Tim Baker Q&A

Tim Baker is the author of two brilliant novels that I’ve enjoyed immensely. The first, Fever City, is a wonderful JFK conspiracy thriller and put Tim on the map alongside the likes of James Elroy. 

His second, City Without Stars, is centred on the Mexican narco wars and the horrific femicides that have plagued some of the cities that rest against the US border. This is an assured and complex novel that can be compared to Don Winslow’s Cartel trilogy (the final instalment of which, The Border, is published in February 2019). I reviewed City Without Stars and you can read my review here: 
https://bit.ly/2Ml74Ds

In short, Tim is an author who produces work that can be read alongside the greats - Elroy and Winslow - and someone who’s work I really look forward to. So who better to teach me something about writing? 

I asked Tim for a Q&A and here it is.  

How do you get your ideas? What’s the process and how do they go from vague inspiration to fully fleshed out notions?

All my work starts with a visual image that excites me enough to want to explore it more. If I can locate a voice there, I follow it. I never know at the beginning where my stories will lead me.

Both your novels so far have dealt with conspiracies – Fever City, the Kennedy Assassination and City Without Stars, the Mexican drugs wars and the femicide that’s plagued border cities. What attracts you to these kinds of stories?

The notion of something hiding in plain sight has always appealed to me. History is made up of broad, block strokes, but it’s the novelist’s role to insert the shading and I’ve always been attracted especially to the shadows. We live in a world of injustice and rampant criminality, except that these days, the criminals are mainly businessmen, industrialists, media barons and politicians who control society. It’s never been a better time to be a crime novelist.

Tell me about the research that goes into your writing?

My non-fiction reading will unconsciously lead me to the story. For example, one day my wife asked me why I had so many books about Charlie Lucky Luciano on my bedside table. I hadn’t even realised it, but once she asked the question, I knew the answer: because I was going to write about him one day. Often times, my research takes place years before the actual novel begins. Once the writing starts, the research stops.

Are you a plotter or a pantser?

I never plot. It’s more exciting that way.

As a non-plotter, how do you make sure you don’t go off on wild tangents? 

It’s the journey, not the arrival. And sometimes you need to go off on those wild tangents, either because there’s something worthwhile lurking there, or just to get it out of your system. Luckily the trip is not made in real time. I go through many drafts – enough to see what I have to change to make sense of what’s come before and to ensure that outcomes are both unexpected and at the same time inevitable.

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

To my despair, and that of my bank manager, I write full time. That means that every day, in one way or another, I aim to advance my writing.

When is your most productive period of the day?

Until I became a father, it was always the night. Then I began to reassess the virtue of sleep. Now it is the morning, the earlier the better.

Is any part of your writing biographical or are any of that characters inspired by real people? 

None of my writing is biographical except that all of it reflects my own interests and concerns. I have quite a number of important secondary characters who are based on historical figures, but they are so much more interesting and complex when they become fictional characters.

Both your novels have been standalones, would you ever write a series?

It’s not on the cards, but who knows. Although my novels are standalones, they are interconnected by themes and by a number of characters who pass through all of them. 

What writing projects are you currently working on? 

A Cold War epic about three retired spies who come out of retirement to take down the presidents of the USA and Russia, and a thriller about a Mexican-American woman whose child is mistaken for a migrant and gets lost within the Child Separation System.

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

Persistence. Tenacity. Luck. They all played a role in my journey as a writer. I tried to identify the agents who were actively looking for the kind of work that I was producing and then aimed to send them the best submission pitch I could come up with. I do feel that once you get the right agent, you’ll tend to get the right publisher and the right deal.

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?

The scenes you love the most are usually the first ones you have to sacrifice.

Give me some advice about writing?

Never listen to advice about writing. That way you’re free to make your own mistakes, and that’s the only way you’ll ever learn how to find your own voice.

Dead of Night by Michael Stanley

This is a standalone by the writing duo of Michael Sears and Stanley Trollop, authors of the Detective Kubu series of novels. While the Detective Kubu novels often tackle serious and weighty subjects, they’re a touch more light hearted than Dead of Night. This is in part because of Detective Kubu himself who never fails to bring a touch of humour to proceedings. Crys Nguyen, the Vietnamese born American journalist who’s the hero of Dead of Night is a more serious protagonist and thus the book is a more straight  tale.

Crys is a local journalist aiming for the big time. When she learns that her friend Michael Davidson, a writer for National Geographic, has gone missing in South Africa, she is more than a little concerned. Michael was on assignment in South Africa, writing an article on rhino poaching and Crys persuades the magazine to commission her to finish his piece so that she might go in search for him. So off Crys goes to South Africa where she slowly discovers that Michael got more than he bargained for in pursuit of his scoop.

This is a novel on a mission, if that makes sense, the authors’ clearly having a message they want to tell and they convey it with urgency. They clearly care deeply about the plight of the rhino, which is endangered due to the the demand for its horn, an ingredient in Chinese medicines. Along the way Crys discovers the tensions between those who want the trade completely banned, and those that want it licensed (apparently rhino horn can grow back, so some estates carve horns off sedated animals), and this debate forms a backdrop to the wider conspiracy she tries to expose and foil.

Throughout the narrative Crys comes into contact with a variety of actors. There are the obviously bad - the rhino poachers and horn traffickers - but there are also many that she is unsure whether, and to what extent, she can trust. Estate managers, NGO workers, police officers - in third world countries where a black market trade flourishes which can make people millions, corruption and hidden agendas is always something she must consider. We’re never clear as readers who is on Crys’s side and who might betray her and this adds to the books tension.

The story travels the globe, principally from South Africa where the rhinos are poached, to Vietnam, Crys’s home country and where the horn is trafficked. The novel has a good sense of place, particularly the South Africa sections, the authors’ clearly being familiar with the country. The scenes in the African bush are brought to life vividly as is the authors’ obvious affection for the rhino and African wildlife more broadly.

Dead of Night is a pacey and well crafted story though I didn’t like Crys Nguyen nearly as much as the authors’ usual protagonist, Detective Kubu. I also struggled with the initial set up. Apart from Crys, nobody appeared particularly concerned as to where Michael had disappeared to; even his employers in National Geographic appeared quite sanguine and I’m sure in actual fact they would have been a little more alarmed by one of their star writers going missing.

That all said, this was a novel that kept me interested and it’s good to see an issue of such importance that doesn’t often make it into fiction featuring in a thriller such as this. The plight of the rhino is something that we should all be concerned with and if popular fiction can make people take note then that can only be a good thing.

3 out of 5 stars

Blog Tour! - One Law for the Rest of Us by Peter Murphy - Blog Tour!

This is a legal thriller set in the English legal system of the 1970’s. The author, Peter Murphy, spent his career in the legal system, as an advocate (barrister) and judge, and thus the novel has a strong basis in realism. Peter Murphy is the author of twin series, the barrister Ben Schroeder, of which this is number six, and the Judge Walden series. The Ben Schroeder series are serious legal thrillers, while the Judge Walden series is more light-hearted. One Law for the Rest of Us is the first of the Ben Schroeder novels that I’ve read, though I have previously read one of the Judge Walden series (my review of which, can be read here: https://bit.ly/2A40KgA).

While One Law for the Rest of Us is the sixth book in the Ben Schroeder series, it can easily be read as a standalone (as I indeed did) and there’s no need to have read the previous novels to enjoy this one. The story is of Audrey Marshall, a woman who sends her daughter Emily to the religious boarding school where she herself was once a pupil. Emily reports to her mother that she’s been abused, which awakens memories in Audrey of her own abuse when a pupil at the school. She reports the abuse and Ben Schroeder is appointed barrister for the prosecution. Quickly, however, it becomes apparent that the abuse has been perpetrated by seriously powerful members of the establishment who are determined not to be exposed.

Two things will be apparent from this brief description of the plot. The first is its timeliness, dealing as it does with abuse by powerful people. In recent years, with the revelations concerning Jimmy Saville, the MP Cyril Smith, and other powerful paedophiles who abused and whose abuse was either covered up or ignored, the full scale of how such things were swept under the carpet in the period this novel occurs has become known. The second thing to note is that this novel tackles the sensitive and upsetting issue of child abuse, and there are parts of this book where this is discussed, which can be quite hard to read.

Being a legal thriller set in the English legal system, this is very different from those legal thrillers, such as the novels of John Grisham, set in the US system. The English judiciary is much soberer than its American counterparts: there are no lawyers leaping to their feet to shout ‘Objection’; there are no gun-toting Mafiosi, shoot outs or car chases. That said, this novel lacks nothing in tension. In fact, this is an incredibly tense novel, as Schroeder and his colleagues use their analytical skill to probe the evidence and unearth the truth.

One Law for the Rest of Us is a novel that packs a punch and if I have one criticism it is that at times elements of the plot are unearthed in exposition. This was most apparent at the very beginning of the novel where Ben and his colleagues divulge some back story from a previous novel in dialogue that I found unconvincing. Ironically, this was superfluous to the plot, for as noted, this novel can be read as a standalone. That said, this is a small matter and did not detract from my enjoyment of what is otherwise an excellent legal thriller.

4 out of 5 stars

Fukushima Dreams by Zelda Rhiando

This is a meditative novel about the effect of the Fukushima disaster on one estranged family. Sachiko and Harry, a Japanese woman and her English husband, have moved to the fishing village of Taro in Fukushima Prefecture. They have a baby son, Tasha. Harry was an English teacher, with plans on writing a book based in Japanese folklore, ambitions that have been put aside due to the obligations and pressures of his new family. This is something he greatly resents. Sachiko suffers from post-natal depression, something for which she has received little help.

At the start of the novel the tsunami hits and Sachiko is nearly killed. She awakes in a shelter for survivors, the whereabouts of her husband and son unknown to her. Harry has also survived, though we learn that for months he has been hoarding supplies in a secret den in the hills, planning on abandoning his wife and child. He also doesn’t know whether his wife and son have survived, but nor does he care. A deeply selfish man, he sees his wife and sons a burden and one that he is simply happy to have escaped from.

Yet Harry, now alone in the wilderness is soon visited by visions of his son, Tashi. Submerged in Japanese folklore as he has been, are these visions signs of his losing his grip on sanity, or are they actually demons come to haunt him? As the novel progresses, both characters grip on reality is threatened and the story becomes progressively more surreal and dark.

Both Harry and Sachiko are estranged from their respective families. Harry sees nothing in left in Britain for him and indeed this is one of the reasons he came to Japan in the first place. Sachiko for her part separated from her family after meeting Harry. They wanted much for her and were disappointed by her life choices. Now in the aftermath of the disaster, and separated from each other as they are, they are both adrift with no kin to fall back on. 

Having never been to Japan, I can’t attest to how accurate the author portrays Japanese society and the tensions that underlie it, but it certainly accords to what I’ve read over the years. The novel is particularly strong on this and the author highlights both the strengths and limitations. For example, early on in the novel we learn that post-natal depression is not something Japanese society really grapples with, that due to ideas of family probity neighbours are reluctant to interfere if they see a mother struggling and doctors just proscribe drugs. On the other hand, Sachiko also reflects on the strengths of the Japanese system, how the unspoken rules that keep people in line ensure an ordered and peaceable society, and that she allowed Harry’s constant denigration of such facets of Japanese life to influence and drive a wedge between herself and the systems which might have helped her in her time of need.

Fukushima Dreams can be seen as a meditation on the disaster, Japanese society, and perhaps most of all, bonds of family. For it is precisely because Harry And Sachiko have cut their ties with relatives that they are so adrift and thus vulnerable to mental breakdown. This is a deeply unsettling novel and at times upsetting and challenging, but it’s well worth a read.

3 out of 5 stars

No Good Brother by Tyler Keevil

If this novel is ever made into a movie, it will be called a road movie of sorts. For that’s what No Good Brother is, a road movie of a novel. Tim Harding works as a deckhand on a fishing trawler. Come the end of the fishing season, the crew are washing down the ship and stowing away the equipment when Tim’s brother, Jake, shows up. Jake is an ex con, a drifter, and a dreamer, a man who tends to slide from trouble to trouble.

Jake tells Tim that he needs help repaying a debt. Tim senses that no good will come from him agreeing to go along with his brother, but Jake is nothing if not good at manipulating his older brother and tugging on his heart strings. This is especially true because their sister, Sandy, the anchor who held their family together, died in a hit and run a few years back. The loss of Sandy left the brother’s bereft and Tim believes Jake wouldn’t have gone so off the rails if it wasn’t for her death. 

So it isn’t long before Tim, against his better judgement, agrees to assist. Jake tells Tim the job is just a simple one, that to repay his debt they have to drop something off for the Delaney’s, a violent crime family. Tim reckons on the job being a drug drop or something similar and is alarmed to learn that it is in fact to steal and transport a race horse. What’s more, they have to transport the horse across the international border, from Canada to the United States. So begins a madcap journey across country, the brothers first trying to transport the horse by land, before stealing the boat Jake worked on and transporting it by sea. 

No Good Brother is a novel of many levels. On the surface, it is a crime novel: the brothers commit a crime, the stealing and transferring of a horse, and there is a gang of violent criminals pulling their strings. On a broader level it is a journey, a tale of two men travelling the ocean. I have zero nautical knowledge, but the author seems to know his stuff; the book is packed with information on how Tim sails the boat and navigates the open sea. This isn’t info dumped, but rather perfectly calculated to the tale, so that the author spins what feels to be an authentic story. There’s a real sense of the environment the brothers find themselves in, a sense of place if you will, the ocean brought to life. But so too is Canada. If like myself readers haven’t visited the country, it’s easy to imagine the picture postcard vision: forests, bears, Mounties and Maple syrup. Here is a grittier Canada of working class men scraping by, dive bars and violence.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this is a story about relationships. Road movies and their novel counterparts are about personal growth, the characters’ internal journeys mirroring the external, as they learn something important about themselves. No Good Brother is no exception and the brothers, their relationship rocky at the outset, learn some hard truths and gain insights, some not too welcome, into each other and their shared histories. 

I thoroughly enjoyed No Good Brother and Tyler Keevil is an impressive and talented writer. One of the reasons I review books is for the opportunity to find new authors whose work I can enjoy and this is one such author. I will definitely be checking out his back catalogue.

4 out of 5 stars  

Homegrown Hero by Khurrum Rahman

Khurrum Rahman burst onto the crime fiction scene in 2017 with his brilliant debut East of Hounslow (which I reviewed here: https://bit.ly/2FyH7Cn). Homegrown Hero is his hotly anticipated sequel and once again we’re with Jay Qasim, a British born Muslim reluctantly recruited by MI5 as an agent (an informant in the police’s parlance). After the events of the first book he’s been dropped by MI5, much to his relief, and is trying to reestablish some sense of normality. But The Teacher, the head of the jihadi group Qasim infiltrated is still at large and some in MI5 want Jay to help them to finish what they’ve started. Meanwhile some within the jihadi group have learnt that Qasim was the one who betrayed them and set an assassin on his tail. While far right thugs and an assault on a Muslim girl leading to her suicide set in motion a powerful subplot.

All this is promising material and certainly current, but the question is, does Rahman pull it off with the aplomb of East of Hounslow? Or does Homegrown Hero suffer from the dreaded second book hurdle?

As with the first book, I firstly have to get my little bugbear out of the way and one which I alluded to at the start. An agent to the intelligence services is what an informant would be to the police, while those employed by the agencies, their staff, are intelligence officers. Many a writer gets such details wrong and the problem is exacerbated by the fact that some countries have agencies which straddle the law enforcement/intelligence divide and don’t obey this rule. A good example of this is the American FBI, both a law enforcement agency and one like MI5 that deals with domestic intelligence, which calls it’s employees agents (confusingly, the CIA which is solely engaged in intelligence, calls its staff officers and its informants agents). Rahman is to be applauded for getting such details right. 

The above might appear to be a small doctrinal issue, but it speaks to a wider realism in the narrative. Post-911 Western intelligence agencies were under enormous pressure to prevent further attacks and this was exacerbated after every successive outrage. As always their response was two pronged and both were controversial. The first is electronic surveillance and the Snowden revelations amongst others have demonstrated the controversy that comes with that. The second is human intelligence, the recruitment of agents. A number of revelations have come about in recent years of how intelligence officers have gone to great lengths to recruit agents - offering inducements and where that doesn’t work, engaging in coercion and even blackmail. MI5 has been accused of such behaviour on a number of occasions and there have been reports in the press, and human rights groups have lodged complaints, alleging their officers bullied and harassed Muslims in an attempt to recruit them as agents. 

Most spy novels are told from the perspective of the intelligence officer, very few are told from the perspective of the agent. This is similar to crime novels where the vast majority are told from the perspective of the police and very few are told from the perspective of the informant. Where agents or informants do feature in fiction, they’re all too often seen through the eyes of the police or intelligence officers. So they’re portrayed as perhaps shifty and untrustworthy, mercenary or licentious, certainly with motives that are questionable. This might well be understandable and certainly reflects how they’re seen. I’m lucky to know a number of police officers and once discussed the issue with an officer whose work entailed running multiple informants (for a large regional police force in England). I asked how he felt about them and he was blunt in his contempt. When meeting with them he had to pretend to be able to tolerate them, like them even, but his real feelings were clear. To be sure his informants were criminals, whereas some of the informants intelligence agencies recruit will be ordinary people with access, such as Muslim’s in the local community, but the fact remains that distrust can remain especially where the informant is coerced. Jay Qasim, the protagonist of East of Hounslow and Homegrown Hero is such a person, coerced into working for MI5 and then treated appallingly, and his story is told with real humanity and warmth.

If this wasn’t all, the second character the author introduces into Homeland Hero, the assassin, is equally well drawn. He’s a sleeper jihadi, one sent decades before to inculcate himself into British life until one day he’s activated. While this character's predicament isn’t as firmly based in reality as Qasim’s treatment at the hands of MI5 (as far as I know at least) there have been sleeper agents in service to the KGB and its successors and much discussion has been had as to the psychology that must go into that. Only a few years ago a whole host of sleeper agents were discovered in the US and then deported back to Russia, some having adult children who had grown up in America with no idea of what their parents were doing. Rahman gives his sleeper assassin real personality. He’s a man who’s fallen in love with a non-Muslim woman and her child and is reluctant to embrace his calling once he’s activated. I ended up liking this character as much as Qasim and the novel is nail biting at the finale when both characters lives are on the line

One final aspect of this book which I must not overlook, and one which might not be guessed from this review, is the humour. For despite dealing with serious and weighty issues, there are comedic elements to both Homegrown Hero and the previous title, East of Hounslow. Qasim with his quick wit and street smarts is a character with real charisma and his internal monologue can bring on more than the odd chuckle. This not only makes one warm to his predicament but also counteracts some of the darker scenes, thus bringing the narrative a little light.

So conclusions? Homegrown Hero is a worthy book 2 and one which is well worth a read. With both titles the author has managed a remarkable feat, penning popular fiction that tackles weighty topics while not being afraid to pack a punch and broach controversy. With a splash of humour, a likeable protagonist, and a sympathetic antagonist you can’t help but root for too, there really is little not to like.

5 out of 5 stars  

The Shepherd's Hut by Tim Winton

Jaxie Clackton is an abused teenager, the product of a dysfunctional family upbringing. His father is a violent drunk, while his mother who’s spirit was long ago broken by the man she married, has died after a protracted battle with cancer. Now it’s just Jaxie alone with his father who’s beatings show no sign of relenting. Jaxie has fantasised about killing his father, but is far too intimidated to try. The family live in a small rural town in Australia where everyone knows everyone else’s business. Mr Clackton’s overbearing nature is not a secret. Due to his circumstances, Jaxie has been in a lot of trouble in his life. He’s not shy of using his fists himself and has been expelled from school. So when Jaxie arrives home one evening to find his father crushed to death by a car he was fixing up, he reckons he will get the blame, that people will conclude he brought the car down on his father’s head.

So Jaxie runs.

There’s one person in Jaxie’s life that he cares for, his cousin Lee, with whom he’s fallen in love. Lee is the daughter of his mother’s sister and lives quite far away. Jaxie and Lee were also found together by Mr Clackton who told Jaxie’s mother and aunt (Lee’s mother). So his welcome at his aunt’s is uncertain. Instead, he hopes to elope with Lee. 

But first he has to get there.

So begins an oddysey into the bush and across the Australian outback. Jaxie is well used to hunting, having done so with his father, so he’s equipped to survive. Even so, he soon runs into challenges. Food is not a problem, shooting kangaroos and dressing them for their meat is something he’s done many times before. But how to keep the meat from spoiling, or attracting wild dogs? Then there’s water, which in such an arid landscape is always in desperate short supply. While searching for solutions, he stumbles upon Fintan MacGillis, a recluse living alone in a hut. At first he’s suspicious of the man, especially when he discovers he used to be a priest; Jaxie fears Fintan might be a peadophile, that this might explain why the old man is living alone in the middle of nowhere. Soon though they reluctantly and hesitantly become friends.

The Shepherd’s Hut is a sparse book written in terse sentences. It’s a book about Jaxie, yes, but it’s also about Fintan, and more than that, the landscape they make their home. This is a book as much about the Australian bush, the outback, as it is about the human characters. In an age where much of the world’s population resides in cities and urban sprawl, where modern telecommunications mean we can communicate with people across the globe, and where air travel has not just enabled international travel, but ensured there are few places untouched by tourism, it is easy to forget that any wilderness remain. This novel reminds us that not only do such places still exist, but that they do precisely because of their inhospitality. The outback here is an unforgiving and brutal place, one where few people could survive for long.

The sense of place that the author imbues The Shepherd’s Hut with is complemented by its characters, for it takes a certain robust resilience to survive in such a landscape, a toughness that few possess. Fintan has been dumped there, regularly supplied by his mysterious benefactors, though he kills and dresses goats who wander onto his grounds. Jaxie is more than that, a born survivor, and one with a purpose. He’s determined to be reunited with Lee and this gives him the motivation to surmount the odds.

The Shepherd’s Hut is a brilliant novel and one penned by a clearly talented author. I have never read anything by Tim Winton before but am already looking to purchase titles from his back catalogue. A paean to people's ability to survive the odds and to a brutal yet beautiful Australian wilderness, this is not a book to miss.

5 out of 5 stars