Each year Huddersfield University invites people to tell their story in 20 pictures. I can do that, I thought. Twenty pics projected one after the other onto a big screen and a 20 second narrated caption for each. A good way to launch my latest book. Then I discovered it would be done in a darkened theatre so I couldn't read my captions but would have to memorise them. I bottled out. But I had done the work so thought I would present it here. My career as a writer in 20 photographs.
I grew up in Manchester with ambitions: to play football for Manchester United (I failed the trial); be a rock star (our band broke up a few months before the Beatles were discovered and sent every A&R man scuttling north to sign every guitar group) or to be a writer. I became a journalist.
Journalism is not a good occupation for a wannabee writer. I used words all day and, as a teenager, all I wanted in my spare time was sex, drugs and rock and roll. Or, in reality, a girlfriend, go to the pub and rock and roll. I had written my first short stories at the age of eight and my first book at the age of 14. I wrote a play for Granada TV when I was 18. Granada didn't want it. So I went to Africa.
I was night sub on the Uganda Nation and had such a great time I had none spare for actually writing. Plenty of bars and wild experiences. I was eventually deported for entering the country on an illegal permit – I paid 40 East African shillings for it from an immigration officer at Entebbe Airport. I returned to Manchester about the time the Evening Chronicle closed and put 70 journalists out of work. I ended up in Blackpool.
The Evening Gazette promised entry into the nationals in Manchester. It was a well worn path from the seaside to the northern offices of the Express or Mirror or News of the Screws. In the 1960s Blackpool was a town that had more stars than the West End, nightclubs, pubs and endless young ladies looking for fun. In between these delights, I wrote a novelette about Paris that no one was interested in. Fellow reporter Mike Berry became my best mate but wanted to be a comedian. He became Lennie Bennett.
Lennie eventually starred at the Palladium, with Sinatra in Vegas, and became a TV game show host. Back then, he was playing clubs around the north of England and I was his roadie. After a dismal New Year's Eve performance at a drunken Manchester Southern Sporting Club (he followed the piper and died on his arse) he took me to a relative's party in a mansion on the outskirts of Blackpool. Across a crowded room, my eyes met those of Antonietta Maria Coluluca.
The nationals could wait. We became an item. I stayed in Blackpool. Our age difference could almost have got me arrested: she was 16 and I was 23. I had walked into a romance without fully understanding the consequences. Maria was the daughter of Louis and the grand-daughter of Diamond Tony Colaluca.
Lennie Bennett was called to the house. Louis (he's in his shirt sleeves at the back) put him against a wall. “This bloke. If anything happens, it's not just his knees. It's yours as well.” We were married two years later, had a daughter called Siobhan, bought a house in St Annes and I kept writing: a terrible novel about a man who won the pools. But I had short stories published: Men's Own and Mayfair, where the editor was Gerald Kingsland.
Gerald told me to stay focussed and not be stupid about my writing. Then he went to live on a desert island with a girl half his age. Oliver Reed played him in the film Castaway. Amanda Donohoe played the young lady. Taking this as inspiration, we sold the house and my Lotus Cortina and bought a VW camper van.
We headed for Naples where Maria had family. I was going to be a full time writer without the distractions of journalism. I had not taken into consideration the fulltime distractions of a nine month old baby. We reached Aachen after meandering through France and Belgium before Maria said enough. We turned for home and the van blew up on the M6 on the way back to Manchester.
I tried full time writing for a year and spent the house. I had short stories published but not enough. For a 2,000 word story I was paid the equivalent of a week's journalistic wages. But I only got one a month published. I returned to newspapers and ended up in Huddersfield, where we added to the family with our second daughter, Sian.
The Huddersfield Daily Examiner was going to be another staging post. I had already seen action on several provincial weekly, evening and morning newspapers and I was still only 31. Maybe time for a serious tilt at the nationals before I got too old. But I stayed. I also continued writing: a novel about a naïve young journalist in Africa. Evelyn Waugh did it better. A comedy about race relations. Tom Sharpe did it better. I thought long and hard about what sells and came up with Hitler.
I spent two years researching and writing a thriller about MI6 and postwar Nazis. I sent it to a London agent. Mandy invited me to her office in Charing Cross Road, near The Garrick theatre. She signed me up and told me to go away and write another. It took a year, during which time I received a deluge of rejection slips for the first. I sent the next book: The Dark Apostle.
 | It's original name was The King Conspiracy, because it was about the assassination of Martin Luther King. Bantam, the first publisher it was offered to, accepted the book but didn't like the title or the ending. They came up with the title and I re-wrote the ending in a Chinese restaurant in Ealing, up the road from the publishing house. I got a four book contract for a lot of money and won The John Creasey Award from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain. |
I was presented with the award by Bill Deedes, legendary journalist and writer, at a dinner in London. I was two seats away from Ruth Rendell and a galaxy of writing talent was present. Bantam thought I was the next hot property. The new kid on the block. They said: "A debut from a Forsyth or Ludlum of tomorrow." They were wrong.
 | I produced a second book, The Serpent's Tooth, plus a British crime novel called The Limit that Hodder and Stoughton bought on first sight and which was published under the pseudonym Peter Lacey. It was eight on a best seller list, in between Agatha Christie and James Elroy. The books were also selling around the world. |
 | I was published in America, sold in all English speaking countries, and translated into nine languages, including Japanese and Korean. The Scandinavians particularly liked me. I was big in Japan (I'm short everywhere else) and became a lire millionaire when Silvio Berlusconi's publishing house bought two of my books. A million lire was worth about fourpence at the time. |
An American producer bought the film rights to The Limit, which was good and bad news. He paid an annual fee but never actually made the movie. It meant that French TV and a British TV company couldn't have it. Soon after, the British TV company produced their own crime drama with a similar setting. A British producer wanted to make a film of The Bagman with Oliver Reed in the lead role but that never happened either.
 | After six books I entered the wilderness years. I did commission work under pseudonyms, a children's book, adult fiction, all under different names. I still had the day job and had become a columnist for the Examiner. Manuscripts that both Mandy and I thought were good never quite made it. Publishing was changing as ebooks bloomed. And then I sent her the first part of the Reaper trilogy and she sold it to Myrmidon Books under the pseudonym Jon Grahame. |
 | Jim Reaper is a hero in a post apocalyptic Britain. He helps found a colony of survivors and protects it with a group of special forces who are mainly women. I enjoyed writing it and dispensing the sort of justice to bullies, murderers and rapists that you can't dispense in a civilised society. That's the positive part of writing fiction: you can set your own rules. It was first published in 2012 and a second edition with a new cover was re-launched, along with Angel, the second part, in March, 2014. The third part, Redemption, came out in July 2014. |
 | The women come more to the fore in the second and third books: they are deadly and dangerous. Redemption was my 22nd published book. Half a dozen more are available on Kindle as ebooks. This time round, I'm no longer the new kid on the block. But I'm still writing and have just finished a book called Pilgrim. As a writer, I'm like Jim Reaper. I'm a survivor. But I don't kill people. That's my career as a writer in 20 pictures. I'm still writing and always will and cannot imagine life without it. But deep down, I wish I'd played for Manchester United. |
RSS Feed
