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Finding the killer hook

21.11.08 Alice O'Keeffe

Linwood Barclay Too Close to Home (Orion, January, hb, £14.99, 9780752888620)

At its peak Linwood Barclay's No Time for Goodbye was selling an astonishing 42,000 copies a week, the highest weekly sales of any "Richard & Judy" pick. It spent eight weeks at the number one spot, and, at the time of writing, is spending its 20th week in the official UK Top 50. Barclay was told that Orion was submitting No Time for Goodbye but he didn't give it another thought until Susan Lamb at Orion called to say it had been chosen for the R&J Summer Read. On hearing the news, surely one of the biggest fillips to an author's career, he remained cautious: "I thought, OK, mine will be the first ‘Richard & Judy' book to tank . . . it'll go right down the dumper immediately."
Yet the book was not just phenomenally successful, it was voted the top read for the series, which Barclay did not even consider beforehand: "People said: ‘Just because it's doing well doesn't mean it's going to be picked as the winner because it's very commercial, they'll pick something that's weightier.'" He laughs: "I'm always pessimistic. I always expect the worst. Even when things go well I think there's still time to fail."

‘I just want it to be as good'
Given that it's predecessor was such a hit, I wonder if he feels the pressure for his second book Too Close to Home (hb, January) to achieve the same success? "Not to be as successful" he corrects me gently: "I just want it to be as good. Success? Who knows what will happen?"

What both books do share is a killer hook—No Time for Goodbye turned a standard abduction case on its head with a teenage girl waking up at home one morning to find her family have disappeared without trace. It's a very filmic thriller and rights have already been optioned by the actor and producer Eric McCormack (Will of "Will and Grace" fame). Too Close to Home features a family, the Cutters, who discover their next-door neighbours in the quiet American town of Promise Falls have been murdered, and subsequently find out that the killers went to the wrong house. The story unfolds to reveal that the good people of Promise Falls harbour a number of secrets, and suspicion falls on more than one local resident. Both books are tightly plotted with sharp twists and turns but Barclay observes: "Plotting is something I wish came more easily . . . I can never plot an entire book out before I start writing because often a lot of things really don't occur to me until I'm into the book. I know where I'm going . . . I know where I want to end up."

Barclay writes extremely quickly, perhaps as a legacy from his days as a journalist, the first draft of Too Close to Home was completed in just two months. He was a prodigious writer from an early age: aged 10 he was writing 30-page stories based on TV shows he liked. Impatient with the time it took to write out longhand he persuaded his father to teach him to type on "a Royale typewriter that weighed as much as a Volkswagen".

First job
His first newspaper job was as a reporter on the Peterborough Examiner, a small Ontario daily, covering lots of "calf stories". He'd already written a couple of mystery novels by then which he sent to publishers but with no success: "It dawned on me I probably couldn't survive as a novelist," he observes wryly. He settled on journalism as a way of being paid to write every day, moving up the editorial ranks at the Toronto Star before becoming a full-time humour columnist—"People would say to my wife: ‘So your husband writes three columns a week for the Star . . . what's he do for the rest of time? That's not really a job is it?'" he laughs—only retiring from journalism officially in July this year. He acknowledges the workload became exhausting: "I guess I've written seven novels in the past five-and-half-years and was still doing three columns a week [for the Toronto Star] for most of that . . . and you're going to the same well for everything."

Barclay's first four novels, published in North America, are a series featuring Zack Walker which Barclay describes as: "different in tone to No Time for Goodbye and Too Close to Home—Zack Walker is this somewhat obsessive-compulsive, well-intentioned, pain-in-the-ass, anal-retentive, know-it-all kind of guy but ultimately, I hope, endearing. I took all of my anxieties, and things I worry about and funnelled them all into this character and he's kind of me unchecked—they're funnier books—but there's a change in tone. I think the books get darker as they go on." Orion is planning to bring out the series in the UK at some point, most likely as paperback originals, but publication dates have not been confirmed.

But for those desperate for their next fix, the good news is that his third standalone thriller is under way. It "starts at a gallop and stays that way. I think it moves even faster [than the earlier books]". I ask him to elaborate and, true to form, it is all about the hook: "It's a story about a father whose 17-year-old daughter is living with him for the summer, she's going to a summer job and she's been going for a couple of weeks. One night she doesn't come home and he goes to the place where he believes she's been working and they say ‘We don't know who you're talking about, we've never seen this person . . .'" he pauses, "and that's our 
opening."

 

 

Authors Todays Picks In Depth Profile Orion Alice O'Keeffe Linwood Barclay

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