Alec Marsh Q&A

Rule Britannia is your debut novel (which people can but here if they haven't already:  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rule-Britannia-Alec-Marsh/dp/1786157187, and they really should, as it's very good). Some writers get published with their first attempt at a novel (even if it takes years of changes) others have aborted previous attempts. Was Rule Britannia the first novel you tried to write? Do you have unpublished novels that have never seen the light of day?

I think I have three other unpublished novels lurking on various hard drives and floppy discs dating back 24 years or so, plus half a dozen short stories and about three plays. Two of the novels were written before Rule Britannia, and one written since. Actually… In fact, its now four novels, because I’ve also just written a sequel to Rule Britannia which is due to be published this October.

How many drafts did Rule Britannia go through? How long did it take you to write the book?

It took ages. But then I’d never written anything like this before. I think the idea first bobbed up into my head in about 2005. I then spent a long time writing it and finding my characters and finding my way. I finally found an agent in 2008 and that endorsement certainly helped give me the self-belief to knuckle down and finish the book. I then finished the book over the following six months, and then redrafted it probably four or five or six times after that. Essentially until it made me snow-blind just looking at it. The truth was that the first half of the book got a lot more years at it because it was also a learning curve. 

What was the inspiration, the first spark, for the plot of Rule Britannia?

Two things came together really. First an old professor of mine from university, Martin Pugh, had written a history of fascism in Britain between the wars which made it apparent just how popular Mosely and his Blackshirts were. The cover had normal men and women lining up giving him the Blackshirt straight armed salute. It was all pretty scary but made me think, what if? It led me into the Abdication Crisis of 1936 too, because Pugh believed there was a rump of Tory MPs who might have supported a right-wing fascist government if the King had decided to marry Mrs Simpson. So in a sense, real history gave me plenty to work on there. Then the second inspiration came from reading the Da Vinci Code: it put a historical puzzle at the centre of a thriller so effectively that I thought, I’d like to give that a go. Rule Britannia, in many ways, a very different sort of book, is my attempt at that. Graham Greene called his thriller’s ‘entertainments’ and I think that’s a great ambition to aim at. 

Rule Britannia is set in the pre-world war 2 period of the 1930’s. What attracted you to this period?

Peter Hennessey says that Britain was stuck in the Thirties until the 1960s, and I think that’s pretty telling. When I was a boy, most older stars had come into maturity in the 1930s – Laurence Oliver, John Gielgud, John Wayne, Peter Ustinov, David Niven – and their cultural legacy was very present. Turn on the BBC (if it was actually broadcasting anything) and it would invariably be an early Sherlock Holmes adventure with disconnected sound (the Basil Rathbone years) or the RAF would be vying with the Luftwaffe over the skies of London, again. Pick up the telephone – if no one else was using it – and you could dial six digits and get someone local. So in a way, I’m only in my forties but that made the research easy: the Thirties is or was still at arm’s length. You can see how people speak, understand the vocab and yet it’s modern enough not to have Victorian attitudes, sex and gender, in many respects at least. Finally, the cars are pretty fantastic and so are the planes…

Have you always been attracted to the crime thriller genre?

As a writer, not necessarily – my first attempts were at literary fiction, though I might not use that term now. After years of not getting very far, a friend of mine then suggested I consider historic fiction and the rest fell into place. As a reader, I’ve always loved books like the 39 Steps, Stamboul Train and Rogue Male, which is brilliant, but away from thrillers, I was a big reader of Wodehouse, Waugh, Saki and Anthony Powell. I suppose I’ve always been a bit obsessed with the past.

What’s your process and how do you go from vague inspiration to fully fleshed out notion?

You need to have an idea, I think, what Hitchcock called the McGuffin. What’s the driving mystery at the heart of the story? You may not know what it is in the first draft until the end, but you know what it concerns, and how it cranks up the plot. So I think yes, inspiration fleshed out along the way is probably as sophisticated as I get.

When do you know if an idea isn’t working? Have you ever had to abort a story because it just isn’t “doing it”?

I really try very hard not to take the wrong path. Sometimes it does happen and you have to throw away material. You have no choice. The military maxim, ‘Never reinforce a lost position’ is almost certainly the best line here. I think Obama’s spin on that is: ‘Fail early.’ Good advice. Sometimes you can get carried away when writing, but you just have to hope that you are self-critical enough to stop it. And if you aren’t, then you just have to have the courage to stop yourself in your tracks when you get that faint inkling in your stomach…

Tell me about the research that goes into your writing?

Where do you want to start? I love the research. The best part is when you remember something you learned at school or university and you go, BANG, that’s it! It wasn’t a complete waste of time after all. What I would say is that the research is essential and whether it’s biographies, general histories, newspaper archives, exhibitions, obituaries – these are all valuable sources I turn to. For my next book I had a week darting about Rajasthan in India which was amazing.

Are you a plotter or a pantser?

A dash of both. With Rule Britannia I had a firm idea of the shape of the plot that I wanted – which helped me make decisions along the way. For me, like lots of people – not having unlimited time available – having a plan is essential, even if the plan adjusts and changes as you go along. That probably makes me more of a plotter. All right. I’m a plotter, but occasionally characters do things to surprise you.

How do you go about plotting your stories? 

Can I fudge this? With Rule Britannia I have sheets of A3 and A4 paper where I’ve got bubbles with scenes in them, which I’m moving around as I make sense of the timescales and timeframes of the book. I then had to move things back and forth to make sure I wasn’t getting ahead of myself.

Tell me about your writing, do you write full time?

I work fulltime as a journalist, so I write fiction in the evenings, or early in the morning, or on the tube or the bus on the way to work or home. I also have two young children so time is precious. The main challenge is not missing your stop.

When is your most productive period of the day?

I actually think it’s the early morning, but for most of my life I would have said at night. The truth is that I write whenever I can get my laptop open and do it. 

Is any part of your writing biographical?

Not especially. But then, of course. One of the reasons Rule Britannia is rooted in Cornwall and Devon is because that’s where my first job in journalism was, on the Western Morning News in Bodmin. That meant I had done all the research there, already. Then certain characters are inevitably inspired by people I’ve met and known. And certainly the internal thoughts of my protagonists, Drabble and Harris, have come from somewhere in my head, too. 

What writing projects are you working on now? 

I’m in the closing laps of a sequel to Rule Britannia, called Enemy Of The Raj, which is out in October and sees Drabble and Harris continue life’s great adventure in British India in 1937.

Tell me a little about your journey to success, how did you secure that all important agent and first publishing deal? 

That’s very kind of you to say… I did have an agent – who back in 2009 was unable to sell Rule Britannia to a publisher. So in 2010, he suggested I write something else and I did but it is still unpublished and in the end he and I split company over it. So it took many years after 2010 – and many years for them trapped in a hard drive – before Rule Britannia and Drabble and Harris were released onto the reading public, and I can’t say how grateful I am to my publishers, Headline Accent, for making that happen. In a sense, as I mentioned earlier, having the agent back in 2008 gave me the confidence to realise that what I was working on was worth the fight. And that remains something I’m grateful to him for.

Finally, I’m going to shamelessly poach two questions the author Mark Hill (author of His First Lie and It Was Her) used to put to writers on his blog. Like me, Mark was a book blogger before he became a successful author and I like to think that the answers to these questions helped him glean valuable help for his own writing. Certainly, reading them on his blog is helping me. So here goes:

What’s the hardest lesson you ever had to learn about writing?

Discovering that it might take 20 years to get published. It’s been worth the wait, but my 21-year-old self would have died from impatience.

Give me some advice about writing?

Never give up. I asked that question of Martin Amis once and he simply replied: ‘Keep writing.’ It’s great advice.