What is your favourite childhood book?
I was always a reader and read challenging books when I was young – though growing up in a tower block in the days when children’s television was literally an hour a day, what else was there to do in the dark months? First book I chose to read for myself was The Tale of Troy by Roger Lancelyn Green, but I remember reading The Complete Sherlock Holmes and The Iliad before I left primary school. I also read Just William and Jennings and Darbyshire and remember enjoying The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier. I loved history and later, I wrote OUP’s primary textbook on Ancient Greece.
Who are your favourite writers?
This varies so much. My tastes are eclectic. I don’t read one genre. Currently, Mick Herron for spy thrillers. Delia Owens – Where the Crawdads Sing was wonderful. I didn’t expect to enjoy H is for Hawk, but found it fascinating … And Paul O’Grady’s autobiographies are so honest and warm. I am in awe of Michael Morpurgo – his prose is so easy to read and his illumination of the human condition so stunning. Such a difficult question with a different answer every day. One thing lockdown taught me was the need for comfort – When previously, I would have been awash with gritty, political stories, suddenly I wanted Agatha Christie and to listen to the entire seven series of Andy Hamilton’s wonderful comedy Old Harry’s Game on BBC Sounds. I think prior to that, I really underestimated the importance of just writing a good story that gives someone a break from the troubles of the world. I have always loved radio drama. In the days before streaming I would set timers on cassette players to record while I was at work and I would take spoken word albums out of the library and record them. Today streaming and Audible make things so much more accessible. I love having something to listen to when I am doing a boring job – I even amaze my wife by volunteering to hoover now I have noise excluding earbuds.
What have you written to date?
Writing for school was a constant in my life, especially non-fiction, traditional tales and myths and legends, but I also wrote for adults. My short story, Through My Own Fault, has been broadcast on Radio 4, 4Extra and BBC World Service. When I won the Pow-Wow Writers flash fiction competition my work was published in their festival anthology alongside Kit de Waal.
My writing began when, in my mid-twenties I was sent on a course to learn specialist teaching of reading skills. We had to write materials for children. After that I contacted Oxford University Press and was offered writing and editing work on their bestselling reading scheme, The Oxford Reading Tree. Next they asked me to write I a series on world history that was accepted and an advance paid – then the National Curriculum changed but, because they liked my work, I was then asked to write a book on Ancient Greece. I have also written books for Pearson. I returned to writing for my own interest as my teaching careered towards retirement. Only then did I really understand what a network of help was available. My first novel, Missing Targets, is one I am currently revising as I feel the story would have an audience. I was selected as a writer for the West Midlands Readers’ Network and my short story appeared with four other authors including Kerry Hadley-Pryce, who has achieved critical acclaim for three novels published by Salt. I am proud of radio play I have written based on a story told to me by a man who worked in Germany in the early 1960s. He told me about his friend who, at seventeen years of age, was drafted into the last weeks of the war as a Waffen SS radio operator. Abandoned in the forests south of Prague, he tracked the strength and direction of enemy radio signals to guide his platoon away from Russian and partisan forces and certain death, towards the Americans, so they could surrender and survive as prisoners of war. I have had encouraging replies for some BBC radio producers, but budgets are tight. I think I should make another push with this as it is based on a gripping true story.
In late 2023 I finished a Middle-Grade/YA novel, Now you see me (79k words). My beta readers have really liked this and it is a story I have a lot of faith in.
How is a shy Maisie to feel when the too-cool-for-school girls look down on her? Spending half term training with the security services, then averting an international incident proves an effective cure for adolescent angst.
Now You See Me interweaves the day to day trials of early teenage life with a heist story. I am still hoping to place this story as my current publisher, Crescent Swan, doesn’t deal with this age range, also they are digital first and Now you see me is better suited to more traditional publication because of its schools potential and the attractiveness of physical copies as gift sales for younger readers. Currently, I am revising my crime thriller, Missing Targets and re-telling it with 3 distinct points of view – and the new project that I’ve started and am really looking forwards to pushing on with is a murder story set in the Blitz that has political undertones.
What made you decide to sit down and start something?
The very first time I was told I had to – on that teacher’s course I mentioned above. Only then did I realise writing could be for me. This was a real case of the power of praise. The tutor was a very well-to-do lady (in complete contrast to me), but as she read my stories, she looked up and said, ‘These are really rather good.’ That was a real moment for me. I had spent my childhood and adolescence in a flat full of books (and my nan lived on the floor below and her flat was full of books as well). But growing up where I did, and in that time, looking at books and thinking I could write one was like going into the grocery department of a supermarket, looking at the shelves and thinking I could become a farmer.
Where do your ideas come from?
Things people tell me. Often the news – but maybe I use a starting point, and change time, location and so on, until it is unrecognisable. Sometimes, it’s a characteristic – a lead character of one book started with me seeing a friend – a good man who wanted to save the world and became weighed down by the fact that he couldn’t. Sometimes a phrase – The opening line in the short story I had broadcast on Radio 4 began with a phrase that a friend of mine used. One day my wife was recalling her first meeting with my friends and how she felt. The way she described it gave me the idea for Maisie in Now you see me.
Because I am an historian, I am drawn to the collision of human nature with forces of cause and effect. In terms of writing, I find it challenging because you have to create worlds that envelope the reader, but you can’t waste words and slow the story. I enjoy the pace and trying to write in a way that makes the reader forget about the writing and just be absorbed by the story and characters.
Do you work to an outline or plot or do you prefer to see where an idea takes you?
Always plot – usually formally, but even if not formally the shape is always in my head – If better ideas come I go with them, but then the plan has to be adapted. I will have a character development plot and an events in the story plot – this usually involves the back of rolls of wallpaper, that are transferred onto index cards for re-ordering and turning into a chapter plan. Books such as Into the Woods by John Yorke are invaluable. Working to a plan gives a sense of purpose as well as keeping the book structure tight.
I find getting the chronology right can be problematical. I tend to write freely for about 10,000 words and by then I’ve got a direction and a sense of the characters and voice. The problem is, I then begin to have ideas for key scenes, rather than one page following another, so then I have de-construct and re-construct and that slows me down. I think, if you’re a full-time writer this is easier. If I have a period where I am consistently writing several hours a day I stay on top of things and can move things on very quickly, but when you are fitting writing in around life it is hard to hold it all in your head when you’re picking it up and putting it down. Once I’ve got a first draft and the shape is there, I’m okay.
A year or two back I was attending a writing for radio course taught by the brilliant Helen Cross and she ‘Yes, Tim, but you do finish things…’ and I took that as a compliment. As Jimmy McGovern says, ‘The world is full of Gonna Writes,’ – People who say they could, or they want to write a book, but never actually do.
How do you select the names of your characters?
I take a lot of time about this. On the practical side, I make sure they aren’t too difficult to pronounce and that I don’t have characters with similar names. I like to make them sound natural, but with a sense of who they are – so in Days of Long Shadows, he is Jamie Seagrief… I stored this one up from decades ago when I worked with an editor at Oxford University Press who had that surname and, of course, Jamie does see grief. Shona McCulloch, I wanted something that reflected her Scottishness, but also something that captured her no nonsense energy. In a story I wrote for Radio 4 there is an arrogant young priest named Michael Devine. It’s strange how the subconscious works. The radio play I wrote about a platoon of German soldiers in the last days of the war whose lead character is seventeen year old radio operator that guides/shepherds his comrades away from the Russians and almost certain death – I gave him the surname Schaffer without realising it meant Shepherd – I don’t speak German, so no idea where that came from – And the play finished up being called The Lost Shepherd.
What kind of research do you do?
I am meticulous. If I name a setting, it is very likely to exist. Google Earth and Street View are a fantastic tool for a writer… but for example, I am currently writing a murder story set in The Blitz and the area has been rebuilt and the tube lines and stations are different… I will be going back to old maps and photographs and doing my best to be authentic. If I know an area well, research is easier, but if I’m quoting forensics from 1940 I need to know the state of play at the time, so I’ll read, say, Professor Keith Simpson… or Molly Lefebure (his secretary). Actually, when you do this, you learn so much more than forensics, you learn attitudes of the time (often very surprising by modern standards) and the language used – still English, but very different from today.
If you could have been the original author of any book, what would it have been and why?
Mark Twain was so far ahead of his time and, like Michael Morpurgo, had the gift of dealing with big issues in elegantly simple language – so my answer is Huckleberry Finn.
Why? Because it is a story that makes you think you’re just being entertained, but inside Huck’s head we’re seeing the injustices and frauds of the world around him. The genius is when you see Huck struggling to square what he sees with how he has been told he is supposed to act… Jim, the escaped slave, is the shining Pole Star of honesty, loyalty and kindness in the book and here is Huck travelling in a world full of liars, fraudsters and criminals and he has to wrestle with the fact that he is told that betraying Jim and becoming party to false morality is fine for the sole reason that Jim is a black slave. And it’s all told in the language of the boy, that brings us an all-consuming immediacy – like when we experience To Kill a Mocking Bird in the words of Scout, or the way we see the Handsworth riots and the longing for a little brother who has been taken away just because his skin colour is different in My Name is Leon.
What are you promoting at the moment?
My debut crime thriller – Days of Long Shadows