Novelist Cathi Unsworth describes how she feels the crime novel genre offers a distinct viewpoint on society
Cathi Unsworth © Allison McGourty
Cathi Unsworth is a novelist, writer and editor who began her career as a music journalist on the legendary weekly magazine Sounds and has since written for many other music, film and arts magazines since, including Bizarre, Melody Maker, Mojo, Uncut, Volume and Deadline. Her first novel The Not Knowing was published by Serpent’s Tail in 2005, followed the next year by short story compendium London Noir: Capital Crime Fiction, and in 2007 by the punk noir novel The Singer. Her latest novel Bad Penny Blues will be out on December 3rd 2009. Here she explains how a passion for music led to a fascination with noir crime fiction.
What inspired you to become a writer?
I always wanted to be a writer, ever since I was a little girl, living in the middle of a field in Norfolk, creating the worlds I would rather be living in for my own entertainment. I became a music journalist at 19, and that was so much fun I didn’t have much ambition beyond it, until I met the crime writer Derek Raymond when I was 25. His book I Was Dora Suarez showed me what a crime novel could be, and shortly after I also discovered James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia.
Those two novels, I think, were the books that changed everything, not just for me but for a whole generation of UK and Irish crime writers, who had grown up at the time of punk/new wave and found in those novels the kicks they could no longer find in popular music.
But it took me another ten years after that inspirational meeting until I published my first book. During that time, I devoured as many noir novels as I could, hoping that the genius of the authors would somehow rub off on me.
I was fortunate enough for a few years to edit a books page on Bizarre magazine, which helped enormously in my quest to meet all the greatest living practitioners of the art. And one of them, Ken Bruen, encouraged - no, in fact, he ordered me! - to write my first book. I was again very lucky that he did, as I was shortly made redundant from that job and had nothing else of worth to do for the next couple of years. So all that went into The Not Knowing, my first novel.
Did you find an agent or a publisher first? How did you find them?
Again, this came with the Bizarre books page. I interviewed Martyn Waites, whom I very much saw as an heir to Derek Raymond, and we got along really well. When I first started writing The Not Knowing
All those years of being made to condense words as a journalist had left me writing with extreme brevity - a problem that, seven years down the line, has now very much been cured. So much so that my last two books are twice the length of the first!
Did you face much rejection initially?
Caroline spent two years trying to get a big publisher interested in The Not Knowing
In a magic moment, I was at the launch party for David Peace’s GB84 when John came through the door and asked me to if he could see my manuscript. It was one of the best moments of my life.
John read the manuscript and took out all the stuff that other publishing houses had told me to put in, leaving it more or less as it had initially been. So there was a meeting of minds for you.
The best thing about John is that you don’t have to explain the pop culture references to him; he has been there and lived that! He is also a genius at knowing how to get the best out of you by very subtle means. Along with Caroline, I really owe him and ST head Pete Ayrton so much - they have had so much faith in me.
What is it about the crime novel genre that appeals to you?
It is the best way of examining the society that we live in, and how we can never seem to get to grips with the eternal, infernal questions - Why are we here? Why can’t we ever live in peace, no matter how much easier we seem to have it than the previous generation? The most serious things that bug me in British society are the hatred towards women and children; the fact that every week at least two women will die at the hands of their partners, while we have the most mentally sick, unhappy children and teenagers in Western Europe.
Where does all that hatred come from? How much does it have to do with the social conditions and how much to do with the national psyche? Or the influence of the psychopaths that walk amongst us - not necessarily killers, either - a social psychopath can have just as devastating a long term effect, see the legacy of Milton Friedman, pointed out by Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. Look where all of that has got us.
When our rulers, our Establishment, have nothing but contempt and hatred for people and can’t even bother to disguise it any more, what is the ‘trickle down’ effect of that going to be? Noir fiction provides the opportunity to reflect on all that through the dissection of a crime and its impact, the ripples of which never stop being felt.
It is also, like punk rock, a way to make the personal the political. Thanks to my publisher, I have never had to compromise anything I put in a novel, so I am not writing to a formula, but allowed to experiment and push myself further with each one.
What inspired you to write Bad Penny Blues?
I read Jack of Jumps by the late David Seabrook, a true crime account of the unsolved Jack The Stripper murders of prostitutes that happened in West London between 1959-65. Like his Whitechapel forefather, this Jack created the biggest manhunt in Metropolitan police history, yet was never apprehended. His reign ended suddenly in 1965, without explanation, and since then, his crimes seem to have faded from public memory.
Most of the girls lived and worked in Ladbroke Grove, where I have lived for the past 22 years, so I felt a connection to them. The book haunted me and profoundly disturbed me. I couldn’t stop thinking about those women.
Shortly after that, I was reading something by local psychogeographer Tom Vague in the catalogue for the Portobello Film Festival, that made the connection that demanded the book be written. In 1959, legendary producer Joe Meek was a resident of Arundel Gardens, W11 - where I also lived for many years and used as the setting for my first novel. Here, Joe was dabbling in the possibilities of both sound and Spiritualism, producing bands at Lansdowne Studios by day and holding séances or piecing together his sonic masterwork I Hear A New World by night.
It was in Arundel Gardens that Joe and his friends conducted the séance that foretold the date of Buddy Holly’s death, which would also prove to be that of Joe’s own demise. But it was from just outside Lansdowne Studios, on the corner connecting that road and Holland Park Avenue in the minutes after 1.10am on 17 June 1959, where the first victim of Jack the Stripper, Elizabeth Figg, was taken from this world into the next. What I couldn’t stop thinking was: could Joe have possibly been at work up at Lansdowne while it happened, using radios to create strange signals and open up new channels? Was he unwittingly letting the darkness in?
The third coincidence, which seemed to suggest that I was on the right track, again came from Tom Vague, in his Getting It Straight In Notting Hill Gate. The headquarters of the Christian Spiritualist Greater World Assembly, run by the trance medium Winifred Moyes, was just across the road from Lansdowne Studios.
So I set out, not to try and definitively solve the mystery of this Jack, because I fear that would actually prove impossible, but to create a parallel universe in which a solution to the crime could be offered that was more satisfying to me than the true crime accounts, which blame either low-ranking policemen or, in one case, the boxer-turned entertainer Freddie Mills, who himself came to a very strange, violent end.
Ladbroke Grove at that time was fertile with possibility - an island apart from the rest of London. So I took everything I could find from this era, every strange coincidence and urban myth, and wove it all into my fiction. All the names are changed, because this is a world five minutes away from reality, but nonetheless I would hope that it does contain a lot of truth, all the details of the girl’s murders, incidences from Joe Meek’s life, and very many other things in there are accurate. The whole thing was, to use the parlance of the Sixties, one long, strange, trip.
How did you know where to draw the line between fact and fiction?
In the spaces where no accurate accounts are possible, the imagination must take over. I tried to make all my leaps into the unknown as plausible as possible, but there is stuff in there that even I don’t know where it came from.
Exploring Spiritualism, which I do in the book, was the only way I could think of to give each of the girls a voice from beyond the grave. And those moments where they speak are the most important parts of the book for me.
The radio is probably the central object of intrigue. Joe Meek was expert in taking them apart and retuning them, using them to make his experiments in sound. The wireless was invented by the famous Spiritualist, Sir Oliver Lodge, in an attempt to tune into the ‘aether’, the frequencies on which the Spiritualists believed all of us operate on. And sufferers of paranoid schizophrenia, like Joe Meek, often believe they are being controlled or sent messages by radio.
What research methods did you use?
I met a policeman who had worked in Ladbroke Grove during the 1950s who was very helpful. It was strange, just before I met him I had worked on a scene where Oswald Mosley was doing a rally from a flat-back truck on Lancaster Road, and he had actually witnessed the entire thing. He gave me lots of little details that were very helpful, including the fact that detectives and bobbies did not go around with handcuffs in those days, as there were only a few assigned to each station, something that seems quite incredible now. But they did get a lot more help from the public in apprehending villains.
But other than his help, everything came from newspapers, books, film, fiction and music of the era. In fact, the first thing I did was to look up what songs were number one in the charts on the days each of the girls’ bodies were found, which gave me a very spooky soundtrack to begin with. What you think of as quite innocent pop songs take on a whole new meaning in the context of Jack’s crimes - ‘The Night Has a Thousand Eyes’, ‘She’s Not There’, ‘Learning the Game’, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’…
I took a tip from David Peace about ‘method writing’. Once you have steeped yourself in an era for long enough, he reckons, you suddenly feel that you are in it. This happened to me while watching The Blue Lamp, when a car chase comes round the corner of Royal Oak and into Westbourne Park Road, and an aerial shot swoops up to reveal the landscape - without the Westway flyover. The Westway is something that begins to take form during the course of the novel, and I have always found it a sinister presence.
The best thing about the research was watching so many brilliant films. I became particularly fond of Bryan Forbes, his Séance on a Wet Afternoon and The L-Shaped Room really helped me get a sense of time and place.
What are the biggest challenges of writing?
Finding the time to do it. I work four days a week and cramming in the amount of research and the complications of the plot was really, really tough. I didn’t really have a social life for the two years I wrote it. I still find it weird sometimes to look out of the window and see things are in colour, that it isn’t the early Sixties out there in Brain Forbes monochrome. I’m really glad that the book ended in 1965, I think the decade got a whole lot less interesting after that.
What do you enjoy most about it?
The moments of magic when things come together and fly out of your fingers without your brain really having to engage. When I realised what the conclusion to this book was going to be, literally as I wrote it, was an unbelievable high.
Whose writing do you admire?
I’ve already mentioned a lot of them, but also, majorly, Nelson Algren, Harry Crews, David Peace, Lydia Lunch, James Sallis, George Pelecanos, Patrick Hamilton, James Curtis, Joolz Denby, Jim Thompson, Stewart Home, Elizabeth Wilson. About a million more that I will be kicking myself that I didn’t mention!
Where do you carry out the majority of your writing?
In my front room, staring out into Ladbroke Grove, in my head, walking around Ladbroke Grove, and in my dreams where solutions suddenly magically appear. When I’m not having horrendous nightmares, that is.
What has been the highlight of your career so far?
Managing to finish writing this book!
What advice would you offer an aspiring writer?
You must believe in yourself and your work above everything else, and be prepared for a lot of hard work, but the rewards do make it worthwhile - when you have that first baby in your arms it is an incredible feeling. And when other people really like what you have done, when it connects with them in the way that you’d hoped, that is a wonderful, magical thing.
I really think all artists, musicians, writers, film-makers, whatever sphere of the arts you are talking about, are creating a kind of magic carpet that stretches on into infinity, cross-stitching each others’ work and picking up threads from each other so that it can go on forever. Take your inspiration from the artists you love most and use that as your shield and comfort!
What are you working on now?
I am fascinated and horrified by the phenomena of kids killing other kids, so I want to explore this, and have started writing a book set during my own teenage years, back in the Norfolk town where I grew up. I have no idea what it feels like to be 16 in 2009, but remember vividly what it was like in 1984, which was such a monumentally awful year anyway that it provides a fertile setting for revolt and revulsion.
I want to explore the notion of identity and belonging, of clans and cults, the things that unite people and the things that divide us. Using Norfolk as the backdrop also allows plenty of superstition to intercede. If Bad Penny Blues was a kind of ghost story, this will be a kind of horror story. I blame The League of Gentlemen and Psychoville…
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