Published in the Sunday Times
Which book changed your life?
I’m not sure it changed my life, but Trust Me I’m Lying certainly changed the way I look at the world. It’s by a guy called Ryan Holiday, a media strategist who understands the way today’s media can be exploited and manipulated. Before I became a full-time writer, I was a journalist for many years on some of the best newspapers in the world – including the Times and the Daily Mail in London and the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. Back then being a journalist was a respectable profession and facts were sacrosanct. These days, not so much. Ryan Holiday explains how lazy and unscrupulous some journalists have become, and how you can no longer believe anything you see in print or online. I always knew that the internet was awash with faulty information but it wasn’t until I read this book that I realised how easily the media can be manipulated. I gave up reading newspapers several years ago and view pretty much everything I read online as being suspect. I never thought that was how the world would go, I assumed that the internet would give everyone access to facts and information and that as a result people would become smarter and better informed. What’s happened instead is that you are deluged with lies, misinformation and opinions masquerading as facts. Some of that misinformation is deliberate, some of it is mistaken. For instance, recently I posted on my Facebook page that I hurt myself falling off a Segway in a Cape Town vineyard. Several people posted on my timeline that the inventor of the Segway drove his off a cliff and died. That’s just not true. The inventor of the Segway – Dean Kamen – is alive and well and living in New Hampshire. It was the British guy who bought the company who died. But the lie that the inventor died is repeated again and again. As a former professional journalist I always get upset when facts are wrong. That’s not to say that mistakes don’t creep into my books because they do, but I am always gutted when errors are pointed out to me.
What music helps you write?
No type of music helps me write. I’ve never been able to write with music on. I’m a big fan of music, I have a huge vinyl collection and I go to see live bands all the time, but it’s never been an aid to writing. But I can’t write in silence. When I work I sit in front of the TV with my Mac on a coffee table. I watch TV as I write and always have done. I did most of my homework at school and university with the TV on, and most of my working life was spent in busy newspaper offices so I need a buzz around me as I work. Working with the TV on helps when I need to describe a character’s clothing and the credits are always a good source of names! I can’t watch music shows either – it has to be drama or comedy.
What is the strangest thing you’ve done when researching a book?
My book Fair Game is set partly on a container ship that is attacked by Somalian pirates. I booked myself onto one of the largest container ships in the world and sailed from Malaysia, around the Horn of Africa, along the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean and onto Southampton in the UK. It took 16 days and I could do all the research I wanted. As there was no TV, wifi or phone service, I had plenty of time to write and wrote almost half the novel while at sea!
Do you keep a diary?
Not really. I keep all the pages from my Filofax which tells me where I was on any particular day and any meetings I had. I did keep a diary for my daughter, starting on the day she was born and detailing all the milestones in her life – first steps, first taste of ice cream, first movie, first day at school, and so on. I stopped when she was 16 and will give it to her when she’s 21.
Who is your favourite fictional hero?
Sherlock Holmes. No question. I’ve read and reread the books countless times and I’m always transported back to another time and place. I love the stories, and the writing.
Which current book will you remember in 10 years’ time?
Probably none. That’s the way of the world, unfortunately. There are more books being published now than ever before, but I don’t think any will have the sort of longevity we see with the likes of Enid Blyton and Robert Louis Stevenson. Arthur Conan Doyle published the Sherlock Holmes stories well over a hundred years ago, but they are still well read and will almost certainly be read in a hundred years time. Robert Louis Stevenson was writing at the same time and his books will, I think, go on for as long as people continue to read. Will any of today’s writers still be read in a hundred years? I think not. I very much doubt that mine will! I enjoy the thrillers I read but they are for entertainment and I doubt that I’ll remember them in ten years time. I’ve read many a crime novel recently but none has created a character like Poirot or Miss Marple or Sherlock Holmes. I wonder why that is? Maybe there are just so many books being published these days that it’s impossible for one to stand head and shoulders above the rest.
Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
When I’m writing I use “he nodded” and “he smiled” way too many times. I always do a word search when I’ve done my first draft and cut them in half. I went through a phase of always having cars “pull away from the kerb” but I’ve stopped that, pretty much. I always describe gun silencers as “bulbous” but that’s a tribute to thriller writer Jack Higgins who does the same.
What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?
The Quran and the Bible. I have several copies of both and keep meaning to read them but never get around to it. I’ve flicked through them, though! Much of my thriller-writing at the moment involves Islamic terrorism so I really should know what’s in the Quran but I’m afraid I Google the bits I need. We did a fair bit of Bible studies at school and I always enjoyed the stories, so I’ve no excuse for not reading the whole book.
Has a book ever changed your mind about something?
I was a biochemist before I became a journalist so I read a lot of medical stuff. I’m not a great fan of doctors generally, like journalists they have become a tainted profession over the years, with financial considerations often taking precedence over treatment. One book that changed my mind about the whole cholesterol argument is The Great Cholesterol Con: The Truth About What Really Causes Heart Disease and How to Avoid It by Malcolm Kendrick. For years the so-called experts have told us that low-fat high-carbohydrate diets are good for us and result in healthy hearts. But this is almost certainly a lie. The pharmaceutical companies came up with so-called “wonder drugs” – statins – which are widely prescribed to lower blood cholesterol levels in an attempt to protect against heart disease. Millions of people take statins every day, and the experts say they are safe and relatively free of side effects. That’s probably a lie, too, and this book demonstrates why. The sad fact is that these days you can no more trust doctors than you can trust journalists, and this book explains why.
You’re hosting a literary dinner with three writers. Who’s invited?
Jack Higgins, Len Deighton and Gerald Seymour, the three thriller writers who influenced me the most when I started writing. My publisher sent my first novel Pay Off to Jack Higgins asking him for a blurb for the cover. He wrote back saying he was too busy to read it. I always through that would make a wonderful cover blurb – Jack Higgins: I was too busy to read it – but no one seemed to think that was a good idea. Years later he gave me a much better blurb for my break-out book The Chinaman, for which I’ve always been grateful.
What novel would you give a child to introduce them to literature?
The Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton. It’s the first book I remember, it was read to me at primary school, I guess I was five or six years old. I’ve never forgotten it and read it to my daughter when she was little. I went on to become a huge Enid Blyton fan and the first book I remember reading myself was a second-hand hardback copy of her book Shadow The Sheepdog. I think it was her Famous Five series that first got me interested in thrillers because I went from there to Ian Fleming (James Bond) and Leslie Charteris (The Saint). If you’d argue that The Faraway Tree isn’t literature, then I’d go for Kidnappedby Robert Louis Stevenson. When I was 12 I was given it to read during the school holidays. I kept putting it off and finally realised there were only two weeks to go before school started. I worked out that if I read 20 pages a day I’d finish it just in time. I forced myself to read the first 20 pages. The next day I read 20 more. The third day I was hooked and read it through to the end in one sitting. Brilliant storytelling.
Do you finish every book that you start? If you don’t, how do you decide when to stop reading?
It’s rare for me not to finish a book. I stop watching TV shows all the time (my Netflix account is littered with unfinished episodes) and I have walked out of cinemas midway through films, but books are different. I usually know before I start a book whether or not I’m going to like it. Generally I’d know the author, I’d have looked at the cover and the blurb, and flicked through it (if it’s a paperback) or read the sample (if it’s an ebook), so I’d have a pretty good idea what the book is about and how it’s written. One book I couldn’t finish was Stephen King’s Under The Dome. I was sailing on a container ship from Malaysia to the UK and wanted a good-sized book to get into because there was no TV, no internet and no phone signal. I wanted a good book to keep me occupied when I wasn’t writing. Under The Dome is just under a thousand pages but after three days I abandoned it. I was a huge fan of Stephen King in the old days and devoured the likes of The Shining, Salem’s Lot and It, but I found Under The Dome to be just plain boring. I started skipping pages, then chapters, then skipped to the ending and read that. It was as ridiculous an ending as I thought it would be so I was glad that I’d saved myself the days of reading to get there. I left it on the ship. I stopped reading because I didn’t care about any of the characters, a fatal fault in storytelling.
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