So I returned to the problem of writing a novel in Britain – but if it was serious crime, where were the cops? The answer was obvious and was staring me in the face. Again though, this wasn't something I wanted to write. This allows the reader to support the cop breaking any law whatsoever 'to get the job done' because that is the lesser of two evils. (For more on the sub-genres of the crime novels see my Murder, Mavericks and Marxism).
#Phillip brett walker serial#
One final possibility was that in many novels (and indeed TV series) nowadays, the murders are brutal, serial and usually involve torture (often of women). Now I love both – yes, I know James was a Tory peer, but such are the contradictions of capitalism – but again, I couldn't see myself being able to write like that. James made her Inspector Dalgliesh a poet, and Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse is someone who as the great writer, journalist and activist Paul Foot said, was the type of liberal, cultured and fair police officer that everyone wants – but never encounters in the real world. So why not make sure that the reader sees the cop as being very different from the police force? P.D. There was the option of writing a novel where the cop is the bad guy, maybe like Irvine Welsh's Filth – but then I'm a romantic, I like a hero.
#Phillip brett walker full#
Making them good guys takes a very good writer, a whole lot of empathy and a cargo ship full of suspension of disbelief. The experience and memories of policing for many people has been one of kettling, Orgreave, or miscarriages of justice in such cases as the Tottenham Three. So should I write a police procedural? Here was another problem though – for someone who considers himself a socialist, could I write a novel with a good guy from the Metropolitan Police? Hmmmm……. Not my cup of tea – let alone a bourbon on the rocks. My imagination of such a novel set here merely extended to some seedy bloke investigating divorce cases. The trouble was that whilst Archer or Chandler's Philip Marlowe or Hammett's Sam Spade are believable in the whisky bars of hard-boiled America, I didn't think I could envisage the same in Britain. It was reading a number of the Lew Archer novels by Ross Macdonald which inspired me to write my own crime novel.
It’s a crime novel, set in a future revolutionary Britain, and here he explains how he got the idea. Phil Brett has just published Gone Underground, the second of his Pete Kalder novels.