short essay story in English. You were supposed to do some serious composition but I ended up writing this stupid short story. I always wanted to write funny stories. I think I've always written stories and then I started writing stand up, writing television scripts - but the one thing I never thought I could write was a full-length novel. That just seemed so daunting. I thought how can you do that? Then I sat down and tried.

How did you make the transition from stand-up comedian to writer?
Well I didn't actually stop one and start the other. It's only now that I've started to wind down the stand up. I'm not doing very much of it at all whereas for the last few years I was doing both. They really are two sides to the same coin. For a while it was fantastic to do both. I'd spend all day writing about death and darkness and then go out and tell some cheap jokes in the evening.

You really do use the same tricks. The way you manipulate an audience when you're live on stage and you're kind of leading them in certain directions and then hitting them with punch lines from somewhere unexpected. You do the same thing when you write crime - it's just different punch lines. Also you need to entertain an audience in the same way I need to entertain a reader. It's all words; it's all using words, just without quite so many laughs.

Comedy does come through in your books - is that deliberate?
Well life is like that, the funniest things happen at the darkest moments and also I quite like to end a chapter about some really hideous dark moment and start the next chapter with a joke because I really do think that's how life is. Also the people I'm writing about do have the blackest sense of humour, otherwise they would go home and kill themselves. You can't deal with that kind of stuff all day and not kind of joke about it.

What made you choose the thriller genre?
It's what I like to read really, it's that easy. I was writing comedy and I was performing comedy and I was writing stuff like animation for kids but I was devouring this dark fiction, mostly American, so when it came time to sit down and try and write a book there was never going to be any question abut what it was going to be. I wanted to be a crime writer more than anything.

Burning Girl is your fourth novel, will be seeing much more of DI Tom Thorpe?
Well you certainly do in the fifth! Every time I keep thinking I'm going to write a stand alone novel he just kind of forces his way into it. This book is actually very different from the three that come before it and the next book is different again. In the next book without giving anything away he doesn't go anywhere near a police station. He's getting over what happens at the end of this book, it's different, you have to keep reinventing it.

Jessica's voice comes across as completely authentic. How do you write like a fifteen-year-old girl?
I really liked writing her which is why I want to write a novel in the first person. The bits I've enjoyed writing more than anything are Alison in Sleepy Head and Jessica in this. The thing about writing in the first person is you have to put yourself in somebody's head and think: what are they seeing? what are they thinking? what are they feeling? I find it very liberating and I write very quickly when I'm doing that. I guess Jessica's diary bits are very similar in some ways to Alison's thoughts which you read in the first book.

Are the crimes in Burning Girl based on true-life events?
The start of this book, the incident in the playground, was based on something somebody told me. A friend of mine said: "I was at school and they caught this bloke trying to set a girls skirt on fire," and I just went "excuse me?" They caught the guy or chased him away before he did anything but you're talking about it and half your brain's going "that's terrible" but part of you is going "why?" I'd written about some very twisted characters in the first three books who killed for all manner of bizarre psychotic reasons and I wanted to write about someone who killed for probably the strangest reason of all, which is money. To try and get inside these characters' heads. So when this friend of mine told me about this incident with the lighter I just thought, "well, what if the guy was doing that for money, why is he doing it for money?" and that's the way I went and that's all it was.

Who is your favourite detective character/hero?
I've just had to write an article about the evolution of the detective so I just had to go right back to Sherlock Holmes and all that crew. I'm a big fan of Michael Connolly's Harry Bosch novels. He's a fantastic hero. The last book of his I read made me cry on a beach in Greece. He's a great hero because he's very human.

Do you think the genre of the detective novel has evolved over the last 20 years?
We've come from Peter Wimsy and those aristocratic detectives to Rebus and Thorne and detectives who will cross lines and sometimes it's difficult to tell the good guy from the bad guy. They are more human. They fall in love and they listen to music and they have relationships with drink and drugs, the kind of thing the rest of the world does. Also, in England they tend to be policemen because in this country private detectives spend their life chasing adulterers of husbands and wives. We don't have that kind of same private eye tradition that they have in the States so the police procedurals tends to rule the roost here. I think it's in a very healthy state here, in terms of the detective novel, I really do.

Mark Billingham was in conversation with The Techie

To win a signed copy of The Burning Girl click here

To read our review of The Burning Girl click here

Other Books mentioned in the interview
Sleephead by Mark Billingham