PETER HANINGTON, Author of THE BURNING TIME on Lying Through My Teeth

A confession – I lied to SHOTS magazine. When the previous Carver book was published a couple of years back, the SHOTS’ team offered me the chance to publicise it, the ever-excellent Ayo Onatade and I took part in a virtual question and answer session (you might remember that almost everything was virtual back then, during The Pandy, as young people here in New York like to call that deadly, world-stopping global epidemic). I rewarded Ayo and the SHOTS’ team and you the reader by lying through my teeth (interesting phrase – lying through your teeth, I’m going to investigate its origins as soon as I’m finished confessing). It was all going fine until question thirteen when Ayo asked what was next for my unlovable hero William Carver. My answer was this –

Ah that’s a hard one to answer without spoilers but I can say that book four will probably be more spy-centered than anything Carver has come up against before.

Turns out that was a lie. Which is ironic because the book I was publicizing was in large part about lying and why it was bad and wrong.

I’m now going to double down on the crime of lying to the UK’s premier crime and thriller magazine by doing a bit of victim-blaming. It wasn’t my fault that I lied. It was Ayo’s. What happened was this – when I re-read the published Q&A, that way that self-obsessed, insecure, needy writers (there might be another type, but I haven’t met one yet) sometimes do, I got kind of stuck on question eight, which was…

In A Cursed Place William Carver has to get to grips with a world where hyperbole is all the rage as opposed to the truth and it is difficult to distinguish between fake news and real news… not only that, but the rippling effect of fake news. This is not so much a novel as contemporary history thinly disguised in literary form. Was this intentional?

Apart from the fact that the question asked was way better than the answer given, it struck me that this was exactly what I was trying to do… take a piece of contemporary history and give it a literary treatment, turn something that I was worried about into a thriller so that more people could worry about it and perhaps, working together, we could figure out a solution. This was what I liked doing, this was what the Carver books were supposed to be. So why was I messing about trying to write a more spy-centered story? Good question. I stopped writing what I was writing and started writing something else – a thriller rooted in issues around climate change and geoengineering and why that whole area is as risky and scary as hell.

So that’s what I wrote and that’s what The Burning Time is. I hope that a few of you in the Shots Community will get a chance to read it and might enjoy it. I’m lying again. I hope it’ll sell a gazillion copies, be made into an enthralling and extremely successful tv series… all of that. But more realistically I hope that anyone who reads it might do what I did and think some more about geo engineering - in particular the enormous consequences of getting it wrong. I also hope we can keep cross examining the motives of oil companies and petro states and their paid lobbyists and political supporters who already now - and I think increasingly - will tell us that geo-engineering is the only solution.

I don’t believe it is.

Not yet.

Anyway, that’s the confession. And an apology, of sorts. Now I need to get back to work on the next book – Carver Five. It is going to be more spy-centred than anything he’s come up against before.

Or I might be lying through my teeth.