Talking Manglish – The Charlie Williams Interview

by Ray Banks

"In this town, everything turns to shite."

Royston Blake - King Of The Road

CHARLIE WILLIAMS is the creator of one of the most compelling anti-heroes of recent years, the doorman (don't dare call him a fuckin' bouncer - and it's "Head Doorman", right?) Royston Blake, the type of bloke who carries a monkey wrench in the lining of his leathers, likes his pints, his whisky, his fags and is possibly deranged. He's been known to have conversations with Clint Eastwood (thinks he resembles him, too) and drives a Ford Capri (because it's "a bit of class"). Oh aye, and he's killed a few people in his time. Never his fault, of course. This kind of shite just happens to Blakey.

Williams' debut novel Deadfolk had Blakey questioning his bottle and confronting a chainsaw called Susan, as well as the local hard lads. Fags And Lager brought drug cults and outsiders into the equation. And in February 2006, the Mangel trilogy comes to an end with King Of The Road where Blakey, recently released from the local nuthatch, walks headlong into a battle between a local vigilante group and a newly-opened shopping mall. All three books are testament to William's vicious sense of humour, wicked plots and unerring eye on what makes those moribund corners of Cruel Britannia tick. In short, the Mangel trilogy is one of those rare series that effectively shows British crime in all its pissed-up glory and should not be missed. And if he doesn't get massive soon, I'm gonna start burning stuff.

Ray Banks: Let's get this out of the way, because I know everyone and their dog'll ask you about this: what's the deal with the bouncer you chinned? And how come it's part of your bio?

Charlie Williams: Ah, Ray... there's no short way of telling this. When I first got the deal from Serpent's Tail they gave me an author questionnaire, where they want any bit of interesting info that could possibly be used to help sell the book. Basically I could see that I didn't have much interesting stuff down, so I dredged up the bouncer incident, seeing as it has some sort of bearing on my books about a bouncer.

RB: So what happened?

CW: I was 19 and walking home from a club with some mates, all of us pissed, staggering around and shouting, etc... Everything's hilarious, then I look up and see my mate Dan up on the corner, getting decked by this big suited guy who's come out of nowhere. I went up to argue with him in my drunken way. He's saying he gave Dan a slap for being cheeky, or something. Meanwhile Dan's still lying on the deck, out cold. I don't know what my line of argument is, but at some point I think "What the fuck is he on about? He's decked a guy half his size for being a bit cheeky? And also, why is he standing here telling me this? Why doesn't he just deck me, too?" So I start throwing punches, well aware of the huge risk, but feeling that his aggression has passed. And he runs off down the road, crying like a baby. (Remember I was well inebriated, so some of these details might not be spot on.)

Anyway, next thing I know there's blue lights everywhere and a meat wagon cutting us off on the pavement, cops jumping out the back. They herd us all up and off to the cells we go. Next morning I get a plastic cup of horrible coffee and "You have the right to remain..."

Skipping all the details, and the desperate efforts to hide it all from my mum (me and my brother had already brought her enough shame) Mr Bouncer and I both end up in court, and both get bound over to keep the peace for six months. For me it's easy. I'm a student, and just have to get my mates to keep an eye on me when I'm pissed. But the other guy's a fucking bouncer. Trouble is his business! And it was him who ran off and cried to the coppers, like a big, stupid baby. Therein, possibly, lies the genesis of Royston Blake.

RB: And they say a debut novel's the most autobiographical. Was that the case with Deadfolk?

CW: The setting, yes. Royston Blake... believe it or not I think he's the man I wish I had been, in some suicidal way. Wouldn't it be great to just crash around the place, acting on instinct and worrying about it later, and fooling yourself so expertly that no drop of unsavoury truth leaks in? As for the plots in the three books, they're really about me looking at the way Worcester has changed during my lifetime. First it's a beery, violent market town that no one escapes from, and there's not actually much of a market left... Then drugs come in and present a new problem for the youth... Then the whole thing gets redeveloped as a consumer lifestyle experience, or something (or that's what they try to do). In terms of the crime and desperate scrabbling around, trying to get out of trouble... I've seen that stuff. I was in that scene many years ago, but not really in it. I was like a fascinated observer of it all. I realised in time that this could get me in serious trouble, and got the hell out.

RB: You've said you go into a book blind, pretty much. Then again, you knew the Mangel books would be a trilogy. How did that figure? Did you have an overall plot arc for Blakey, no matter how vague?

CW: It's because I'm a liar, and just not a very good one. To be honest, I don't know which of the above is true. Actually, no, they both are. I knew I would do a trilogy of books about the town of Mangel, using it to chart the "progress" of a provincial English town in my lifetime. But I didn't know at first that it would all be about Royston Blake. In time, I found that he was the only way to do it. How does this guy, a pure product of his environment, cope with that environment changing around him, in ways he can't understand? Very well, I think.

RB: Because he changes with it, doesn't he?

CW: Yeah, he "grows" with the novels (or at least changes). I couldn't do a series or a trilogy any other way. I hate it when some series novelists cart the same old hero out for a new case, year after year, paying lip service to "personal development" by having girlfriends come and go, or watching his daughter blossom into a young woman. How can a protagonist not change, all that shit going on around him? (Actually I don't "hate" books like that, I just stop reading them.)

RB: Well, Blake loses his fucking mind. There are parts in all of the novels, but predominantly King Of The Road, I think, where the reader's a good five steps ahead of Blake. Kind of a bizarre device.

CW: That sort of dramatic irony is a device I discovered about halfway through Deadfolk, and pushed a lot further in Fags And Lager. It gave me a challenge, purveying all the info the story requires without allowing Blake to register it, even though he's the narrator. But, you know, maybe he does register it? Maybe he does know what's going on, but doesn't want to acknowledge it? Maybe he's having fun with you?

RB: Before you embarked on the Mangel trilogy, you were writing the "London Novel". To me, that's all literati and educated media types. So what drew you from that to the two-fisted profanity of Royston Blake?

CW: With the aborted "London Novel", I was looking at the world around me at that time. I was living in London, and had a feeling I saw the place differently to a lot of people (but similar to some - who knows?), and I just wanted to get that down. I certainly wasn't interested in the literati and all that bollocks. My problem, as I found out, was that London was still too fresh for me, despite me living there for a few years. I need to let things stew for longer than that, which is how I turned to the earlier experiences of growing up in Mang... er, Worcester.

RB: So why put together a fictional town? Why not just write about Worcester?

CW: I wanted to write about Worcester, but not in any accurate way. I was only interested in the things from that time that had become little obsessions, and threw away all the rest. So Mangel is a bit like Worcester circa 1986, but with the boring stuff taken out and a lot of other strange stuff thrown in. No casual visitor to Worcester would recognise Mangel there. They'd see the nice cathedral, the swans on the river, the pottery works and lovely gift boutiques. But that's all a front. Try going on the dole, doing a bit of squatting, toughening up your face and knuckles, etc. Then the hidden dimension of Mangel opens up to you.

I've written stories set in other places, but it's only when I started mining earlier times that I hit a rich seam. I must have a lot of demons from that period. To a writer, of course, demons are angels.

RB: Are those demons exorcised, or do they just take new forms now?

CW: I think perhaps the idea of writing as therapy is a bit misleading. You don't write a novel about a short guy coping with all the flak he gets for being short, and then all of a sudden you're happy with being a short author. But it does seem to have an effect on me, writing all this material which seems rooted in my earlier life in Worcester. I used to hate the place, and had a dread of being stuck there for life. I couldn't stand to hear the accent, and it didn't help that there were a few people walking around the town who I wanted to avoid, for my own good. But now I live there. I've moved back to Worcester (or nearby) and I love the place. For me, there's no better part of the world. It has its problems, of course, but so does everywhere.

But as for demons, I'm sure I have a lot of others. They'll never run out. It's like that thing about being happy: if you're happy, you're finished.

RB: The actual topography of Mangel and the surrounding areas is pretty vague, I noticed. The town seems dictated by its residents. Was this deliberate?

CW: No, I think it's just the way I write. Someone somewhere once advised to describe everything in your writing, so the reader can be there. What a lot of crap. You describe what you need to describe. And you can normally paint the whole scene with just the mention of a smell, or a picture on the wall. Readers do the rest.

RB: Yeah, something I appreciated was that a reader automatically knows what Doug's shop looks like, simply by virtue of the fact he's called Doug The Shopkeeper.

CW: You don't know how happy it makes me to hear you say that.

RB: Okay, now I've got you in a good mood: who's Paul Pry?

CW: Well, the Paul Pry is the name of a longstanding public house in Worcester. As far as I know, it's always been dingy and dodgy, and it still is. While the town gets spruced up all around it, the Paul Pry remains a stubborn monument to a bygone time, in all its spectacular drabness and sleaziness. There's something very English about that. I used to drink there I lot, and I've always loved it. That said, the Paul Pry of the novels is an entirely fictional pub.

As I understand it, there are several "Paul Pry" pubs across the country. (I don't mean it's a chain, just not an unique name for a pub.) It does have some root in legend, but I can't remember it. Something about a voyeur.

RB: Always have to bring it back to the gutter, don't you? Which leads me to ask about the swearing... Really, Charlie, all that cursing...

CW: All the foul language of Royston Blake and co is just normal speech for a lot of people I knew back in the day. You say "fuckin'" so you don't have to pause in your sentence, which might let someone else get a word in. I always thought that this kind of fruity language (not just the swearing) was a lot more expressive than BBC English, because it obeys no rules.

RB: I agree, but do you think the amount of swearing has put some people off? Because there's a real lack of foul language in a majority of British novels and an abundance of it in British society.

CW: I've no doubt people have been put off by the swearing. But what can I do about them? Strangely, in this age of anything goes, swearing seems to be a bit of a taboo. Or maybe that's just in the tweedy corners of the literary world, where swearing is equated with lack of intelligence. But there's no way I could censor the swearing out. That's the way Blake talks, and it wouldn't seem right to me otherwise. And I don't exaggerate the swearing for effect, either. It just is what it is.

Hey, I might lose some prudish readers, but I gain a few fans of profane literature.

RB: And it's not just the swearing. There's a whole load of violence in the novels. Yet you manage to ground it in this kind of absurd realism. Is this a deliberate attempt to lighten the scenes, or is it just the way you see violence?

CW: Unfortunately, there is a lot of humour to be found in violence. I know this because I've seen it. In your violent rural market town, violence is seen as a recreational activity (as it is elsewhere, but I'm talking about rural market towns here), and it's "fun" to beat someone to a pulp in front of your laughing mates. What I was doing, I suppose, was showing that and taking it a bit further. Other times, like when Blake's got the gun at the end of Fags And Lager, he takes it lightly as a means of coping with it. It's an intense situation, and if you don't take it quite seriously, maybe it isn't so serious. I'm not sure if all of the violence is treated in that way. Towards the end of Deadfolk it stops being funny. I think this comes back to the rural market thugs - a step further and they're into murder and big trouble, and I've seen this happen (not first hand, of course. Don't call me up as a witness or anything).

RB: Especially in King Of The Road, because Blake's not a gun kind of guy. And I have to admit that I'm not a fan of guns in British crime fiction (especially when they're bloody Glocks or something), but it works because Blake's obviously uncomfortable. How do you approach these scenes?

CW: Violent scenes, love scenes, dream scenes, drinking scenes... I don't really distinguish them. I just write each bit of the story as it comes up, from Blake's POV. I never consciously attempt to make the books realistic or surreal or disturbing or anything, it's just a guy telling a story as he sees it and wants to tell it. Sometimes the violence can be very casual, because he is hardened to it and things need to be done. Other times he's in a fantasy world, covered in blood and he thinks he's a cowboy or something.

I agree about guns, though. We may have people getting shot in cities here and there, but how often do you see someone with a gun? A bloke from So Solid Crew gets caught with a gun in his car - it's headline news and he goes to jail. Guns are not the standard currency of violence on our shores.

RB: How have the Mangel books been received in, say, the United States? I ask because some of the biggest gags are the most parochial (I'm thinking of that Minder thing in Fags And Lager which was fuckin' hilarious).

CW: Yes, I was aware that some of references are parochial. As I wrote the Minder stuff, I was aware you had to be British to get it properly. But fuck it - you can't write for everyone. I'm British and I write about Britain. However, a lot of Americans seem to like Royston Blake. Deadfolk was certainly no commercial success over there (there was only a limited distribution), but got some great feedback. Parochial jokes aside, I'm using an American model for the novels - that of pulp crime fiction. An editor at a major US publisher was interested in the books when Fags And Lager came out, but I understand his bonfire was pissed on at committee level. This does not surprise me. Other foreign countries have jumped in, though - France, Italy, Spain, Russia. Maybe they had Minder in those countries?

RB: Or maybe they think their readers will get it regardless. Glad to hear about the US feedback, though, because from what I've seen, the books have been marginalised by the British press, haven't they? Reviews stating that the book should come with an orange jacket, calling the books "chav lit"...

CW: I don't mind that. I'm grateful for any positive attention the books get in the press. Not everyone wants to do a deep reading, you know? I thought about that when I was writing the books. I didn't just want something to be admired in a literary way, I wanted casual readers to pick it up and get something out of it, whether it be a few laughs or a thrill. Saying that, I didn't have much choice in the matter. The books came out like they did, and are what they are. To be honest, I was just the typist.

RB: And yet there's a sly dig in Fags And Lager. C'mon, admit it, is there a shade of what you could have been in Steve Dowie?

CW: You mean, did I ever want to be an investigative journalist? No, not really. I'm way too lazy. I'd be the kind who's in the pub all afternoon getting hammered. I think with Steve Dowie I wanted a counterpoint to Blakey and the usual Mangel types. Someone who's from that, but thinks himself above it. But not quite high enough. Poor old Steve.

RB: And while we're at it, do you have any other hobbies apart from writing?

CW: Er, no. Writing is an all-encompassing... (ahem) "hobby". Everything else (reading, movies, music etc) just seems to support it, if you know what I mean. I play chess with anyone who wants to play, which you could call a hobby, I suppose (although I never study it or read about it). Of course, new interests always come and go, but I’m inevitably thinking about them as a writer. This was not always the case. Not so many years ago I could enjoy the world for what it was.

RB: What about your influences? You've had the Jim Thompson comparison (which seems to be par for the course these days), but you strike me as a guy who reads far beyond the conventions of genre.

CW: Thompson for sure. He's near the tip of an iceberg of influences, most of which I will never know about. His Pop. 1280 is pretty much a model for Deadfolk. I wanted to write that kind of one-horse-town novel with a drawling, totally unrestrained narrator... but set in provincial England. Magnus Mills - his personal vision of Britain is unique, and that spurs me on (to write my own). Liza Cody for the Bucket Nut books. Eva Wylie (the female wrestler/rubbish dump nightwatchwoman narrator) is a glorious monstrosity of ignorance, pride, insecurity, and defiance. She's a beauty. And an influence. Other influences I would guess at are Thomas Hardy, Stephen King, Coen brothers, David Lynch... who knows? We all have so many influences we don't even know about.

As for general reading - no, I don't restrict myself to crime. A lot of stuff that comes under "crime" just sends me to sleep, and is so far distant from the stuff that floats my boat. Boat floaters crimewise for me would be Jason Starr, Ken Bruen, Charles Willeford, John Franklin Bardin, Goodis, Kem Nunn... A guy called Al Guthrie is pretty handy. And one called Roy Banks, or something. Yes, these are all guys who write from within the crime, rather than the investigator who stands outside it. I loved Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island, but not so much Mystic River. Michael Connelly is to be admired for his sheer novel-constructing ability. I just read whatever I fancy, whether crime or no. Niall Griffiths is defo putting out some great books. Desmond Barry's A Bloody Good Friday should not be missed by any crime fan (or Merthyr Tydfill resident). Daren King's Boxy An Star is out of this world.

RB: Not a lot of police procedurals in there. And there's a slim police presence in the Mangel trilogy. They're there on the fringe, posing a threat, of course...

CW: The police had to have some kind of presence in these novels. At different times in the three books, they have different levels of power. Towards the end of Fags And Lager they have Blake cornered, but even then they're not the kind of police we like to think of as a force for good. More than upholders of the law and protectors of the good, they're just "establishment". Blake, of course, is a force of nature and a bringer of chaos, and therefore an enemy of the establishment. I wanted to show that forces of normality will do whatever they can to uphold the status quo, but they'll never really be able to tame the underbelly, because the underbelly is the heart of it all. This is why Blake has a direct line to the strangely powerful Nathan the Barman. Is that confusing enough? I hate to bring class into it, but class could illustrate my point here. The ruling classes (Nathan) and lower classes (Blake) are interesting, and where things happen. They have a dialogue. The middle classes (the police) are just mediocrity, and try to get themselves into roles where they can have a little bit of power.

RB: Do you ever see yourself heading into that territory, though? Can we expect a gutter-mouth Wexford?

CW: I don't think so. I suppose I'm interested in people themselves, and not the roles they have to play. A policeman (in the "procedural" sense) is just a role. He might have a semblance of a personality beneath that role (divorced, alcoholic, blah blah blah...), but he's there to solve the crime and restore order. With the Hoke Moseley novels of Charles Willeford, there's a big shift towards the man himself. He does the role of a policeman alright, but it's the way it all affects him (or not) that interests me much more. (This is brought home in the unpublished Grimhaven, which has no investigative element whatsoever.)

Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is that you get a lot more existential rope if your hero does not have to trot out all this police procedure. I just find it much more exciting to write from within the crime. Mind you, there's nothing to stop the two converging.

RB: In the books you've touched on chainsaw torture, child molestation, drug cults, anti-corporate terrorism, issues of paternity, courage and mental illness. Is there any subject you wouldn't touch with the proverbial barge pole?

CW: I hope not. If I felt uncomfortable with something, I'd have to ask myself why I've got a hang-up. And the best way to resolve hang-ups, as we know, is to write novels about them. Then again, I don't consciously write about "issues". They just come out.

One thing I've become aware of is that the three Mangel books do not really touch on racism. This seems a bit odd, considering racism is a big issue in British towns these days. But it just hasn't cropped up. Royston Blake is the narrator, and he's very focussed on his own problems.

RB: No, they're not obviously "issue" books. They're not even obviously genre books.

CW: I don't really think of writing in terms of crime fiction, or any other genre. I didn't start out writing crime, and I don't make any attempt to stick to it. It just comes out this way these days. I was inspired by Thompson's Pop. 1280, but that's because it's a great novel, not just a great "crime" novel. So if there is any intrinsic limitation of the genre, I don't feel it's a limitation for me.

RB: You've inferred that Blake is a kind of shaman, showing us the dark side of life. Do you think there's room for that in the genre? And why d'you think crime fiction is so popular?

CW: There’s room for a lot of things in crime fiction. Or at least there should be. As I mentioned before, I think most crime fiction is about preserving the status quo. Fans of that are not interested in seeing the dark side, because to them the dark side is just a bad thing that should be stamped out. And in certain specific cases, they're right. But that's one of those limitations I was talking about, and you don't have to observe it. I think there is a lot to be gained from playing with bad behaviour (eg: violence, murder) in fiction, because it just reminds us of the things we are capable of. Our perspectives are constantly reined in by whatever the media/society wants to feed us, and we forget that we are animals with animal urges. So it becomes easy to look at the latest low life murder on the news and reject the murderer as a bad apple. But if you examine the bad behaviour (in fiction), and the things that lead up to it and motivate it, you can maybe restore a proper perspective.

Maybe this is why we're so obsessed with crime fiction: we feel our perspectives slipping out all the time, and need to restore them.

RB: So you've finished the trilogy, what's next for Pretty Boy Williams?

CW: You never know, do you? Far as I'm concerned, I envisaged a trilogy of Royston Blake/Mangel and I've done a trilogy. And I feel that it's done now. My wife is into spiritualism and all that, and she reckons Blake is some sort of spirit who came to me so I could tell his story. I quite like that. I've done a job for him, and now I can do something else. But you never know.

The novel I'm writing now is not Blake, not Mangel, but it's set in the same world. In the Mangel books a couple of places called Tuber and Barkettle are mentioned in passing, and I've taken them for my little tale of two cities. But this is a standalone. I suppose I'm a bit reluctant to leave this world I've created. I want to explore it more and find out what else goes on. I have a pretty good idea of what to write after that, too. It'll be the story of two street kids in "the big city" (as mentioned throughout the Mangel books). I don't know what the plot will be, but I can see some scenes.

I don't know about you, Ray, but I feel I've got a finite number of books in me. I couldn't do the thing where I keep churning them out, year after year. I love writing but it's draining, and it's a pure waste of time if I don't really have anything to say. So I can't really see me doing more than six or seven books.

How did you know my nickname, by the way?

RB: What else could it be? You boxed, didn't you?

CW: I only boxed a bit as a kid. My best mate was in a boxing club at the Worcester Working Men's Club, and I started going along with him. I liked all the training (and was fascinated with the medicine ball), but I really had a bit of problem in the ring. I'd get in there and see that the other guy was looking at me like he wanted to hurt me. And I didn't want him to hurt me! I didn't want to hurt him either. I didn't understand how you could hit someone if you weren't angry with them. What a ponce, eh? I quit after a year or so. It's all a long, long time ago. But I sometimes think, you know, do a bit of roadwork, hit the gym, get the old moves back...

RB: Talking of roadwork (what a segue), you've been at a few events recently. How do you reconcile the appearances with a full time occupation and a family?

CW: It's an obligation I feel. To get a publishing contract was amazing, and I wanted to do what I could to try to make it work. Plus I really like the idea of events. Let's be honest - it's an ego boost. We write in total isolation, and no one appears to give a shit about what you're doing (which is as it should be). Then you go along to a festival or whatever and people have come to hear you (or more likely the other, more famous guy you're sharing the bill with). I never dreamed I'd get to do stuff like that, so I try to appreciate it while it lasts.

But yeah, full time job... You just have to fit it all in. Work, wife, kids, animals, house, reading, writing... There was this thing called a "social life", I had once. Can't recall what it was, though.

RB: But isn't there a part of you that kind of yearns to be anonymous? You've mentioned before that our mutual favourite Magnus Mills is kind of elusive. Is that something you've considered or even wanted?

CW: Well, I am anonymous. I've got a website and stuff, but that's the give the books more of a chance of getting out there. It's not like I'm sitting alongside Tom Paulin on Newsnight Review. I've been to some major literary events, but I'm like the gimpy little kid who gets to play with big bro and his big mates because big bro wants that bike for Christmas.

One thing I like about Magnus Mills is that he does none of that. No website, few appearances. He does an interview now and then when he has a book out, but appears to keep himself to himself the rest of the time, and does a day job as a delivery man or something. And somehow he's much better for that. I am much more interested in him as a character/writer/celebrity because he is so normal, and elusive.

RB: And you're a character-reader, aren't you? How do you prepare to deliver the readings in that Blakey style?

CW: I don't have to prepare anymore because I've got it down. But it took me a lot of practice before the first readings. I'd go down the garden and shout and rant and be Royston Blake. Then, when it's show time, I can't help but be a bit more restrained. Part of that is (usually) being up there with another writer or two. They're doing a good reading - why should I do this mad shouty thing? If I ever did an event with Alexei Sayle, it would be different.

RB: How have reactions been at the readings? I ask because I'm a total novice myself...

CW: Good, mostly. I think. One of the best was when I did an event with Mark Billingham, who is of course a big name. There was a good-sized audience, and they were enthusiastic Billingham fans by and large. But they were genuinely interested in my stuff, and got into it (I think). It helps if you choose a passage that gets some laughs. I spent a good while afterwards chatting to punters and getting pissed.

RB: Couple of questions before last orders: can you give us an idea of how you write? Do you listen to music as you're tapping?

CW: I work wherever I can. Most of it these days is in a tiny room at home, late in the evening, on a borrowed laptop. I can't work for more than an hour or so, and during that hour I find myself stopping to distract myself quite a lot. I tend to write 100 words or so and then feel the need for a reward. God knows how I ever finish novels. I'm amazed at myself when I type THE END. A novel for me is a year-long project, including pre-pub stuff and recovery time. I hold the characters and story in my head for months and months, and if I tweak this bit I tend to know instinctively what other parts are affected. I don't understand how I can do this, because away from novel writing I've got the shortest attention span. I've never really stuck with anything worthwhile for the long haul, except this. So that's good.

But yeah, I do write whenever and wherever I can. I wrote most of Deadfolk sitting on a train, waiting to leave Farringdon station. I'd get on the empty train at 5:45 every day after work, and it would leave at 6:00. That's 15 minutes of quality Mangel time.

Music - no, I can't listen to it while writing. But I need it for writing, if you know what I mean. In the non-writing hours I try to forage on music, books, films, art, etc... I have a very long car commute to my day job and I sometimes have audio books on, but mostly it’s music. Nick Cave, Nick Drake, Bowie, early Manics (just The Holy Bible really), bit of Elvis, bit of Joy Division, Franz Ferdinand, Johnny Cash, whatever. I'm always open to new stuff and old stuff.

RB: And finally, why do you write?

CW: Because it's something I can do. Everyone wants to do hard things well, and writing a book is seen as a hard thing. Actually it is a hard thing, and I'm frankly surprised I can do it. I started writing because I felt it was time to step up to the plate and finally do something, you know? I've tried lots of things in my time but never really followed them through. Also I love writing. Writing a book is like doing one of those first-person shoot-em-up video games. I step into a new scene and it's like... now, who's around? What's that music playing? What about that guy over there, at the end of the bar? Looks a bit dodgy to me...

RB: Especially if he's wearing Doug's "sausage-making" suit. Charlie, thank you.

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Copyright © 2006 Noir Originals

RAY BANKS' first novel The Big Blind was published by PointBlank in 2004. The first novel in the Cal Innes series Saturday’s Child will be published by Polygon in May 2006. He also joins an all-star line-up in Akashic Books' Dublin Noir edited by Ken Bruen. But he really doesn’t like to talk about himself. Especially in the third person.