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David Lawrence

David Lawrence is an acclaimed poet and TV script writer. He lives in Barnes, West London. There are now four novels in the DI Stella Mooney series: The Dead Sit Round in a Ring, Nothing Like the Night, Cold Kill and Down into Darkness.

David gives us some fascinating insights into the writing of Nothing Like the Night, character-development and his plans for the series.

Nothing Like the Night is your second novel featuring Detective Sergeant Stella Mooney. Will there be others? And what are the advantages of having a returning character?
There will be others, yes. In fact, the third – Cold Kill – is already written and will be published later this year; and a fourth is humming in my brain. The advantage, from a writer’s point of view, lies in continuity. Instead of abandoning your characters at the end of each book and introducing a new cast, you’re able to expand and develop a main character (Stella in this instance) and the people associated with her. I like the idea of being able to find out more about the cops in the AMIP 5 murder squad and about the people in Stella’s life outside the nick. In The Dead Sit Round in a Ring – the first Stella Mooney novel – Stella put at risk a long-standing relationship by becoming involved with John Delaney, an investigative journalist. I was curious to know how all that might pan out. In Nothing Like the Night (and in the midst of a particularly gruesome and puzzling series of killings) she takes even greater chances in her personal life. I didn’t have that planned for her when I began the book, but I like the fact that I was (and, of course, readers were) able to get to know Stella better and watch her walk the high wire of relationships.

Stella Mooney’s patch is the Notting Hill/Kensal Green area of London. Was there a particular reason for this?
I suppose it comes under the heading of ‘write what you know’. I used to live in Notting Hill. That aside, it’s an area of London where the very rich live (almost) cheek by jowl with people from high-rise estates and I liked the tension that provides. When I first lived there I was in the posh bit (luck, not money got me there); when I moved back after a short while away, I was on the borderland and it was a completely different perspective. Stella’s patch includes both luxurious three million pound mansions and high-rise sink estates: one in particular called Harefield. On Harefield you can buy anything and sell anything and the desperate and disaffected who live there will cross the border, walk into your house, take anything that isn’t nailed down and slam-dunk you if you get in the way. One of Stella’s advantages in policing that patch is that she’s an estate girl. She used to live on Harefield. She knows the rat runs and she knows the bad guys and she knows how to fight dirty.

Stella has a pretty complicated private life, as you say. And in Nothing Like the Night she has some hard decisions to make. Are you more interested in character-development than plot-development?
No but the two have to go side by side: they’re interdependent – or they should be. It would be a dreary novel that cared only about its plot and whose characters existed only to solve the puzzle; by the same token, the characters shouldn’t put the plot in the shade or make it seem incidental. It’s a crime novel after all, and one of the fascinations in writing crime fiction is that characters are formed and influenced by extreme events and are often under pressure. If you think about it, crime writing usually depicts characters in extremis, so for the crime-writer the balance between event and character is a particular skill. All that said, I do have a soft spot for Stella and, yes, she’s in trouble in her private life. I’m looking forward to writing the next Stella Mooney novel to find out what happens to her.

How much research do you do?
As little as possible – not because I’m lazy or don’t care about authenticity, but because the imagination is by far the best researcher. It’s important to get things right (police procedure, for example) but it’s equally important not to have the story buried under the weight of too much information. I always smile when cops of a totally inappropriate rank arrive on the doorstep or go out on the collar (‘I’m Chief Superintendent Nabber and this is my sergeant…’) and I have a number of good police contacts who keep me up to date and supply me with essential information, but it’s all too easy to become obsessed by the precise mechanics of a set-up and forget that the idea is to create believable characters in believable situations rather than pass an exam. However, it’s true that I made Stella a detective sergeant precisely because ranks above that (contrary to television norms) tend to be desk-bound. Stella is a street cop. She knows her way through the badlands and she’s tuned-in to the rhythms of interrogation.

Nothing Like the Night contains a particularly terrifying plot-aspect which – for obvious reasons – I won’t give away here. But I want to ask how that idea came to you: did you come across it by chance, in a newspaper report or whatever, or was it entirely imaginary?
I know what you’re referring to and since we can’t discuss it without giving the game away, I won’t spend long on it. Basically, you’re asking me whether I lift that sort of scary stuff from life or whether I’ve got a dark and lurid imagination. Dark and lurid is the answer though, of course, such things have happened and been documented. So I did talk to a couple of clinical psychotherapists – no, not about my lurid imagination; about the terrifying plot-aspect you refer to. The shrinks were specialists in the subject and the book does make use of that research.

Talking of shrinks – the secondary characters in Nothing Like the Night (in fact in both the Stella Mooney novels so far published) are an interesting bunch. There’s Anne Beaumont, a profiler who was Stella’s shrink when she had a breakdown; DC Pete Harriman, who works the street with Stella; DI Sorley, Stella’s boss; DC Maxine Hewitt, who’s gay; and most important, perhaps, John Delaney, the investigative reporter with whom Stella is having an illicit affair. You manage to keep us interested in all these people without ever letting the pace slacken. How difficult is that?
The fact that each of the characters has a distinct and important role to play in the investigation allows me to have them progress the plot at the same time as we learn more about them. This applies particularly to Stella’s colleagues in the AMIP-5 murder squad. I’ve been allowed to sit in on a couple of investigations, watching and listening as things went on round me. I gained a good sense of the rhythms of squad-room life: the banter, the breakthroughs, the letdowns, the way detection works, though none of my characters is drawn from life.

Just as Stella’s character has developed since The Dead Sit Round in a Ring, so others have also developed. The relationship between Stella and John Delaney is a difficult one and they’re both very independent people, but what lies between them is fired by a strong sexual attraction. I think they’re probably good for one another in a contradictory sort of a way, and I hope they make it. Pete Harriman is a ladies’ man and a tough cop; the tension between him and Stella is productive. Mike Sorley is desk-bound and hates it but runs a good squad; he smokes as if it were an Olympic sport and Team GB depended on him. I used to smoke…fond memories!

I get on with the female characters in this book very well: Maxine has a waspish sense of humour and, like Stella, knows how to hold her own in a world where women can still have a tough time of it. Anne Beaumont is funny and insightful and unconventional. As I’ve mentioned, I never draw characters from life, but I rather wish I’d known someone like her.

The ending of Nothing Like the Night is shocking and tragic and surprisingly lyrical: very unsettling, very effective. I got the feeling that I was supposed to sympathise – to some extent, anyway – with a character who has done some dreadful things. Did you intend this?
The issue of the ‘bad guy’ is one of the most challenging for a crime-writer. It’s easy enough to create a standard-issue nutcase or an off-the-rack underworld villain. The trouble with this approach is that it tends to drain colour from the book and limit the writer’s opportunities. Part of the challenge of crime writing, I think, is to make all the characters believable and interesting. The notion of a ‘perpetrator’ who is, in effect, ‘pure evil’ seems lazy: he (or she) becomes little more than a device: a quarry for the investigator. How much more intriguing – though more difficult, too, perhaps – to think of that person as having a past, an emotional life, a reason, however perverted. Nothing Like the Night does contain characters who might be described as ‘damaged people’. To some extent, of course, Stella Mooney is one of them.

***

We chat to David Lawrence, author of acclaimed novel The Dead Sit Round in a Ring, about the comparisons between scriptwriting and writing a novel; he lets us into DS Stella Mooney’s most recent escapades in his latest novel Nothing Like the Night, and tells us a bit about his new project for Channel 5.

The Dead Sit Round in a Ring was your debut novel. What made you decide to write a novel?
I wanted to treat myself to the greater expansiveness and depth that fiction allows: the authorial voice permits all sorts of freedoms that screenwriting doesn't allow. (Doesn't allow the writer, that is; screen is really a director's medium: shot-selection is a bigger deal than dialogue.) I also wanted a returning character (DS Stella Mooney) - wanted to have her develop and change, to have the space to write the flux and flow of her professional and private lives over an extended period. In a piece of crime fiction for the screen, we're usually with the principal characters for a short, intense time. I wanted the intensity, but not the brevity. Fiction is the way to get that.

You are also a successful scriptwriter, how does scriptwriting compare with writing a novel?
As I mentioned above, fiction provides more room and also allows for the authorial voice. It's also all your own work. There might (there should) be rewrites, but there are none designed to accommodate the needs of a director or an actor. On the other hand, screenplays offer the chance to create literal effect. You can either describe an event (the novel), or show it (the movie). Writers' directions - the sinew of a screenplay - while they're not there to tell a director exactly what to do, are, nonetheless, the writer's screen-vision of his narrative; seeing that realised, not least with the benefit of good direction and good acting, can be exciting. There can be genuine revelations - lessons to be learned - in watching a talented actor interpret your page.

Your novels are of the crime genre; do you also enjoy reading in this area?
One of the drawbacks to genre fiction - not just crime - is that the talentless flock to it, wearing bags over their heads. Some crime fiction is outstanding, some is junk. The genre is baggy: too baggy, perhaps. At its best, it seems the last bastion of the nineteenth-century novel: big characters, sin and retribution, narrative scope. At its worst, it invites writers who seem to be gambling on the notion that events can move fast enough to disguise bad writing. Wrong: nothing disguises bad writing. My desert island crime writers would be James Ellroy & Martin Cruz Smith: always ambitious and, when on-song, formidable.

Nothing Like the Night is the new DS Stella Mooney thriller. Can you tell us a bit about it?
Well, too much information would be not enough, if you see what I mean. A sketch: in The Dead Sit Round in a Ring, DS Stella Mooney is troubled in her private life and pretty fiercely involved in her work: she takes things seriously. Stella is a DS in an AMIP (Murder Squad) team and her patch is Notting Hill, Kensal Green, Kensal Rise, and a bit of Paddington ... She grew up on a sink estate, was one of only three people from her school to go to university and knows that, in the crime war, the footsoldiers are drawn from the same stock. All this personal stuff carries through to Nothing Like The Night, and develops. She is still living with her long-term partner, George Paterson, but the journalist, John Delaney, is still an un-ignorable presence in her life.

The book opens with the particularly nasty murder of a young woman who lived on the glitzy side of Stella's patch. AMIP-5 polices an area where houses costing £3m are a stone's throw - literally! - from high-rise dumps; where organic shopping shares space with open drug-dealing. The investigation appears to indicate that someone is at work who has a taste for killing, but it's worse than that: uniquely worse. And there's a kid - one of London's waifs - sleeping rough with a dog-pack; but that's as far as I go.

So, is DS Stella Mooney based on someone in particular?
No, Stella's in my head and on the page. And in the readers' heads, of course: I wonder what she looks like and sounds like to them ... I never base characters on real people. Sometimes, I guess, there's a specific and useful reason for doing so: a structural need to take a character from life, perhaps. That aside, it's always struck me as both limiting and lazy.

Are you working on any exciting projects at the moment?
I'm writing the screenplay of The Dead Sit Round in a Ring, which was commissioned by the production company ARG and Channel 5. So far as I know, it's Channel 5's first large-scale, homegrown project, so a bit of a landmark. When that's done, I'll be starting work on the third Stella Mooney novel which (at present) is called Between the Dog and the Wolf.

One of the problems writers of crime fiction must deal with is that to speak of ‘crime writers’ – or ‘romantic novelists’ or ‘writers of science fiction’ or, simply, ‘genre’ – hints at limitation. And all too often, this limitation is thought to lie in the general assumption (which is generally true) that crime fiction’s main purpose is to entertain.

All fiction seeks to be entertaining, I suppose, but there’s a distinct notion that genre fiction stops there: that entertainment is its be-all. The larger problem is that because crime fiction is sometimes thought of in this way, it’s easy for the best in the genre to be judged – in general terms – by the standards of the worst. In truth, of course, ‘crime-writer’ no more sums up the individual novelist in terms of ability than the term ‘suburban housewife’ tells us all we need to know about the hidden lives of millions of women.

That said, it’s right to suggest that genre fiction – crime fiction in this instance – is expected to obey certain rules, one of which must be to entertain. There’s a story told about the fifties broadcaster Gilbert Harding – a man who made his reputation on being a stuffy old sod, and whose public image was that of a stuffy old sod, and who was, in truth, a stuffy old sod – that he was once on a plane for New York and was given a visa form to fill in: what in those days was called a landing card. One of the odder questions on the card was, ‘Have you any intention to attempt to subvert or overthrow the government of the United States of America?’ You can see in what way this question might be thought redundant. Anyway, against this question, Gilbert Harding wrote, ‘Sole purpose of visit.’ I always think of this story when there’s a discussion about whether or not genre fiction should be taken seriously. Is it not the case that entertainment is, for the reader of crime, the sole purpose of visit?

I suspect it is. The next question has to be, of course: Does that matter? Well, no, it doesn’t. To entertain – to excite, to grip, to intrigue – is, it seems to me, one of the primary intentions of crime writing and one of its most closely observed rules. And there are, quite definitely, certain rules: no getting away from it. You can break some of them, but you can’t break them all: not in the confines of a single book, anyway. And no matter how often you break them – break some of them – you certainly can’t get rid of them. And these rules – however often broken and however loosely obeyed – still tend to define the genre.

One of the primary rules for narrative in crime fiction is that a story should be told and, eventually, resolved. That might seem a simple-minded definition, but the nature of prose fiction has changed a lot in the last eighty years or so. In a way, the crime novel might be said to be the last example of the nineteenth century novel. It deals with sin and redemption; it possesses what, in Hollywood, is called the three-act structure (some of us know it better as ‘a beginning, a middle and an end’); it develops character through event; and it allows motive to provoke action.

Crime fiction does tend to deal in big characters, big motives and – not least – big events. Mostly, the event is murder; more often multiple murder. (Another rule of crime fiction: someone – at very least some one – has to die.) It might seem that contemporary crime fiction tends particularly to enjoy gore and bloodletting, but it’s only method and description that sets such books apart from their antecedents in crime-writing. A typical Agatha Christie, for example, will contain a veritable pile of bodies, and the classic country house mystery often entails several of the guests being slaughtered before the sleuth solves the case.

So – we’re usually talking about a narrative that tells a story in a traditional way, but a narrative that’s somewhat unusual, in that certain crucial information is usually held back: the question of whodunnit and also, more often that not, whydunnit. The formal three-act structure has to involve a set-up (the crime), a pursuit (the investigation) and a payoff (the reveal). It’s a very precise structure and any casual examination of a random handful of crime novels will show that it’s rarely deviated from. What keeps us reading is a strong need to know what happens next.

A need to know what happens next: that was how the first instalment of this article ended. And that very desire – that urgent curiosity – takes us to a crucial ingredient of crime-writing, one of its primary rules: there must be suspense. In fact, there are two rules, here, that might be dealt with as one, since they tend to be inter-dependent. Suspense and excitement: the qualities that make a crime-novel ‘a page-turner’. Nothing is more desirable than what we can’t have and withholding satisfaction – that is, keeping the reader guessing – is one of the ways of producing that ‘I’ve got know how this turns out’ factor.

In part, of course, this has to do with clever plotting. In general, it’s a good idea, when you sit down to write, to know more or less where you’re going. On the other hand, too prescriptive a game-plan leads to writing by numbers. I don’t know how other crime writers work, but for my part, I tend to start with an image or a brief series of images: a character – probably DS Mooney or the murderer or the victim – in a certain setting. It gives me something I can describe, a way of building place, character and event that proceeds from that initial image or series of images: something like a fragment from a movie. This movie-clip tends to arrive unbidden when I’m thinking about a new book. As often as not, it will give me the nature of the crime and some of those involved. It might, of course, be abandoned after a while, or modified in its nature, or radically re-written, but it will have served as a starting point.

In my new book, Cold Kill, the image that came to me was of a London park at twilight. I quickly decided it was Holland Park, since all the Stella Mooney books are set around Notting Hill and Kensal Green. It’s dusk. The hour the French refer to as entre chien et loup– between the dog and the wolf. There’s a strong wind blowing. A scene of crime tent has been set up and is lit by halogen lamps. The shadows of the members of a scene of crime team go to and fro on the fabric of the tent. Two shadows are set slightly apart: those of Stella and her immediate superior Inspector Sorley. The one shadow that can’t be seen is that of the murder victim; it can’t be seen because she is lying in it. And standing at a remove from this activity is a man, watching from the cover of some trees.

Having got this far, and having made some hurried notes, I then sat down to think more carefully about the why and wherefores. And this was the point at which I made a brief synopsis of how matters might proceed. My method, then, is to expand that synopsis piecemeal, keeping sufficiently far ahead of my written narrative to know where I’m going, but not so far ahead that the opportunity for being surprised by my own storyline is lost. Think of it as a journey I’m making along a road of my own construction. I’m running ahead of myself to lay more of the road, but I haven’t built so far ahead that I know its exact destination. Thought of another way, it’s a pattern that changes as I make it.

Patterns are, if you like, another rule. Some character patterns are easily recognisable. The cop as damaged goods; the one-serves-all sociopath... In some ways, recognisable character-traits are unavoidable, since the roles characters play in a crime novel are fairly restricted. There’s not a problem in this, so far as I’m concerned. The trick is not so much of finding a way of avoiding such patterns as bringing a new aspect to them, or simply depicting them with more depth and a more delicate touch than usual.

Crime fiction can’t be experimental. It requires characters and events that are recognisably attached to the genre. After all, you’d be pretty surprised to play a game of Cluedo where one of the options was ‘the Post-modernist Reverend Green in another dimension with the Beatitude’. I suppose someone might attempt a magical-realist crime novel, but the fact is it wouldn’t, really, be a crime novel. It would be a magical-realist novel that somehow involved a crime.

It’s true to say that many of today’s crime novels are tougher and darker than classic detective fiction, but the structure of the crime novel, and its narrative requirements, has remained largely unchanged. A criminal. A crime. A victim. An investigator. An investigation. A resolution. It’s difficult to see how crime writing could get along without all of these, no matter how complex and original the story, no matter how complex and original the characters. The trick is, quite simply, to draw the reader in; to create characters that readers will respond to and take a journey with, even if that journey begins and ends with death – that one indispensable ingredient; that one unbreakable rule.

It’s odd, in a way, to construct a story where death is a device; odd that both the writer and the reader conspire in this. In life, death is a tragedy. In crime fiction it’s the event that moves the narrative along. A death and then, more often than not, more deaths. And not just a death, but a violent death which might well be described in some detail, though we tend to refer to it as ‘a light read’.

What such a death might mean in reality – insupportable grief, lives irrevocably changed, trauma, misery, breakdown – this isn’t the province of the crime novel. It might get mentioned en passant but, for the crime-writer, death is a necessity, not a tragedy. It’s a means to an end. It’s a kick-start. It’s a gambit, an opener, an intro. It’s a how, it’s a why, it’s a wherefore. It’s a puzzle. It’s a selling-point.

How can death provide entertainment unless it’s really not death at all, but death’s stand-in? And I think it’s this that, in the end, says what genre is, says what the rules are and how they work. Fiction depicts not life, but a version of life and a method for viewing the world. Crime fiction, with its system of moral values, its notions of right and wrong, its set-ups and its payoffs, its specific ingredients and necessary omissions, depicts a world where death is a disguise and life provides solutions. And, because we recognise its rules and patterns, it’s oddly reassuring. Maybe it’s a paradigm for what we would like the world to be.