Speak No Evil
After the disaster of The Tarantula Stone, I spent a few years collecting rejection letters.
My agents also took the opportunity to jump ship and I was left to have a go myself. It was disheartening. Publishers kept telling me how much they enjoyed my work but... and there was always a but, about a third of the way down the letter. It got so I would just scan the text until I found the 'but.' However, I was determined to keep trying.
Speak No Evil originally started life as a manuscript called Black Dog. I'd long fancied doing something with links to Egyptian Mythology (my second unpublished novel, Magic Sam, had combined ancient myth with a contemporary setting and I figured if it was done better, it might just work.) I'd spent a couple of years in the mid 80's writing and presenting a film review programme at Piccadilly Radio in Manchester, and this seemed like an interesting background for the story. I made my hero a DJ (inevitably, when the book was published, it drew comparisons with the Clint Eastwood movie, Play Misty For Me, though the occupation of the hero really is the only comparison.)
When it was finished, I bunged the manuscript off to Headline Books and promptly went off with my wife for a two week holiday to Ireland, determined to forget all about it. I pretty much did. My wife and I returned on the eve of the elections and as we drove back from the ferry terminal at Holyhead, we listened with mounting depression as the Tories won seat after seat, another Conservative landslide.
Entering the house, I peered disconsolately through the mountain of mail and found one with the Headline imprint on it. Another rejection, I decided, it had come back too quickly to be anything else. I opened the letter and looked for the 'but'. This time there wasn't one! Waving the letter triumphantly above my head, I ran out of the house to my wife, who was still sorting through the luggage in the car. She looked at my delighted face in astonishment and jumped to the wrong conclusion.
'Don't tell me Labour have won?' she cried.
'Better than that,' I assured her. 'I sold another book.' Writers are selfish creatures, when all is said and done.
The letter was from Peter Lavery, making an offer for Black Dog. All was well with the world, at least temporarily. Editorial changes were minor and translation rights and a book club deal were quickly lined up. On the eve of publication, there was a slight glitch when Ian McEwan released a book called Black Dogs and I was called upon, at very short notice, to come up with a list of possible titles. Speak No Evil was the one that Headline liked, and this is why, unlike most of my other novels, the reader will find no reference to the title anywhere in the book.
FACT: When I went in to Piccadilly Radio to do some promotion for the novel, I discovered that many of the staff there were convinced that characters who populated my fictional Metrosound Radio were based on them. They pressed me to admit the truth. This amazed me, because in some cases, people were asking to be identified with psychopaths and creeps of the lowest order. I explained that fictional characters are generally composites, utilising different characteristics from various people; but I realised that for many readers, to be identified as the hero or the villain of a novel, is highly flattering.