Crime Scene has been lucky enough to bag an interview with the author of the stupendous Kiss Her Goodbye, Mister Allan Guthrie. Originally from Orkney, Guthrie now lives in Edinburgh and is the author not only of Kiss Her Goodbye but the superb, Debut Dagger nominated, Two Way Split. Guthrie was put under the spotlight by Crime Scene on a variety of subjects including his own work, his thoughts on the history of noir and other various subjects. Before we start, we’d like to thank him for kicking off the interview in a lively fashion. The first thing we heard on playing back the interview was a very loud, “Bollocks!” which I guess was an attempt at scene setting by Guthrie. After trying to shy away from the outburst by claiming that Ray Banks wouldn’t have shut up with the swearing if we’d dared interview him, and also commenting on Jerry Springer the Opera, we managed to persuade Guthrie to talk about his own work… although he claimed he couldn’t be introspective about it… We’ll see…

After realising he could pass on questions just by saying “fuck off” and treating it like Mastermind (Has anyone ever said such a thing to Mr Magnusson, I wonder?) Guthrie finally settled down to answer a few questions…

Crime Scene: Kiss Her Goodbye employs some of the peripheral characters from Two Way Split… Cooper’s the one I’m thinking of…Are you trying to create a kind of realised world – well, a realised Edinburgh – kind of like George Pelecanos’ DC…?

Allan Guthrie: Possibly… I wouldn’t necessarily want to compare myself to Pelecanos… bit heady. Balzac did this a long time ago… he took various characters that appeared in different books as cameo characters and gave them their own books. And I quite like that idea. Essentially because the concept of a single-protagonist series is a difficult one if you’re writing noir because an essential part of noir is to do with the mortality of the protagonist. And if you have a series, then the protagonist is by definition immortal. So that’s part of the reason why I want to kind try a slightly different approach. Apart from anything else, I suppose, I have to say that having spent some time creating characters, you want to spend more time with them… explore them further. And giving them their own books is a good way to do just that.

And now I’m gonna completely contradict myself. Because the book I’m currently writing, Hard Man, is intended as the first in a series featuring Pearce [From Two Way Split]… But whether or not its noir is debatable.

CS: But if it’s a good story, then that’s definitely, in the end, all that counts.

AG: Yeah… definitely. It’s hardboiled but I don’t know that it’s necessarily noir because you know that he’s going to survive… but maybe he won’t! Maybe I could do a series and you won’t know that he’s going to survive… if I’m clever about it...

CS: Just make it up as you go along?

AG: Yes, that’s generally my policy!

CS: Which brings us back – talking about characters like Pearce – to how well you get to know your characters before you start writing… or do you just – which I’m going to assume you probably do – get to know them as you go along?

AG: Yes, I get to know them as I’m writing about them. Same with the plot, really. I mean, sometimes I’ll have a really basic idea of what it is I’m going to work on; a couple of scenes or something. But essentially I just start writing and hopefully I’ve got the hang of what’s going on by the time I’ve written about ten thousand words… and I’ll have a handle on most of the characters.

But sometimes I’ll switch to a different point of view character, like in Kiss Her Goodbye, where I did that partially to find out more about Tina. And I found out all sorts of stuff about her by doing that…

CS: I must admit Tina was one of my favourite characters in Kiss Her Goodbye… for a prostitute she was quite endearing… in a cold, hard way.

AG: I certainly think that she’s a very strong woman… Two-Way Split has Carol … But Tina comes across a lot better.

CS: The one thing I noticed between Kiss Her Goodbye and Two Way Split was – I love Two Way Split as I’ve said a lot – but Kiss Her Goodbye felt a lot more mature.

AG: It’s a more serious book. To be honest, Two Way Split was written a lot more tongue in cheek. And it’s also got this moving from being very grittily realistic to being quite surrealistic at times, you know? From the moment Don makes his appearance, that’s where it gets surrealistic, because at the same time things start going funny with Robin and he starts seeing leeches and he starts plucking swallows out the air that he thinks are his thoughts… stuff like that. But as I say it was written quite tongue in cheek in a way, whereas Kiss Her Goodbye I did want to make more serious and there are no surrealistic elements in that. It wouldn’t be right.

CS: It’s a strong book. As I say, Two Way Split, a brilliant debut and then you sort of build on it…

AG: Thank you.

CS: That’s just my opinion…

AG: Yes, and I won’t forget it!

CS: I’m just a suck up, really. Wait till you see what’s on the site… “Two Way Split was a load of shite…”

AG: ...Kiss Her Goodbye had to be better by definition!

CS: Moving away from your own work, there seems to be a growing trend for British authors who are moving away from traditional elements of Brit Crime which is very welcome and something I’m really just discovering… a move away from cosies, police procedurals, the serial killer psychopath of the month…

AG: Yes, someone called the serial killer the new vampire.

CS: God help us if Anne Rice starts! But what would you say are the primary reasons for this shift?

AG: I’m not really very sure. I suppose… I’ve never really been compelled by traditional British crime and mystery. My first real discoveries, that I clicked with, were American. I discovered David Goodis and Jim Thompson, guys like that. Black Lizard reprints, they pretty much changed the way that I read, who I read, what I was, you know, looking for. I mean I’m a huge fan of all the paperback originals… the Gold Medals… the harder Dells… stuff like that. It’s what I find myself attracted to. I also have a real problem with anything that’s typically middle class… and I do find that a lot of crime fiction that comes from this country just doesn’t click with me at all because of that. I’m far more interested in the victim and criminal perspective than I am from the detective perspective.

CS: It does seem to be a shift towards real people doing bad things ... There are a lot of writers… I’m finding now more influenced by American writing than traditional British…

AG: Yes, Ken Bruen, there’s his stuff. He’s Irish, not British, but definitely American influenced… His work is utterly stunning… I just finished Her Last call to Louis Macneice. Only like a hundred and twenty pages but loaded with superb lines…

CS: It seems to me that maybe lean is coming back again… at least in the small presses…

AG: Lean is definitely good for me! Hemingway didn’t write many fat books, why should anyone else, you know what I mean? To get back to the original question, I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that there hasn’t been a lot of British crime where the criminals have been the focal point, whereas in America that started in 1929 with Little Ceasar and its been going on strongly since Cain took over the reins with Postman and Double Indemnity and so on… There is no equivalent really [in Britain]… although you could cite Gerald Butler… but really they’re very few and far between and the tradition hasn’t really carried over. It’s more the Christie and Conan Doyle traditions that have survived… and don’t get me wrong, they’re very good, and if you like detective novels, then that’s great! But if you like crime novels… there is that distinction. I think that’s all its about, really.

CS: Moving on to some of your other projects, you're also running Noir Originals (www.allanguthrie.co.uk) which is an excellent little site… I was just wondering what prompted you to start the site, what it was that made you think, "this is a good project…."

AG: Partly a love of the subject and partly the fact that there is very little on noir fiction on the web… I discovered a writer called James McKimmey who wrote a bunch of Dell paperbacks in the 50s and 60’s… and there was virtually nothing about James McKimmey on the web, which I thought was pretty bad… The fact that there is very little on these writers and also the fact that I wanted to – entirely selfishly – promote myself, that’s how Noir Originals came about. How do you promote yourself when you’re a writer that nobody’s ever heard of, and who – at that point – wasn’t even published! That’s a kind of difficult thing to do, so I just thought, well, I’ll give people a reason to go to the website… which is why the website address is my name and not NoirOriginals.co.uk…

CS: I did, after I first stumbled across it, have trouble finding it again…

AG: Well, people spell Allan incorrectly, which doesn’t help… but at the end of the day you remember my name all the better because of that, so… that’s my theory.

CS: And you can always bookmark it!

AG: And you can always bookmark it – I’d be very grateful if you did. But, yeah, it’s been hugely successful… in fact the volume of traffic I get far exceeds my wildest expectations. And the quality of the submissions has been huge… some really high standards, you know… I mean, I love it… I love it because I love reading the stuff that people are sending which was the whole point, anyway… and to find out about things that were really hard to find out about otherwise, even with this wonderful internet we have these days.

CS: Although the internet has done a lot of good… it seems to be bringing a lot of writers together… One other question – I suppose you answered this earlier – was why it seems to be easier for writers like yourself to be published in the US rather than the UK which I suppose you answered earlier talking about the state of British crime…

AG: And also there are more publishers in America. It’s a difficult one and I’ve thought about this long and hard... I think there are a number of… no… I think, actually, and you may not like this answer, but, I think its luck!

CS: You know, I had that written down! Its right here, “he’s going to say luck!’

AG: I do, no, I do seriously think that. With TWS I was sort of in the right place at the right time. I met JT Lindroos who commissioned it just as he got the job as editor of Point Blank. Practically. And Hard Case Crime [Publishers of Kiss Her Goodbye] when they set up, I happened to have written a couple of short stories for an editor who knew the editor of Hard Case Crime and recommended me to him. They happened to have been American. They could have been British and then it would have been a different story. Although I suppose Hard Case Crime and Point Blank wouldn’t exist in Britain, would they?

Although in America it’s still very difficult to get this stuff published as well and mainstream publishers they are… they are looking for fatter books! And they are looking for books that have very clearly sympathetic protagonists… I get a bit sick of nice…But, yeah, I’m not sure whether its just the luck of the geographical draw… there are one or two publishers producing similar stuff in the UK, Serpent’s Tail, for example, and No Exit… Orion do it on a bigger scale.

CS: Do you think that given the choice, people would buy different kinds of books from the bestsellers?

AG: Well one thing’s for sure, if noir isn’t published they won’t be able to. There’s no denying that! If we can get these books out there, we can at least have the possibility… I don’t know… it’s hard to tell. There’s a large reading public out there. Let’s give them a choice.

And if you look at films and think, well, what films are successful? There’s a hell of a lot of noir out there and I don’t see why that wouldn’t translate to books. Like Training Day or Memento for example, I don’t see why that wouldn’t translate. So I’m optimistic, but I guess I kind of have to be. And I do believe that you can create a market. Because word of mouth does that. I mean, Dan Brown created a market by word of mouth. Would you have said anybody’s actually going to be terribly interested in The DaVinci Code if all you knew was the brief synopsis from the back cover? You’d have said, well no. So you can create a market. And people will always respond to good stories. A good story well written is what they want. With some interesting characters… well, hopefully, cause that’s really all I’m trying to do. I don’t have any grand designs

CS: As long as it’s out there and someone’s entertained…

AG: I’m very, very happy about the prospect of somebody being entertained…

CS: So you wouldn’t describe yourself as more literary than entertainment?

AG: I’m a hack writer! But it doesn’t mean that I don’t take it seriously. Because I do. I’ve studied the craft inside out, basically because I have no talent whatsoever so I have to…

CS: Well you must have some!

AG: No, I don’t, that’s the truth, I don’t. It’s all studied, it’s all learned! But when I say I studied I mean I rarely studied other books – other fiction – I mean I read books on the craft. How to do it: literally dozens of them. And I’ve just taken the bits that I liked from all of them and put them together as guidelines… and what it gives me is the confidence to go ahead and write, which I think is essential because most writers I know are absolutely riddled with self-doubt! And anything you can do to get rid of the self-doubt, or at least alleviate it, is a big bonus. I think when you know the craft as much as possible that definitely helps. Or it helps me, anyway. I don’t know if I can infer from that that it helps other people.

CS: But if it’s worked for you…

AG: It definitely has worked for me, yeah. It’s the only way I’ve been able to go ahead and seriously think about trying to get published.

CS: Well, I think we’ve come to the end of our time. But, Allan Guthrie, thank you very much.

AG: Thank you, it’s been a pleasure.