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• Interview

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• More titles by Tim Weaver

Synopsis

A serial killer more terrifying than you could ever imagine . . .

Seventeen-year-old Megan Carver was an unlikely runaway. A straight-A student from a happy home, she studied hard and rarely got into trouble. Six months on, she's never been found.

Missing persons investigator David Raker knows what it's like to grieve. He knows the shadowy world of the lost too. So, when he's hired by Megan's parents to find out what happened, he recognizes their pain - but knows that the darkest secrets can be buried deep.

And Megan's secrets could cost him his life.

Because as Raker investigates her disappearance, he realizes everything is a lie. People close to her are dead. Others are too terrified to talk. And soon the conspiracy of silence leads Raker towards a forest on the edge of the city. A place with a horrifying history - which was once the hunting ground for a brutal, twisted serial killer.

A place known as the Dead Tracks. . .

Reviews

Interview

Do you find it difficult to balance your career as a magazine journalist with being a novelist?
I don’t like to complain about it too much as I’ve been very fortunate, both as a journalist and a thriller writer, to have been given the opportunities I have… but it does have its challenges! The biggest is probably the unpredictable hours that come with journalism; it’s never 9-to-5, it swallows evenings and weekends whole, you’re thinking about stories and covers and deadlines constantly and it’s hard to switch off because of that. As a novelist, you can dictate your own hours more easily, but it’s difficult to squeeze everything in when your day job is so intense.

I used to have a policy of not writing books on weekends, so I got to remind my family of what I looked like, but I found it hard to leave the books alone, and gradually the world of David Raker has been creeping back into my Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. (It’s also a practical consideration – without weekend writing, I’d never get the books done!) The obvious downside to all this is that it’s exhausting. By the time I’ve finally sent a manuscript off to my editor at Penguin, I’m absolutely shattered, and am dreaming about putting my feet up for a couple of months… then I realise I’ve got a magazine deadline looming, and the plan disappears out the window. An absolute necessity: a very understanding partner.

Do you find that articles you’re writing or researching affect your novel writing?
So far, not really. The things I tend to write about most – games, tech and movies – don’t have much in common with the world of crime writing, and actually I don’t mind that too much. The biggest danger, I think, is that you become sick and tired of always writing about the same things, day in, day out, and your quality starts to drop.

How has the character of David Raker changed since Chasing The Dead? In particular, how has his grief evolved or changed?
I think the end of Chasing the Dead was something of a watershed moment for him, so he’s different in The Dead Tracks in the sense that he’s (symbolically, and literally) entered a new stage of his life and is further along the road to recovery after the death of his wife. In the first book, there was obviously an emotional connection with his next door neighbour, Liz, which is explored further in The Dead Tracks, but I think he’s very different in the way he deals with people generally. There’s a scene towards the end of this book where he’s faced with a similar choice to one he faced in Chasing the Dead, but this time he decides to go another route, and that shows a man who isn’t as reactive or, perhaps, as angry as he was before. In many ways, that anger is projected onto another character in The Dead Tracks – and this time it’s Raker who has to try to keep a lid on things. That’s also where this novel is different to the last book: in Chasing, Raker was very much on his own; in this one, he has help – and that brings quite an intriguing new dynamic, I hope.

There are also some interesting observations about how the media portray young women going missing. Have you carefully followed missing persons cases in the news? What do you make of the media coverage?
During my research, one of the things I came across a lot was this concept of Missing White Woman Syndrome, which is – according to the people who study these things – the disproportionately larger amount of media coverage a pretty young white woman gets, in the event of her disappearance, than an average-looking non-white female. There are social commentators who could provide a clearer and much more erudite explanation of how it works than I can, but the evidence seemed pretty compelling in support of it. It was also quite easy to marry it to the book: before I’d even started reading about MWWS, the plot for The Dead Tracks was about Raker’s search for a pretty, white seventeen-year-old girl from a wealthy two-parent family, whose disappearance invoked a blaze of media publicity.

Do you think your own work as a journalist affects how you interpret news stories?
I think you become more savvy at seeing the subtext! I’m always very interested in the psychology of the story: what it’s about first of all, then how it builds, how it peaks and how it falls away. Strangely, it wasn’t really my work as a journalist that made me decide to make Raker an ex-journalist himself, it was a book I read called The Bang Bang Club, which was all about photojournalists working the townships in the run-up to the 1994 elections in South Africa. It left me stunned, not just because it was brilliant and heart-breaking, but because I was astounded by the risks they took, and fascinated about the morality of it; how they’d be running through the streets of a warzone taking pictures of men being necklaced, of women and kids being shot at and killed in the streets, and the whole time all they were focused on was telling the story.

There is a phenomenal amount of in-depth knowledge about police work in The Dead Tracks. How did you go about researching this element of the novel?
I was very fortunate, in that I managed to find two men – pretty locally to me – who worked for a long time in the police force, had decades of experience between them and worked some very, very high profile cases. Once you’ve spent some time in their company, it then comes down to how much of that technical detail you use in the book (and how many of their great stories you steal!). I think it’s a fine balance: too much detail and the book begins to read like a manual; too little and the reader isn’t going to be convinced. For me, the police procedural stuff will always be on the periphery of the Raker books because, first and foremost, they’re about David, about his life as a missing persons investigator, and about what he does and how he solves the case he’s given. But, inevitably, because of the nature of his work, he’ll come into contact with police investigations and the detectives and officers who work them, and it’s then that you need to strike the right balance between believability and pace.

Place and setting obviously play a very central role in The Dead Tracks and you say in your author's note at the end that some of the key locations are fictional but based on places you have visited in London. Did these places inspire you to write The Dead Tracks?
I’ve always been fascinated by places like Richmond Park and Hampstead Heath; these huge, wide open spaces that can exist and thrive in a city of seven million people, so I’d been thinking for a long time about using the city’s parks in some way. But I think, as a fiction writer, you learn fast that it’s much harder to try and integrate a real place into the plot – especially one so many people know so well – without misrepresenting it in some small way; and when you begin worrying about that, you’re putting constraints on the story when the story, ultimately, is all that matters. The book uses lots of actual London locations, and is (I hope) true to them, but I needed to be able to manipulate The Dead Tracks itself to such a degree it just seemed better to imagine it, plan it out and paint it in the most realistic fashion I could. I hope the residents of east London will forgive me!

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