Nick Brownlee Grilled For Shots

 

 

 

For 20 years journalist NICK BROWNLEE has been used to posing tough questions. So when we asked him to write about his debut novel Bait, he did it the only way he knows how – by giving himself a grilling.

 

 

The opening scene of Bait features a character being gutted alive on a fishing boat. Was it always in your mind to start the book with such a gory scene?

 

I have been a journalist for the best part of 20 years, much of that time writing stories for tabloid newspapers. The first lesson you are taught is that you must grab the reader’s attention with the very first paragraph, because by the third they will have lost interest in the story. It’s the same with commercial fiction – especially if you are an unknown author. In order to get published, Bait had to leap out of an agent’s slush pile and then make a publisher look twice. I needed an opening that would catch the eye. Hopefully it will have the same effect on the casual reader.

 

Is that why you write such short chapters?

 

I am from the MTV generation. We have the attention span of a gnat – and not just when it comes to reading. The average length of a movie or TV scene has to be about 10 seconds. After that, we start getting fidgety. I know – it’s pathetic! I tried to write the kind of book that would keep me interested if I was reading it. My philosophy is always “what’s the point of dragging it out the action if you’ve said everything that needs to be said?”.  Mind you there’s short and there’s James Patterson. His chapters are quite often no more than 200 words, and it’s done him no harm!

 

Why did you choose Kenya for the setting of your novel?

 

Africa is so very different from Europe in almost every way, and Kenya sums it up perfectly. Here is a melting pot of incredible poverty and wealth, privilege and suffering, modern advancement and primitive superstition. It’s a place where the “normal” rules don’t exist. For a writer that is incredibly liberating, and for a crime writer doubly so.

 

What does it offer the crime writer that Britain doesn’t?

 

Crocodiles! Always handy for disposing of bodies. Seriously, though, modern crime fiction is increasingly straitjacketed by the technological leaps and bounds in crime detection. I always wanted to write about an old school copper who solved murders using legwork and powers of deduction, and bad guys who committed crimes without worrying about leaving fibres or hair follicles at the scene. But how do you make characters like that realistic in a world of increasing CCTV surveillance and DNA profiling? The writers of Life on Mars solved the conundrum by sending a modern detective back to the 1970s, and at one stage I was so desperate I started writing a crime novel set in the 18th century! Then I went to Kenya for a friend’s wedding and suddenly it all clicked into place. Here was a country where both the good and the bad guys were still on the same level playing field. It really was like stepping back in time.

 

 

What was the Eureka moment for you in Kenya?

 

I was in the back of a taxi stuck in a traffic jam on the Mombasa-Malindi highway, which is the equivalent of a single carriageway A-road in England. After a while we got to the cause of the hold-up: someone had been run over and killed by a lorry. It seemed that neither Malindi nor Mombasa police could decide in whose jurisdiction the body lay, so it was just lying there in the middle of the road.  Somebody had taken the time to put a banana leaf over its face out of respect, but otherwise the traffic was just swerving round. The taxi driver just shrugged and said: “Life is cheap in Kenya”. He was right – but what he meant was, “life is cheap if you are poor”.

 

And if you are rich?

 

Just before my last visit earlier this year, a wealthy white ex-pat was shot dead in a bungled robbery. Rather than trust the local police, his friends in the community told me how they clubbed together to bring fly in a private security team, complete with sniffer dogs, to track down the killers. Needless to say, they caught the culprits.

 

 

Your Kenyan detective, D.I. Daniel Jouma, is teamed up with an ex-pat fishing boat skipper, Jake Moore, from England. Why such an unorthodox crime-busting team?

 

I don’t think they are particularly unorthodox. A double act has to balance each other. Jouma is the cerebral puzzle-solver, Jake is there to do the legwork and get involved in the punch-ups. Together, whether by accident or design, they combine to get the job done.

 

Why did you decide to give Jake a background as a detective in the Met?

 

For the simple reason that I needed some sort of common ground on which he and Jouma could meet and subsequently work together. Jake, despite his best intentions, cannot entirely shake off his past life. Jouma, despite his misgivings, realises that he needs a man of Jake’s experience on his side. You’ll never see the two men shake hands and agree on a permanent working arrangement. In Bait, and in the sequel Burn (published by Piatkus in July 2009), it’s circumstances that conspire to bring them together.

 

Are they based on anyone you know? Jake, like you, hails originally from north-east England…

 

Believe me, if I’d based Jake on myself I would have made sure to make him look like George Clooney! No – they are both creations of my imagination, although obviously I’ve pinched bits and pieces from experience to make up their back stories. It’s the secondary characters who tend to be plucked from real life. Harry Philliskirk, Jake’s business partner, is very much modelled on a friend of mine who opted out of the rat race to run a boat business in the Far East.

 

Do you have a set working regime when it comes to writing your books?

 

I have a journalistic addiction to deadlines. My editor thinks I’m mad when I demand she gives me a date for the finished draft, but I cannot function otherwise. In the final couple of weeks I’ll be writing hell-for-leather, night and day. I love it, and I always gasp when I hear about whey-faced writers who go through agonies to produce 300 words a day. Why don’t they take up something they enjoy?

 

What next for Jake and Jouma – and Nick Brownlee?

 

That very much depends on how the first two books perform, and whether I’m commissioned to write any more! All being well I’d like to keep Jake and Jouma going as long as people want to read about them. Kenya is a big country and I don’t imagine I’ll run short of stories anytime soon. I also have a couple of ideas for stand-alone novels which I’d like to pursue at some stage. But then I do have a drawer which is rather full of half-finished novels. That, I suppose, is the one major advantage of being rejected for so long.

 

COMPETITION:

We have 5 signed copies of BAIT to give away. Answer this simple question:

What is Nick's occupation?

Put your answer in the subject line plus Nick. Please add your mailing address in the main body of the email. Send your answer to the editor at shotscomp@yahoo.co.uk

 

Bait by Nick Brownlee

 

 

Bait by Nick Brownlee (Published by Piatkus, £6.99)

 

Read SHOTS' review

 

His second book, Burn will be published in July 2009

 


 

 


 

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