Bad To The Bone
Having spent much of my youth pounding the drums for a no-hoper rock band, it had long been my intention to try and write something with a rock and roll background and the time finally seemed right to have a go at it.
My basic game plan for this novel was to do an updated version of 10 Little Indians. Quite simply, I would place my fictional band, The Deceivers, in a remote recording studio in Wales and have them picked off, one by one, by a mysterious assailant. A genuine Whodunnit.
It turned out to be trickier than I'd anticipated. One of the major problems I had was that when you have a successful rock band in fiction, the reader wants to know who they are like. There's such diversity in rock music, it's important that they don't 'hear' the wrong music. The way I tried to get around this was to have characters constantly mistake the band's singer, Jenny Slade for Chrissie Hynde. I even included the lyrics to several of their songs and at one point considered getting a musician friend to lay down some demos!
I also incorporated a strong occult theme in the book, the first time I'd done this since my debut novel way back in the 70's. Jenny keeps thinking she sees the band's dead guitarist, Scott Griffin, hanging around the studio. At first she thinks his presence is malign, but as the story progresses, she realises that he's actually there to help her. But is she really seeing Scott, or is he just a hallucination, the result of flashbacks to her days as a heroin addict? Though there are clues at the books conclusion, the truth of the matter is never spelled out one way or the other.
I was pleased with Bad To The Bone and thought it an enjoyable romp with a higher than average body count - 13 people are offed by the conclusion, in ever more inventive ways. I was rather less pleased with the cover art which to my mind made it look like an Iron Maiden album, but my protests fell on deaf ears.
FACT: The book was originally titled Let It Bleed but had to be changed when Ian Rankin released a book with the same title. Eerily, Mr Rankin and I have a history of this sort of thing. We both used to work as radio presenters, I had a book called Strip Jack Naked and he had a book called Strip Jack. My book Black Wolf was a bit like his novel, Wolf Man and his title, The Black Book. I once received a letter from him saying that he'd started reading a biography about me in a Crime Writer's magazine and actually thought for a moment that he was reading about himself! When Headline told me we needed a change I spent days compiling lists of 'musical' titles and Bad To The Bone is the one they went for. Lucky they didn't call it Tubular Bells, I suppose...