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Which authors have influenced your writing the most and why? |
After an initial burst of voracious reading in my teens I hardly read a book for thirty years, fiction anyway. I was always writing something, TV and film scripts, abortive novels, short stories and was trying to discover what I had to say and how to say it. I wanted to find my own voice. I was nervous of being influenced by people like Hemingway, for example, so easy to ape, or the totally different style of Waugh. To generalise, I think I lean more towards American writers than Europeans.
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What was the last good book you read? |
Anna Karenin, as I understand we must call it now. Tolstoy’s humanity and perception is timeless.
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To what extent has your life experience influenced your writing? |
I did a lot of humorous pieces for Richard Ingrams’ Oldie magazine in the late 1990s and drew directly from daft things I and the rest of the family had experienced. Now though, with the novels about fighter pilots, I can only say I draw on my emotions as a weekend racing driver to describe the feelings of men going into combat. There are similarities but of course at Brands Hatch you’re only fighting for position. No-one’s shooting at you!
I suppose various aspects of your personality, shaped by where you’ve been and what you’ve done, the person you are, help to mould your characters. In Blue Man Falling I see myself in both the idealistic Englishman Kit Curtis and the aggressive and tough little American Ossie Wolf. But I flew a desk for two years in the RAF and I’m not a pilot, so these books are drawn almost entirely from the imagination.
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Do you always know how your books will end before you start writing? |
No, I was going to kill my main character on the first page and my editor, Martin Fletcher, prevailed on me not to because he felt Kit Curtis had rather more mileage in him in terms of future titles. He was absolutely right. But the book did generate some surprises for me as it went along, particularly the climax.
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What inspired Blue Man Falling? |
I found the diary of a fighter pilot in a Salisbury bookshop that recounted his experiences in the Battle of France in 1940. Although I was born before the war and like most people was familiar with the Battle of Britain, this was a time I knew little about. I did some research, discovered the bizarre nature of the Phoney War, when pilots would be on patrol at 25,000-feet looking for the Luftwaffe, yet days later could be sipping champagne cocktails in the Crillon in Paris. It grew from that, and Paris became a character in its own right, with all its loucheness and underlying fear of what was to come. It was all swept aside of course when the Germans finally invaded and France capitulated, leaving the RAF squadrons to scramble for safety in Brittany.
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What kind of audience is Blue Man Falling aimed at? |
Ah, interesting! It’s characterised as a fighter pilot thriller but, if I had to pigeonhole it, I would put it much more in the area of Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong, if that’s not too presumptuous. Blue Man Falling may appear to be what some have suggested is ‘a bloke’s book’, but I aimed for more than that, and women who’ve read it agree. It’s more than just an adventure yarn about fighter boys and has, I hope, some believable women characters who give the story a different and essential dimension that rounds out the spirit of the times. This is still more true of the next book, about the siege of Malta, Band Of Eagles, due for publication in January 2007. Hope so anyway…
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