Tiger, Tiger
After Rachel Ellis, I couldn't seem to get anything off the ground.
Looking back, I think I was trying to be too versatile. Having published one occult story, it might have been a good idea to write another, but no, I wanted to have a go at every genre and was arrogant (or naive) enough to believe I could. Inevitably, the result was a whole string of unpublishable manuscripts. Then my agent, Janet, relocated back to her native Canada and I was taken on by a gentleman called John Parker.
During the '80s, I relocated to Manchester, following a girlfriend who had gone to University there. Needing work, I applied for and attained a post at a small vegetarian restaurant. I had no real vegetarian convictions, it was a means to an end and it would (quite literally) put food in my mouth while I cast around for my next story idea.
Heading home on a bus, after a long night's waiting on at the restaurant, I passed by a billboard poster for Esso petrol, from which a huge tiger's head gazed majestically down at me. I found myself wondering if it would be possible to write a story where an animal was one of the central characters. Fired with enthusiasm, I set to work that very night.
Rather than choosing India as a setting, I settled on Malaya. After all, I'd spent a couple of years there as a child in the sixties on various RAF bases (though in the novel it's actually an Army base) and that I thought, would provide me with enough atmosphere to convince the readers. I undertook a lot of research on tigers and was struck time and again by the similarities between them and humans and this strand became the essence of Tiger, Tiger. The title is of course, from William Blake's famous poem:
Tiger, Tiger
burning bright
in the forest of the night.
What immortal hand or eye
could frame thy fearful symmetry?
John got a deal fairly quickly. It was published in the UK by Granada, by St Martin's Press in America and got various translation deals. Best of all, it was chosen as a Reader's Digest condensation, earning what was (to me, at least) a considerable advance. Strangely though, the book failed to get a paperback deal anywhere. Even after all these years, it's still The Reader's Digest version that I come across most often, generally in charity shops and at car boot sales.
FACT: Shortly after its release, I was contacted by my publisher's legal department. It seemed that an elderly Lieutenant Colonel was threatening to launch a law suit against me because he felt that I had 'plagiarised' his book on tigers. (It wasn't a novel, but a memoir of his days in Malaysia.) I had indeed read the book and used it for research purposes, together with another fifteen or so reference books about tigers. How, we wondered, could anybody plagiarise a fact? I wrote to the gentleman concerned sending him a list of the books I'd used and the case never progressed any further, though it did give me a few anxious moments.