Brian McGilloway has his début novel Borderlands published by Macmillan New Writing on April 6th. The novel is the start of a series, set on the Tyrone – Donegal border, between the North and South of Ireland and introduces Garda Inspector Benedict Devlin. Gallows Lane will follow and Pan Macmillan have recently committed to a further three novels. Borderlands is the result of Brian's own passion for reading crime fiction. Like many, he has his favourite authors, characters and series. He perceived some as coming to the end of their lives and, knowing that he would miss them, decided to write a story he would like to read, a series he would like to read with a character he could admire and understand. Luckily for us, Devlin's stories won't be for Brian's pleasure alone, thanks to MNW.
With any début author, it's always a pleasure to find out more about the author, the novel(s) and what lies behind the passion for writing. Brian, an English teacher, who, with this level of publishing success can surely now add "writer" to his passport, proved to be very generous and open about his work and background.
The first question I asked Brian was the obvious one - what led him to crime fiction? Following his English degree, he was able to read for his own pleasure and his first reads were Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone and David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars. With exam pressure now well behind him, he found he loved both and by sheer coincidence a certain specialist bookshop opened as he was looking for something else to read. "A great crime bookshop called No Alibis opened in Belfast in 1997. I went in browsing one day and came out with a compendium of the first three Colin Dexter novels and a copy of Ian Rankin’s Black and Blue. From then, I read all the Morse and Rebus novels before widening my reading further. Since then, crime fiction has been the main element of my reading. Until I started writing it, strangely..."
Brian admits to writing for years before he was published. He started out with what he describes as "angsty adolescent doggerel", moving on to "a few plays and a hugely clichéd novella about Protestants and Catholics falling in love". Like other writers, writing is a compulsion to him and he feels the move to crime fiction was inevitable, as he fell in love with the genre as a reader.
Borderlands was conceived at this poignant moment for Brian: "I was reading Last Car to Elysian Fields and reached the section where Robicheaux is jogging in the park and thinks he’s taking a heart attack. It seemed like the end of the series. Morse was dead, Rebus nearing retirement. It was a bit like losing an old friend (though Robicheaux survived to live another day obviously."
Both Dexter's Morse and Rankin's Rebus have had a strong impact on Brian's writing. He heard Colin Dexter speak at one point and remembered that he said "that in every chapter he had Morse go somewhere to look for something, and this kept the books moving", so he followed that template when writing his Devlin novels. As for Rankin, Brian sees "each Ian Rankin novel is a master class in crime writing". Coming back to Robicheaux, he says "I think James Lee Burke is just stunning". His favourite characters include Morse, Bosch, Elvis Cole, Charlie Parker, Charlie Resnick, which he describes as “all great characters and guaranteed great reads”. And Brian “will stop any book to read a new Rebus or Robicheaux".
Brian wrote Borderlands in 2003, redrafting his manuscript several times. He sent it to a few publishers who sent it back by return of post and found one or two who were quite interested, though not enough to publish it. But eventually, he sent it "to MNW and another publisher on the same day. The latter lost the manuscript twice. MNW came back to me in March of last year and that was that."
Of MNW, Brian has only the finest things to say, "I feel very lucky with how things have turned out. Working with MNW has allowed me to develop my writing with the support of a superb editor, Will Atkins, who clearly understands the character of Devlin and the tone of the series. In addition, it introduced me to a number of people who have worked very hard on my behalf, including Sophie Portas and Catriona Row. The imprint brought Borderlands to the attention of Dave and Daniel in Goldsboro Books who have been tireless champions for Inspector Devlin, spreading the word both at home and abroad. In addition, writing at all requires the patience and support of your family - and I'm very lucky that my wife, Tanya is extremely supportive of my taking hours out to write. So while there have been no hurdles as such, I have realised that whilst the physical writing is a solitary exercise, the end product is very much a team effort."
Successful authors are vaulted into the public domain with much expected of them these days. They need to connect with readers and lose a part of their privacy in pursuing that, especially début authors. Readers also have high expectations when it comes to the net and author interaction. I wondered if Brian was ready for this. "The idea of the book being in the public domain is a daunting one, certainly, but it would be worse if nobody read it. In terms of reader expectations – I wrote Borderlands as a book I would want to read as a crime fan. Gallows Lane was done in the same way, though I believe I built on the strengths of the first whilst so doing. I can only write the best book I can at any moment. I have a number of friends and colleagues who are both avid crime readers and good enough to be honest. I tend to ask them to read the finished first draft of each book. So far, I believe it has worked all right."
As for the considered autobiographical element in a first novel, and with both Devlin and Brian as happily married fathers of young children, Brian has this to say: "There are elements of me in Devlin, of course, though he is not me by any stretch. The idea of Devlin having a young family was two fold. I tried to make him a man, doing his best to live up to each of his roles, as Guard, father, husband, human being. At times, one must take precedence over the others, as in real life. His struggle in some ways is to balance his life with his work – his need to protect his family with his need to protect his community. It is perhaps not unconnected that I wrote the book following the birth of my first son. When you have a baby, your natural instinct as a father is to make the world as safe as possible for your child. Crime fiction allows us to make the world safe, in a way. Certainly it creates a sense of control that we perhaps don’t have in real life, where the bad guys lose and good conquers all. I suspect on some level the book was an attempt to make the world safer for my son. There is also perhaps some reciprocity in that my detective gets his name from my eldest son, Benedict".
And when it comes to Devlin, Brian also wanted to "get away from the loner, drinking, divorced cop haunted by the past" where he "quite liked the idea of a man who is happy with his family, loves his wife and lies at night watching a DVD with his kids. I know policemen probably have family issues, but I'm sure there are some that manage to balance things".
In Devlin we also have a man who is only too human and thus not perfect. His patience is put to the test in more than one scene and he reacts perhaps unexpectedly, by lashing out at someone. Brian explains "Over here, North and South, the police are accused of colluding with terrorists in murders, or planting and falsifying evidence, so a man losing his temper in the heat of the moment and kicking someone didn’t seem unrealistic. In addition, I think it makes Devlin more real. He is frustrated and whilst he strives to be a good man, he does at times fail."
Devlin is also part of a team and not the only strong character within it. This has Brian thinking about the development of the series. "Book Two develops Devlin, Caroline Williams and Jim Hendry, some in unexpected ways. Certainly any one of them could feasibly hold a novel on their own. At some point I plan to write a Hendry novel and Caroline Williams is developing in her own way. However, Gallows Lane is very much a Devlin book as is the third book which I'm writing at the moment, provisionally called Bleed a River Deep. I suspect that the next couple of books will be Devlin books, though not at all necessarily set in Lifford.
There is a strong feeling of "small town" environment in Borderlands, where there are many secrets and many who know about them. Brian says: "I’m from Derry originally, which is a city where everyone knows each other, despite a population of well over 100,000. I initially set Devlin in Derry but found strangely I knew the place too well, and that the canvas was too big. I moved to Strabane when I married and choose Lifford across the border, because I didn’t know it that well and could freely apply my imaginary world over elements of the real world."
Given the setting of the novel, it would be hard to avoid mentioning the Troubles, but Borderlands does not dwell on them, merely referring to them for one key element in moving the plot forward. Brian's thoughts on this are that he deliberately set out to write a Northern Irish crime novel that didn't involve the Troubles, simply because he was fed up of reading about them. "However, as the book progressed, I was aware that it was there in the background. Peace is too recent in Ireland for the Troubles to be forgotten completely. In a book about the past affecting the present, it would seem unnatural to ignore them totally, but at the same time, I didn't want to give them too much significance. I'm happy with the way they appear in the book - lacking substance but still there."
As an English teacher and in an age where some see the standards of written English falling I wondered what Brian considered important when teaching. "The most important thing for me is that my pupils learn an appreciation of words and language. – that they understand the power of words and think carefully about how they are used and how to use them. In terms of books, I hope to help students connect with something in a book which makes them think, or which helped them express that which they felt was inexpressible. The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton is one such book – one that even non-readers seem to love and understand. I was incredibly lucky to be taught by a teacher called Paul Wilkins, a man with a clear love and passion for literature. It was infectious. I would like to think that in any class, I might have the same effect on even one student in a year."
And what do his pupils think of his emergence as a novelist? Well, some of his classes do know about his novel, although he hasn't told the younger classes. "Not sure Borderlands is really the type of book they should read. My Form Class want me to include the phrase 'Right Folks' in a book, because this is how I start my class apparently! My A-level class also deserve special mention, who are very good humoured and supportive of the book."
Finally, I asked Brian if there was any message he wished to convey in his novels? "No real message - except to make them entertaining. I hope the novels have a sense of morality. Each book has its own theme. Gallows Lane, for example, is about forgiveness. In a way the books allow me to investigate my own concerns and ideas and to have it published. That is a real privilege."
That sense of morality is certainly strong in Borderlands and I considered it to be a privilege to read it, enjoyably entertained at the same time.
Recent Comments