Exclusive preview: CHASING THE DEAD


Tim Weaver talks about the origins of his debut thriller, the story behind its hero David Raker, and the long road to getting published . . .

The idea for Chasing the Dead first surfaced in the muddy swamps of my brain about eight years ago. Actually, the word ‘idea’ suggests I might have come up with a plot, or some characters, or a key set piece to sit alongside it, but in actual fact my ‘idea’ was a clear vision of one part of one scene and absolutely nothing else. Literally: NOTHING.

That wasn’t unusual for me at the time. I had always written, from as far back as I can remember (my best Christmas present while growing up was the typewriter my mum and dad bought me for my thirteenth birthday), but while I’d been very good at coming up with countless, disparate ideas, I’d never been quite as good at weaving them together into a coherent plot, or, more importantly, seeing them through to some kind of conclusion. My speciality became a fairly decent 7,000–8,000 words of opening chapter, followed by a prolonged period of staring into the middle distance wondering what was for dinner.

But while I started, and failed to get anywhere close to completing, a lot of potential novels, the idea I had come up with for what would become Chasing the Dead never went away. In retrospect, I suppose it’s a bit strange that I never attempted to use the idea in one of my countless attempts at finally breaking through that pesky 8,000 word mark – but I think there were two reasons why I didn’t. One was that a part of me, deep down, knew this idea deserved more of a chance rather than letting it disappear into the Twilight Zone of my hard drive. And the second was that, being a relatively late convert to crime and thriller writing, I’d started reading books like Red Dragon, The Poet, A Simple Plan and Every Dead Thing and realized that they were exactly the sort of book I wanted to write.

So I went back to the idea with a thriller in mind. And I wrote.

A year later, Chasing the Dead was finished.
The idea I’d been carrying around with me for so long (what if a mother was convinced she’d seen her dead son?) ended up acting as the central point in a relatively loose plan – but a plan, nonetheless. This was new ground for me. I wrote the question on a blank piece of paper, and from there more questions sprouted off: Would anyone believe her? Who would? What if she were lying? Why would she lie? From there, a potential story started to emerge, and characters began forming. The most important of these was the hero. I knew, in order for the story to progress, he needed to be relatively sympathetic to the mother’s sense of loss – even, perhaps, have experienced a devastating loss himself – otherwise no one in their right mind would take her case on.

Of course, most thrillers have heroes with some sort of past; a traumatic event that shapes how they are and why they do what they do. I wanted that same sense of trying to escape an event, trying to get beyond it, but didn’t necessarily want it to be tied into the main plot or linked to the main villain. I wanted to explore more ‘ordinary’ loss. The kind of loss that touches us all at some point. No serial killers. No sudden violence. No mystery. Just having to watch as someone you love unconditionally succumbs to a disease over which you have no control.
I guess, deep down, I’m a bit of a softie. (Don’t tell anyone, though!) I like a good love story, almost as much as I love a dark, frightening psychological thriller, so while the main plot of Chasing the Dead is pitch-black and (hopefully) scary as hell, I wanted there to be a real sense of who the hero was, and what the aftermath of ‘normal’ grief is like. How it feels; how it affects you; how you begin to get over it, if you ever do; but, most of all, what impact it would have on your work and how people could play on your emotions, using your anger and sadness against you.

On the one-year anniversary of his wife’s death, missing persons investigator David Raker is visited by Mary Towne. Like David, Mary is still grieving the loss of a loved one. Her son Alex disappeared into thin air six years earlier, spent five years in the wind, then turned up dead in a horrific car crash. Emotional, hurting and disinclined to take on the case, David becomes even more reluctant when Mary tells him why she’s really come to him: she thinks she may have seen Alex – and he’s alive.

One of the biggest mistakes I made was thinking that the writing of the book was the hard part. It wasn’t. The hard part was getting anyone interested in it. I bought myself a copy of The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, and looked through the list of agents to see who might be a good fit for me. Selecting about ten agents, I mailed out ten submissions, and waited. And waited some more.

Eventually, the rejections started rolling in.
Most of them were standard responses, though some had handwritten messages at the bottom. Once the rejections start to pile up, any kind of vaguely individual, even mildly positive response is a bonus. When one agent told me she thought my writing was very strong, but the story needed some work, I took that as positive feedback. Agents can receive as many as 300 submissions a week, so if one of them can find the time not to send out just the standard rejection letter, it’s because they see something in the book that they like.

Probably the best thing that could have happened, though, was the birth of my daughter, which forced me to take about six months off from even so much as looking at my manuscript. It was the longest I’d ever gone without writing, but half a year of changing nappies, zero sleep and having to work forced me into semi-retirement. When I finally came back to the book, I read it again and, suddenly, its problems were clear. Time away had given me a perspective on the novel that I’d have never have got if I had been working on it every day. So, I started chipping away at it again, working on the pace and structure, on the twists, and on developing the characters.

It took about three months. I had a good feeling about the book this time. It felt like I had something that worked. It was fast and creepy, and seemed – to me, at least – to have some genuinely surprising twists, and this time I didn’t think it would be totally outside the realms of possibility that someone, somewhere, might see enough in the opening three chapters and synopsis to request the rest of the novel.

Because of that, this time round I decided to submit to only one agent up front; the one I really wanted to go with: Darley Anderson. They had a great reputation for nurturing new crime and thriller writers, plus John Connolly was on their books, and he’d always been a favourite writer of mine. Did I expect to be taken on, however? Absolutely not. But I sent it off anyway, crossing my fingers. And toes.

Five days later, I got a call on my mobile at work.
‘Hello,’ the caller said. ‘It’s Camilla Bolton from Darley Anderson.’
Control yourself, Weaver. Play it cool. Play it cool.
‘I read your first three chapters . . .’
Nice and steady, son, nice and steady.
‘. . . and they were fantastic.’
Nah, it’s no good.
‘Oh, brilliant!’ I said, probably a bit too loudly, maybe scaring her a little. ‘That’s brilliant,’ I said again, then added, ‘Just . . . brilliant,’ for good measure.

About a month later, and after reading the whole book, Camilla invited me up to their offices in London to meet her and talk through the notes she’d made. The scariest thing about her? She’s always right. Throughout, in total, five rewrites of varying lengths, she would pick up on things I’d missed, or make suggestions on improving David or other characters, or a scene, or a storyline, or the structure of chapters. It took about six months to get the book ‘right’, but all her ideas were spot on, and in every rewrite I could see the book’s quality rise just a little.

Then came the best/worst bit: the submission.
When we finally got to the stage where she felt it was ready to be sent out to publishers, it was a long and nervy process. She’d warned me it would take at least a month for the editors at the publishing houses to read the book, and even then there was no guarantee any of them would like it. I got negative after about three hours. What if they don’t like it? What if they hated the story? Or the writing? Or the story and the writing? Was the book actually any good? (The last one, by the way, is a recurring Weaver doubt. When you work on something so closely, for so long, I find it sometimes becomes difficult to gain any sense of clarity on it, and even the sections, or dialogue, or scenes that you loved when you were writing them – and knew were good – start to look ordinary on the fiftieth viewing.)
Finally, though, five weeks later, as I was starting to get a bit twitchy, Camilla called. Penguin liked the novel and wanted to meet me.

At the beginning of October, I headed up to London to meet Stef Bierwerth, editorial director of crime and thrillers at Penguin. She was hugely excited about the book, and extremely complimentary. We talked over her impressions of Chasing the Dead, and her notes, as well as tons of other stuff, including a shared love of The Wire. Then I went home and set to work on what would become the final rewrite before my submission deadline. I spent about a fortnight on it. In a fortunate turn of events, it coincided with Family Weaver being away seeing my wife’s parents in South Africa, so with my brain and body set to Single Man O’Clock, I ploughed on.

At the end of November, I sent copies of the new version of Chasing the Dead to Stef and Camilla, and they read it overnight. I was nervous. I thought it kind of worked, but I wasn’t going to allow myself to get too confident, just in case. The next day seemed to drag. Minutes felt like hours. Hours felt like days. Eventually, I couldn’t take it any more and emailed them at 4 p.m. ‘Okay, I’ll admit it: the suspense is killing me,’ I wrote. ‘What do you guys think?’
Luckily, they both loved what I’d done and, except for a few minor things, there were no more changes. No more changes. I stared at those words and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Chasing the Dead, eight years after I’d first come up with the idea, really, finally was finished.

Tim Weaver’s debut thriller will be published by Penguin in January 2010 as a paperback original.