When we met at Billingham’s north London home, it seemed that the melancholy mood of The Dying Hours was deceptive. Anyone who has seen him perform stand-up or read at literary events knows that his conversation is lively, opinionated (Billingham prefers ‘gobby’) and littered with jokes. He can sound equally light-hearted when faced with heavyweight questions. For example: how does he balance the pressures of marrying classic crime plots with his own literary vision? ‘You listen for the voice in your head telling you to do something different. Having said that, I’m not likely to turn in a slim volume of poetry or a recipe book. I love crime fiction first and foremost. I find it hard to read anything else. I need a body every two or three chapters or at the very least a car chase.’ You can take the crime writer out of The Comedy Store, it seems, but you can’t always do the opposite.
And yet, it is hard to miss the tone and themes of The Dying Hours running throughout Billingham’s conversation. ‘I wanted to write a book about old age,’ he tells me at one point. ‘There’s a moment when Thorne is wondering why there aren’t more witnesses and he talks about how people would always remember the kid in the hoodie, but barely notice an old man. I was interested in that notion of the elderly becoming invisible.’
Thorne’s own time-ravaged state came as a mild shock to his creator. Having begun the series by ageing his central protagonist at roughly a year per book, Billingham dispensed with this itinerary in recent episodes. The Dying Hours offered an opportunity to catch up with Thorne after a temporary hiatus.
‘I wasn’t specifically saying how old he is, but making it clear he’s somewhere in his late forties – that he has a few years and maybe even a few stone on the policemen around him. At the same time, he is in a place job-wise that he hasn’t been for a long time. He can’t run quite as fast as before. He’s losing a bit of hearing. There are aches and pains, and a lot more grey hair. Thorne is starting to be aware of his own mortality.’ Billingham laughs, a little uneasily.
Thorne is not alone. Billingham admits that he has been reviewing his own life and preoccupations in recent years. Turning fifty a couple of years ago had something to do with it. This notable birthday coincided with another significant anniversary: 2011 marked Billingham’s first decade in crime fiction. He realised he wasn’t the same novelist who published Sleepyhead back in 2001. Or not entirely.
‘Being in my early fifties and having written over a dozen books, I’m suddenly less interested in the crash, bang, wallop… less preoccupied with the motor of the narrative. There is still blood and badness but what really haunts Thorne now is whether he should have had a kid, not whether he should have caught a particular killer. Alongside a decreasing interest in graphic violence, this shift in emphasis means I am probably going to be writing different books.’
In The Dying Hours, we are given more insight than ever before into Thorne’s inner life, thought processes and (although our taciturn Detective Inspector would squirm at the notion) his feelings. ‘These were the parts of the book I used to be least interested in. Now they are the parts I’m most interested in. It’s what John Harvey calls the “looking out the window” moments. These are my equivalent to the “back porch” moments in the Harry Bosch novels, where Michael Connelly puts Harry out on the back porch, so he can listen to some jazz, look out across the Valley and think about stuff. These days, Tom’s got a lot more to think about.’
Viewed in a broader context, Billingham’s desire to innovate while remaining true to his personal raison d’etre – to entertain – has defined his career as a whole. Whether he was working as an actor, a comedian or a writer, he has weighed artistic endeavour against commercial success, the need to express himself and connect with an audience. It was a realisation that came to him as a stand-up:
‘Once you become aware that you’re a crowd-pleaser – and I’ve never understood people who use this as a pejorative term – you realise that it’s your job to stand in front of six hundred people and make sure that you entertain them. I was always happy to be a crowd-pleaser. Don’t people who have paid good money for a ticket deserved to be pleased? I remember arguing with a comedian once after watching him scream and shout at a shocked and unamused audience for twenty minutes in what was basically a self-indulgent therapy session. Afterwards I asked him if he genuinely didn’t care about his audience. He basically said, “Sod them, that was for me.” To this day, I have no common ground with writers who don’t give a stuff what their readers think, who claim to write only for themselves. When I write, the invisible reader is looking over my shoulder at the computer screen. Even when I’m finished, it’s still just paper and ink. A book is not actually a book until it is read.’
Born in 1961, Mark Billingham grew up in Birmingham. Those looking for the roots of his anti-magpie attraction to ‘dark things’ frequently cite his parents’ divorce and his father’s absence during his formative years. Billingham himself admits he was intrigued when his wife pointed out the recurrence of father– son relationships in his early novels. But, he maintains, his was a happy enough childhood. ‘I wasn’t traumatised by something that was and still is extremely common. It was just a divorce. It wasn’t a horrible thing.’
What darkness there was in Billingham’s infancy and adolescence can be seen in the books he began to devour. A maths teacher introduced him to the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, while a summer reading Jaws and The Godfather turned him onto the raw power of popular fiction. ‘No book had ever affected me like those. The descriptions of sex and violence knocked me for six. At school, we read novels like Animal Farm and To Kill a Mockingbird. Great books of course, but because we read them at school it always felt like homework. They didn’t have that visceral force of a huge popular blockbuster.’
For the moment, murder was restricted to Billingham’s fledgling love of pop music. The first record he remembers buying was Tony Christie’s ‘I Did What I Did For Maria’. The prime draws – or so he remembers – were Christie’s voice, a catchy melody and the mariachi trumpet. It wasn’t until decades later that Billingham suspected a possible attraction to the menacing tale of the lyrics. ‘It’s an incredibly dark story about a man about to be executed for taking revenge on the villain who raped and murdered his wife. Part of me wonders whether, even at the age of eleven, I was somehow drawn to that really dark stuff.’ Billingham pauses, shakes his head in mock sorrow. ‘Apparently it was also Jeremy Clarkson’s first single.’
What was evident from Billingham’s early years was a predilection for performance. ‘I’m just a huge show-off. Maybe I wanted attention, but it was also what I was good at. It was my nature. I never the quiet, studious type. I’m proud to admit that I have shown off shamelessly in various ways throughout my life.’
For Billingham, performance is the single seam that unites the various stages of his career. From the start, this combined comedy, acting and writing. ‘I would try to write funny stories at school. If the teacher asked me to come forward and read my story out to the class, the buzz of that would get me through the week. It was an incredible high.’
This rush inspired Billingham’s first creative ambition. ‘Thirty years ago, I wanted to be an actor more than anything in the world. At school, unless you were a sporting superstar or an academic genius, you could easily get lost. The only other outlet was the school play. The first time I acted, I realised I was good at it. That reaction from an audience was like crack cocaine.’ It was also, Billingham adds, the only way a pupil at an all boys’ Birmingham grammar school could meet girls.
Having studied drama at Birmingham University (‘It was a doss of a degree. Three years pretending to be a tree. Great fun.’), he helped found a ‘socialist theatre company’. Influenced by writers such as Edward Bond and Trevor Griffiths, Billingham toured art centres and shopping malls performing self-devised plays about the arms race or discrimination in the workplace. ‘It was 1983. The Miner’s Strike, CND and sexual politics. We didn’t make any money, but it was great.�
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After three years, Billingham moved to London to try and make it as a professional actor. By his own admission, he spent much of the time unemployed, winning occasional walk-on parts in television series like The Bill, Juliet Bravo and Dempsey and Makepeace. ‘I played a lot of coppers and villains. In my first TV job, I was blown over a car with a sawn-off shotgun. It is kind of weird. I did a lot of crime even then.’
Frustration with life as an actor inspired a change of direction. An avid fan of stand-up comedy long before it became the new rock and roll, Billingham decided to try his hand after witnessing a ‘frankly terrible act’ at a club in Brixton. He formed a double-act called The Tracy Brothers with Mike Mole, a fellow alumnus of the socialist theatre group.
‘We started off writing comedy songs: original words, original music, very good harmonies. Within six months, we were headlining The Comedy Store and then our act just got worse and worse. Once we’d got to a point where we were doing really well, we stupidly went down the easy route of doing parodies. It is so much easier than actually writing songs, but for some reason audiences think it is the cleverest thing in the world. And it just isn’t.’ Billingham cites a performance at the Comedy Store on the day that George Michael was arrested in a Los Angeles public lavatory. The Tracy Brothers received a standing ovation merely for walking on and playing the opening chords to ‘Faith’. The hastily improvised lyrics were entirely beside the point.
If Billingham’s next transformation – from comedian to author – began with writing the lyrics to these comedy songs, it progressed when he went solo as a stand-up. The culmination came courtesy of ‘the one genuinely brilliant acting job’ he ever had: as Gary, the Sheriff of Nottingham’s less-than-cerebral henchman in Tony Robinson’s BAFTA-winning Maid Marian and her Merry Men. Billingham wrote a script, ‘Tunnel Vision’, for the final series, and a career in television beckoned.
While collaboration had previously proved fruitful, its allure was rapidly beginning to diminish. ‘From day one as a TV writer, I thought, this is not for me. I don’t play well with others! At its best, television is collaborative, but sadly, a lot of the time I found myself working with idiots. I was trying to write children’s comedy and having to deal with TV executives saying things like, “Put a rubber chicken in it – kids love rubber chickens.” This was at a time when what kids actually loved was Vic and Bob or Blackadder.’
If Billingham’s enthusiasm for his new day job was waning, then his passion for stand-up was also wearing thin. Today, he can talk almost nostalgically about ‘sitting in horrible dressing-rooms at 3 a.m. thinking, What the hell am I doing here?’ But it didn’t take long before the extended absences from his wife and two young children, combined with the comedy circuit’s intensely competitive atmosphere, began to take their toll.
‘I sometimes miss the company of comics,’ Billingham says now. ‘I play poker once a week with friends from stand-up. I still get that banter which is nice, but trust me, it can be far more twisted than anything you’ll ever hear from a crime writer. If you want sick, you should hang out with comedians. They are competitive by nature because they have to be. Back when I was still doing it and standing in the dressing room waiting to go on, it might have been my best friend on stage before me, but part of me wanted him to die on his arse because it would make my life easier.’
The autonomy provided by writing novels was a way out of this impasse. Billingham’s childhood love of crime fiction had deepened over the years. He had become a collector, amassing a vast library: forced to choose, he nominates Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon as his favourite crime novel of all time. Having reviewed a number of thrillers for the Hampstead and Highgate Express and Time Out, he began interviewing his heroes in the genre, like Michael Connelly. It was only a matter of time before Billingham shifted his focus from writing screenplays to narrative fiction.
Back in 1999, Billingham faced two central dilemmas. Should his books be dark or light-hearted? Set in London or Birmingham? To begin with, he chose both. ‘When I tried to write my first crime novel, I was actually working on two books at the same time. I wrote twenty thousand words of a story called The Mechanic. Imagine a sub-Carl Hiaasen everglades caper set on the canals of Birmingham. The other novel was Sleepyhead, which was much darker and set in London.’
Unable to choose between the two halves of his own character, Billingham sent both manuscripts to the only person he knew in publishing. He was advised to drop the funny one. ‘That’s probably because it wasn’t funny. But I think the other reason it wasn’t working was because of the setting. I hadn’t lived in Birmingham for well over a decade by then. Even though I didn’t quite feel like a Londoner at the time, I instinctively knew I had to write about the streets I was walking down.’
Published in 2001, Sleepyhead provided a gothic twist on the classic serial killer investigation. Billingham’s villain was a mass murderer by accident: his gruesome M.O. was sending his female victims into a form of living coma, also known as locked-in syndrome. Billingham looks back on his debut with a mixture of pride and calm self-criticism.
‘I think it takes any writer two or three books before you find your own voice. Before you sound like yourself. I think I was trying very self-consciously to write muscular prose. I had probably been reading too much American hard-boiled crime fiction. It’s what I liked; it’s what I still like. But it’s not necessarily the kind of writer I am.’
The novel also introduced Tom Thorne. Looking back, Billingham has reservations even here. ‘I made Thorne have conversations with the dead, which now just make my skin crawl, it’s so clichéd. I also had him like techno music!’ Billingham rolls his eyes. ‘I realised quite quickly these were the wrong things to do. But the early books are where you make your mistakes.’
In fact, if any one character is the star of Sleepyhead, it is the defiant Alison Willetts, the only person to ‘survive’ the killer, albeit in comatose state. This intimate and intense portrait was central to Billingham’s purposes. ‘I wanted to write about victims. I had read so much crime fiction about a killer and a cop as the central collision. The victim is literally no more than a plot device, which is why Alison is the most important person to me in that book. I know about being scared. Not like you’re scared on a rollercoaster or watching a horror movie, but scared enough to wonder whether you’re ever going to see your wife and kids again.’
Billingham is referring to the terrifying night in 1997 when he and his then-writing partner, Peter Cocks, were held hostage in a Manchester hotel room. Having spent the evening working on a script, they were interrupted by a sudden knock. Expecting room service, Billingham opened the door to find three men in black balaclavas. ‘It was just the most surreal moment. I can remember my thought process. This is a joke. Who the hell’s that? Getting punched in the face. Realising it’s not a joke when they run in shouting, “Down on the floor or you’re dead”.’
Viewed from the safety of 2013 and his own living room, Billingham can define the ordeal as a lesson in the power of fear and humiliation. ‘We didn’t see a gun or a knife, but the fact is they didn’t need a weapon. They just created a sense of intense panic. They grabbed a bottle of beer and sprayed it all round the room. They turned the TV up loud and shouted.’
Billingham and his friend had their hands bound behind their backs, and bags shoved over their heads. For the next three hours they lay in fear of their lives. Any movement or noise provoked a kick from one of their captors. ‘That was the worst thing: they didn’t go. They wanted to use our cards in cashpoint machines either side of midnight, so that they could get two days’ worth of money. We didn’t know that then. We didn’t know if they were going to kill us. You begin to cramp up pretty quickly. After about half an hour it was complete agony. I just wanted them to kick my head in and go. I just wanted it to be over.’
It is a testament to Billingham’s resilient sense of humour that he finds a grain of black comedy in the aftermath. ‘The
adrenalin was pumping. I picked up a chair, Peter picked up a fire extinguisher and we legged it down into the foyer of this hotel. They didn’t have any idea that this had gone on. You’ve got “The Girl From Ipanema” or whatever being piped into this serene reception area and suddenly these lunatics come screaming down the stairs, shouting about being kidnapped.’ The perpetrators were never caught, and continued to haunt Billingham’s imagination for years afterwards. An inveterate hotel guest thanks to stand-up tours, he admits that he never answered a knock at a hotel room door ever again.
This persistent fear found an outlet in his writing: he began Sleepyhead just over a year later. One could argue that the coercive power of terror is the defining theme of the entire Thorne series. It is unmistakably present in his breakthrough sophomore effort Scaredy Cat: from its title through the sub-plot of hotel room break-ins to the central murder story, in which Stuart Nicklin manipulates his accomplice, Martin Palmer, through sheer terror. It unites the kidnap of Luke Mullen in Buried and that of Helen Weeks in Good as Dead. Fear pulsates through the finale of Lifeless, set amongst the homeless community who inhabit the subways under Marble Arch. And it is on every page of The Dying Hours, in which our villain exorcises a long-held grudge by making offers his victims are too petrified to refuse.
What has changed over the years, Billingham argues, is how these killers are portrayed. ‘I think I began almost as a horror writer. My first three novels were certainly marketed according to how scared you were going to be. “Don’t read this when you’re alone!” That kind of thing.’ These almost generically gothic bogeymen have gradually retreated to be replaced by killers driven by circumstance and more naturalistic concerns.
‘There are no such things as monsters. I genuinely don’t believe in evil. It has religious connotations that I’m uncomfortable with. You can characterise something as an evil act, but I don’t believe that evil exists as a force. These days, I’m a lot less interested than I was in writing about serial killers. The kind of people who kill because the moon is full or their mum made them wear a dress. I’m far more fascinated by the idea of good people who snap, because that’s something that can happen to anyone. We’re all capable of killing.’
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