Thicker Than Water

interview

This is your fourth Felix Castor novel. Have you found the story branching off in areas you didn’t expect when you started or has everything gone exactly to plan?

The plan is crucial, and everything conforms to the plan right up to the point where you start writing — then it instantly becomes irrelevant. No, I’m exaggerating for effect there. In terms of the big issues, the overall structure of the series, I’ve mostly stuck very close to what I originally had in mind. But a lot of the grace notes, incidentals, supporting cast and their arcs, came to me as I was writing and then were built into the whole. To take the most obvious example, Nicky Heath wasn’t dead in the original Castor pitch: I just had this great idea when I got to that part of The Devil You Know, that he’d be much more interesting as a zombie.

There’s a bit from Mervyn Peake’s journal where he talks about sticking to the plan for Gormenghast while ‘staying on the qui vive for a better idea’. That’s what you find yourself doing: if you’ve built it right, the plan is the structural skeleton that gives you the luxury of improvising without falling apart.

Did the idea for the Castor books come to you fully realised or did you have one particular starting point from which it grew?

The starting point was Castor himself: the idea of a Chandler-style private eye who’s actually a private exorcist. Then I had a subsidiary idea for the mechanics of the story — for how the various undead beings could be explained and connected to each other. Throwing those two ideas against each other gave me a rough vision of how the first three novels would play out, and the big reveal we might play towards in the longer term — if there was a longer term.

Like you, Felix Castor hails from Liverpool but makes his home in London. The advantages to this ‘write what you know’ approach are obvious, but have you found any pitfalls to writing Castor’s history so much in line with your own?

Yes! In Thicker Than Water, the fourth novel, I take Castor back to Liverpool. There’s a lot about his parents there, a lot about his brother Matthew, a lot about his relationships with other kids he knew in Walton. Without going into detail, there were whole chapters there that I wrote and then cut out because I realised after I’d written them that they were (a) confessional and (b) cathartic. They were there for me, not for the reader, and they just had to go. I also had to change some details for more mundane reasons, to avoid getting punched in the face the next time I see some of my friends and relatives.

Your take on the supernatural is almost scientific in its logic. Do you think there is a scientific explanation for everything or do you have some belief in the supernatural?

I’m an atheist when it comes to God, but an agnostic when it comes to most supernatural phenomena. Don’t get me wrong, I come at these things from a rationalist perspective — and I’m dead set against the way the rationalist consensus is now under attack by extremists in pretty much every organised religion. But I don’t necessarily see a fixed and unwavering line between the things that science can explain and the things that it can’t. Quantum physics, if you see it from one point of view, looks very much like superstition and mumbo jumbo. I’m a rationalist but not a materialist: I believe in spirit, in a sort of animistic essence that outlives the body, whether or not it can be seen and measured. So I don’t see any reason why the existence of ghosts, for example, offers any kind of affront to a scientific world view. The world is energies as well as objects, and we’re constantly realising that there are some beans we haven’t counted yet. You know, I’d better stop while there are still some metaphors I haven’t mixed.

What advantages and disadvantages do you see in using fantasy as the vehicle for your stories?

I never really had any choice. I don’t think I could write totally realistic fiction, although I’d be curious to try. For me, the spectrum that extends from horror through fantasy to science fiction is where I feel most comfortable and where I wanted to pitch my tent as a writer. Coming back to the previous question, not believing in Heaven doesn’t reconcile me any better to Earth. I’m happiest when I’m cutting off at an odd angle, playing with counter-factual worlds.

It almost feels to me as though fantasy is a dimension — I mean, in the same way that length and height and breadth are dimensions. My step-father-in-law, Eric, finds it hard to read any fantastic literature because he can’t take that first step of investing belief in the fiction — of accepting its premises. I said to him once ‘so you’re like a guy who loves ice cream, but only ever eats vanilla’. It was a really unfair comparison, but I feel that strongly about the pleasures and experiences that fantasy has to offer. I’d feel like I was living in Flatland if I tried to write something that was wholly realistic.

Do you find it frustrating that so much excellent work is currently being produced in SF and fantasy but that by and large it is still ignored by the literati?

I did, once. I think Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling between them have done a lot to kick those doors down.

Do you have any particular favourite authors who have influenced your work?

Mervyn Peake. Ursula LeGuin. China Mieville. And in comics, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison. I love and seek out two things: outrageous ideas and a vivid, chewy or elegant written style. The writers I come back to again and again are the ones that seem to me to offer both of those things.

Do you have a set writing routine and if so, what is it?

I don’t really have a routine in terms of how my working day is structured. I have a core working day, which is from 8.00 a.m. when the kids go to school to 4.00 in the afternoon when they usually come back. Most evenings, though, I’ll go back and do a couple more hours after that. I work weekends — Saturday morning, Sunday afternoon. I discovered a long time ago how easy it is to throw yourself out of the working mood — the zone, whatever you want to call it — and how hard it is sometimes to find it again. But then I realised something else, which is that the times when you’re not working are probably necessary, too: part of the process. I don’t worry so much about taking breaks now, because I know I’ll pay that time back sooner rather than later.

How extensively do you plot your novels before you start writing them? Do you plot the entire trilogy/series before you start writing or do you prefer to let the story roam where it will?

The first two Castor novels were plotted in obsessive detail. The third I left a bit looser, and it changed more as I was writing it. I prefer on the whole to work with a detailed plan for the reasons I mentioned above. The plan is very useful as an anchor, and paradoxically it frees you up to change your mind because you’ve got a clear idea in your head of how a change here will feed through to what happens way over there.

Is this a strategy that has served you well in your comics writing?

It came out of the comics writing, to a large extent. I had the good fortune to work over many years with Shelly Bond at DC’s Vertigo imprint. Shelly is one of the best editors I’ve ever met, and she insists on very explicit scene breakdowns. At first I found that a bit of a bind, but I soon realised that when you’ve only got twenty-two pages to tell your story, you’ve more or less got to become a miser, counting out story beats one at a time from a grubby burlap bag that you hide under your mattress. I still tend to do those breakdowns, even when I’m working with editors who don’t specifically ask for them. Again, you don’t let them become strait-jackets: you launch from them and come back to them, again and again.

Some authors talk of their characters ‘surprising’ them by their actions; is this something that has happened to you?

You know, every time I hear someone say that, it sounds like a boast to me. Like, ‘my process is really, really organic; my characters are so vivid, they get up off the page and jam with me. Sometimes we go to wild parties together’. I guess it’s just a question of what you mean by that, though. It’s possible to get to a certain point in your story and suddenly think ‘yeah, but he wouldn’t do that, he’d do this’. And it can feel surprising. But really it’s your mind gradually getting a grasp of the character, and the details filling themselves out as you write. It happens gradually, but you can notice it suddenly. In that sense, I’ve been surprised.

Finally, if the Felix Castor books were ever filmed, who would you like to see directing and starring in the movies?

I just want to be there when they cast Juliet, that’s all.