Trust No One

An Interview with Alex Walters

When did you start writing?

I’ve written fiction for as long as I can remember. I started writing mainly because I’ve always been an enthusiastic reader – of anything and everything. As a child, my parents thought it was a good thing for me to be reading anything at all – Enid Blyton, comics, science fiction, horror stories, the backs of cereal packets – just so long as I was reading. The result was that I developed a passion for books, and then tried to produce my own versions of the stuff that I most enjoyed. So, as a teenager, I used to fill notebooks with short stories in virtually every genre – all of them awful (I’ve been back and looked, but only once!). I read English at university, and always carried on writing mainly for my own pleasure, although I did have some non-fiction books and the odd story and poem published. I kept starting novels that never got beyond the first two or three chapters, partly because it took me a long while to find the stories that I really wanted to tell.

Where do you write? And what’s your routine?

I have what I rather grandly call a study at the top of the house – a really nice airy room which on a good day (we get a few in Manchester) has the sun streaming in through the skylight. It’s an ideal mix because I can see the blue skies and the tops of the trees, but I can’t see the glorious views of the Pennines properly unless I stand up, so most of the time I can avoid being distracted. I do most of my writing there, and I fit it in around the other work that I still do as a management consultant. I’ve discovered from experience that I’m not very productive at writing in the mornings, so I tend to deal with less interesting work then. But once I get into a rhythm, I tend to lose contact with the world around me and can work as late into the night as I need to.

I’m always slightly astonished by writers who still work in longhand – possibly because my own handwriting is so awful. I love writing on the computer because it means I can make changes as I go – changing wording or dialogue, or moving scenes around to accommodate new ideas or developments. Once I’ve got an outline plan in place, I tend to just start at the beginning and write till I reach the end of the first draft, but I’ll also juggle the content as I go so that I can try to give the story the best shape.

The other advantage of writing on a computer is that I can do it more or less anywhere. I’ve discovered that, oddly, I can be very productive writing on trains (I spend far too much of my life commuting between Manchester and London), as long as I can shut out the rest of the world with my laptop and iPod. That seems to work well, though I’ve occasionally noticed other passengers peering worriedly over my shoulder as I tap out a murder scene . . .

What are the pros and cons of being a writer?

When it’s going well, it’s the best job in the world. And even when it’s going badly, it’s better than most other things. I really enjoy losing myself in the world I’m creating, and I particularly love it when that world and its characters start to take over. It’s a strange but exhilarating feeling when the life that you’re creating starts to seem more real than the life outside. That means that you’ve got to be comfortable spending a good proportion of your day working on your own, living largely inside your own head. I’ve occasionally suspected that you have to be at least slightly mad to want to write, but I hope it’s an entertaining form of madness.

And of course the writing doesn’t always go well. Sometimes you just feel that a story or a scene isn’t working, or that you’ve reached a dead-end or lost your way with the plot. That can be nerve-racking, particularly if you’ve already invested a lot of time and emotion in what you’ve produced – but so far, I’m relieved to say, it’s generally come good in the end. Usually the dead-end turns out not to be that at all, but just a sign that it’s time to change direction and that something even more interesting is waiting up ahead. The worst thing is that, when you hit those difficult patches, it’s very difficult to put the work aside, so it ends up dominating your mind for days until it sorts itself out. I suspect I’m probably not the easiest person to live with at those times.

Which writers have inspired you?

Countless writers have inspired me in various different ways. I grew up in Eastwood in Nottinghamshire which is famously D H Lawrence’s birthplace, and I went to the same primary and secondary schools that he did. So his work was an indirect inspiration in the sense that it proved that it was possible for someone from a very similar background to my own to become a writer.

As a teenager, my first inspiration was for science fiction – not so much because I wanted to write it myself, but because writers like Samuel R Delany and Philip K Dick showed me just what the imagination was capable of. I came to crime fiction at around the same time, managing somehow to get mildly addicted to both Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler! I remember also discovering ‘literary’ writers who happened to be terrific story-tellers, like Stevenson, Dickens and Wilkie Collins. That gradually led me to discover the wealth of great crime writing that’s out there. My enthusiasm for crime fiction is now very diverse – including ‘golden age’ English writers like the extraordinary Margery Allingham, Americans like Donald Westlake and Ross Macdonald, the best British writers such as Reginald Hill and John Harvey, and newer writers like Jo Nesbo.

How important is a sense of place in your writing?

Very important. I almost always have a particular place in mind when I’m describing a scene, even when I might have fictionalized it to suit my needs. My earlier books had exotic settings – even more exotic than Manchester – so I had to work hard to supplement my own direct experience with research to make sure I got the details right. It’s been a pleasure writing about Manchester and its surroundings because I can use the books to explore places that I know and love (or, in a very few cases, know and dislike!). It’s also brought home to me the remarkable diversity of the environment and landscape in the area – and I’ve only just begun to explore some of the more unexpected locations.

Do you spend a lot of time researching your novels?

One way or another, yes. But it’s a very varied mixture of activities. My non-writing life as a consultant means that I end up working in countless different types of organizations, both in the UK and overseas, so I often gain very direct experience of how things work. As it happens, I’ve spent a large part of the last decade working in various parts of the criminal justice sector – police, prisons, probation – so that’s given me a very solid grounding in the realities of that world (even where I’ve chosen to apply some fictional licence). Beyond that, I’ll go and talk to specific individuals about their particular fields of expertise and a lot of that will feed into the books, though often anonymously. And of course I spend a lot of time reading relevant background material and hunting about on the internet for information. One of the great advantages of the web as a research tool is that it’s now possible to obtain fairly easily the kind of trivial information (what’s the exact road layout in that particular part of the Lancashire coast?) that is irrelevant to most people, but is often critical to getting a fictional setting right.

Do your characters ever surprise you?

All the time. I tend to plot my books fairly carefully in outline, but leave a lot of space for the narrative to change direction or develop as I write. I find that the characters almost invariably take on a life of their own. Sometimes they just take off in a direction I didn’t expect – in one of my earlier books, this happened very early on and unexpectedly took the whole plot with it . . . for the better, fortunately! Sometimes apparently minor characters become much more significant as the book proceeds – that happened with at least one character in Trust No One. Very often, too, I find that, although the character has taken me by surprise, in fact I’ve already been working towards the new development without knowing it. One of my books had a major twist part-way through. I hadn’t planned the twist before reaching that chapter, but then I realized that I’d been unwittingly setting the scene for it for several chapters before. The subconscious mind is a strange thing – or at least mine is!

How much of your life and the people around you do you put into your books?

I’m always getting asked that, usually by nervous-looking friends. The truth is very little, at least directly. I’ve never written a character consciously based on a real person. But of course in creating a character you’re likely to draw on elements of people you know or have met. Quite often, I might have someone’s physical appearance in mind, but combined with quite a different personality or character. Equally, because I spend a lot of time working in different organizations, my depictions of organizational politics or tensions – how bosses treat their teams, how people try to manipulate others or exercise control – are often loosely based on people or incidents that I’ve observed – though I’d never say where!

I should say that there’s one specific aspect of Trust No One which does draw directly on my own life, and I hesitated for a long while before deciding to include it. My late wife, Christine, died tragically young as a result of multiple sclerosis, and I wanted to write about that – partly as a tribute to her courage and partly to help raise awareness of the impact of this illness. But I was concerned about the risk of trivializing the subject if it were to become just another plot-device. In the end, I just tried to write about it as openly and honestly as I could, drawing on our own experiences. No case of MS can be described as ‘typical’ because the effects of the illness are so varied, and Christine’s symptoms were more extreme and aggressive than many. Liam’s illness in the book isn’t the same as hers, and his relationship with Marie is certainly very different from our marriage, but I hope that I’ve managed to convey some of the emotions – the fears, the anxieties, the uncertainties – that face those who are diagnosed with MS. Christine’s love and support made it possible for me to write in the first place, and I hope that the book does some justice to her memory.