Interview with Tony Black - Paying for It

We caught up with debut crime novelist - and BooksfromScotland.com contributor - Tony Black to discuss his first novel Paying for It.

As the blurb says, Gus Dury has lost everything – his career, his wife. What drew you to writing such a washed-up character? He seems a long way away from the real Tony Black.

He is pretty far removed from me, I’m boringly stable and happily married … but those traits would make for terrible fiction!

The characters I like reading about are the ones that have some flaws, some emotional baggage, the damaged individuals. I’m thinking about Jim Thompson’s characters and more recently Ken Bruen’s.

With Gus Dury I wanted to explore the psychology of a man who has suffered in life and what makes him carry on. With all Gus has been through, it’s a true triumph of the human spirit that he can still get out of bed in the morning.

Crime writers like yourself, Allan Guthrie – all really nice guys, with angry, violent imaginations. What gives?

Al is a nice guy, isn’t he! In fact, I can confirm pretty much every crime writer I’ve ever met is very nice. They say crime writers get all their angst and anger against the world down on the page and so can afford to be much more relaxed in real life. It’s an interesting theory... they also say Romance writers are the exact opposite, but I couldn’t possibly comment. They say a lot don’t they …

As a journalist, you must uncover plenty of crimes and misdemeanours that could make it into your books. Do you find inspiration in these, or do you try to keep the fiction and the fact separate?

Huge inspiration. A lot of the incidents in Paying for It came my way through the day job... the point where Gus head-buts the Government Minister is a prime example. I was in a similar situation and would have loved to have nutted the shiny-arse in question but, of course, I had to smile nicely and go home and give Gus the honour.

Sometimes it’s harder to separate the fact and fiction though … I was a nightclub reviewer for the Daily Record for a time and I met a heap of shady gangland types then. There were some vague threats after a few bad reviews and I’m probably lucky to still have my kneecaps.

Then there was the police corruption stories, don’t think I’ll go there, though.

How long have you been writing fiction? Can you tell us a little about how you came to write Paying for It, and how it got published?

I’ve been writing with a serious view to publication for the best part of ten years. I first wrote a novel called The Gob, that would probably be classed as Lad Lit, when I was in my mid-twenties and it got taken on by a London agent; the book attracted a lot of praise from some big names in the industry but Lad Lit was on the way out and it just didn’t sell.

I then went on to write another three novels after The Gob - all quite different, for example one was a literary-historical account of the demise of the Tasmanian Tiger, called The Last Tiger. Anyway, by this time I had an agent in London and one in the USA but the market is very tough and after pitching to the top half-dozen publishing houses I kept hearing, ‘write another one’.

I could have still been plugging away until Paying for It broke the deadlock. Rosie de Courcy at Preface - a Random House imprint - was, I think, the second or third editor to read it and offered right away. She’s a tremendously gifted editor and I couldn’t be happier that she’s looking after me. I’m very lucky.

In Paying for It, Gus moves across Edinburgh and finds crime, corruption, gangs and tartan tat for tourists pretty much everywhere he goes. How much of this view is Gus’s, and how much of it is yours?

It’s probably safe to say that some of Gus’s views on Edinburgh are similar to mine - we both hate the sight of old buildings being torn down and replaced with cheapo flats, for example. But Gus is a bit more rabid with his opinions than I am - he’s a fictional character and so he can get away with it. I’d love to be able to deal with the old-school tie mob the way he does but, like everyone else, I just cringe inwardly and leave them to their Pimms.

The language of Paying for It is instantly recognisable for fans of Irvine Welsh, complete with Scots rhyming slang. Yet you are originally from Australia and lived for a time in Ireland. How do you keep the voices of Gus and the other characters authentic?

Well, I was born in Australia and did some growing up in Ireland but by far the greatest share of my life has been spent in Scotland - and I’m a Scot - so I’d be worried if I didn’t get the patter right.

I’m a huge Irvine Welsh fan and I love books that are written in Scots demotic, one of my all-time favourites is George Douglas Brown’s The House with the Green Shutters. The Scottish flavour is really very important to me as a writer, I don’t like to see books purporting to be Scottish yet hiding their nationality behind banal Anglicised language. We have a rich vocabulary in this country, our writers should celebrate it.

Do you think we will ever see a redemption for Gus? His relationship with Deborah is at breaking point, but hasn’t quite snapped yet, for instance.

I think the point at which Gus finds any kind of stability will be the end of the series. My agent has a great phrase for some of the clearly autobiographical novels she rejects - ‘my boring life spread over a lot of pages’!

You can’t have a fictional character like Gus getting too settled, it would disappoint the reader. Somebody once said it’s not enough to chase your character up a tree - you have to throw rocks at them too.

Gus and Debs’ relationship is a good case in point - the will they/won’t they aspect is something I don’t know the answer too. Maybe they’ll get back together in the next one... but that might be a disaster too.

You’ve been working on the next novel, Gutted, for a while. Any chance of a happy ending, some fluffy bunnies for instance?

Hah! Not much. Unless the happy ending gives Gus a heart attack...

He does get a rescue dog in Gutted, not a bunny though, is that close enough?

Your work on Pulp Pusher, and the writing you have done for BooksfromScotland.com in the past, clearly show that you read a lot. Which crime writers have inspired you?

Well, I’m sure he won’t like being called a crime writer but Irvine Welsh does incorporate a huge amount of crime into his novels and he is a massive influence on me. Of his work, I read The Acid House first and was amazed what he had been able to get away with. It was eye-opening. Marabou Stork Nightmares is one of my all-time favourite books - I re-read it every year and I still can’t get my head around how brilliant it is.

More specifically in the crime genre is Ireland’s reigning genius of the form, Ken Bruen. It is physically impossible for the man to write a bad sentence never mind a bad book. He is an immense talent and I would say the world’s greatest living crime writer. His Jack Taylor series can’t be recommended highly enough; I think what Bruen has done with that crime series in recent years has assured him an audience for decades to come.

And what about Scottish writers – Scotland has a burgeoning crime scene, but are there other writers outside the genre that you admire?

I read lots of different kinds of stuff. I really admire Alan Warner’s work and Duncan McLean is another one, though he hasn’t been doing so much of late. It would be a very long list if I started to trot out everyone from Scotland’s wealth of talent that I admire - I feel honoured to have my small place on the bookshelves among them.