Ask Charlie Higson why he left it 25 years to write a new crime novel for adults and he has a quick answer – The Fast Show.
“I wrote four crime books in the early 90s, I always wanted to be a crime writer, but TV kind of took over and I just didn’t have time for books – and TV pays a lot better, unless you’re JK Rowling,” said the writer, producer and performer.
“And then I moved over into writing for kids. The closest I came to crime writing then was the young James Bond books.”
But Charlie has now penned Whatever Gets You Through The Night and will be in conversation about the novel – described as “helter-skelter thriller” – during Aberdeen’s prestigious Granite Noir crime writing festival.
What will Charlie Higson be talking about at Aberdeen’s Granite Noir?
So what will he be chatting about?
“Fishing mainly, the decline of the salmon stock,” joked Charlie. “No, I will be talking about my favourite subject, which is myself, and how I came to write the book and why I came to write the book.”
The answer to why he wrote the book comes down to the pandemic, which shut down various TV projects Charlie had been developing. Instead, his focus turned to various ideas he had been toying with for an adult crime novel.
“I found myself with time on my hands and the ideas kind of came together and I thought ‘well, this is the perfect opportunity to write another book 25 years later’.”
It seems to have been a good choice, given the widespread acclaim for Whatever Gets You Through the Night from both readers and critics.
Its hero is McIntyre, a fixer who gets people out of places they don’t want to be. But springing a 15-year-old schoolgirl from a tech billionaire’s compound on Corfu spirals out of control as Albanian gangsters, Greek drug dealers, psychotic bodyguards and spoilt, rich teenagers come into play.
Rothschild estate sparked visions of a Bond villain lair for Charlie
“I had for a long time wanted to write a book set on Corfu, I used to go there a lot as a young man and then with my family. I wanted to write a thriller, but I didn’t want to do the standard English thriller set somewhere grey and drizzling,” said Charlie.
The central idea for the novel came when he was on a trip to Corfu and had chartered a boat for the day to sail down the east coast, between the Greek island and Albania.
The trip took them past the sprawling and lush private estate of the Rothschild family on Corfu, with a beautiful house, terraces down to the sea and a private harbour.
Charlie said: “I thought it was an interesting place to set a story and what cemented it for me was when the people on the boat pointed to the coast of Albania on the other side, which was mostly very bleak, barren and brown.
“But there was a stretch of it that was very lush and green with trees and shrubbery. It belongs to the Rothschilds. They bought that bit of Albania so they wouldn’t be overlooked.”
“There was a feel of a Bond villain’s lair about it, so I came up with the story of a young tech billionaire running a private cult in a place like the Rothschilds’. The hero of the book turns up and his job is to get one of these young girls out of this guy’s clutches with a minimum of fuss.”
But don’t think of McIntrye as a Bond trope. Far from it, said Charlie.
“Having written the James Bond books, where Bond is this slightly unbelievably perfect crime fighter – for want of a better word – who lives in this world where you sort things out by shooting people and punching them. It’s great fun but utterly unbelievable.
Charlie Higson’s new hero is the ‘anti-James Bond’
“I wanted to do – and deliberately do in a sort of slightly humorous way – the opposite of that. McIntyre’s idea is to be as faceless as possible, a sort of blank slate so he can pretend to be lots of different people and gain people’s confidence.
“The whole thing was set up as a sort anti-James Bond. I was trying to turn those familiar tropes of the thriller on their head.”
Given Charlie’s penchant for writing series of novels – he also penned the zombie-horror books The Enemy – will McIntrye return?
“It’s done pretty well and the publishers have talked to me about writing another one. I’ve got a couple of ideas, it’s just finding the time again. I need to wait for another pandemic I guess.”
Charlie became a household name through The Fast Show – which also made stars of the likes of Paul Whitehouse and John Thomson. It still has a loyal following today with fans coming up to chat to him.
“It still has a presence, people share a lot of the sketches on Twitter, there’s a lot of them on YouTube and UK TV repeat it regularly,” he said.
“We were having fun with some characters we liked and the audience liked the characters, too. It’s nice the show is fondly remembered and always nice to talk to people about it.”
Charlie Higson on the possible live return of The Fast Show
So, is there any possibility of a reboot, possibly The Even Faster Show or perhaps the Slightly Slower Show?
“It will be The Old And Grey Show,” laughed Charlie. “But we have been talking about doing some more live stuff of some sort. Again it’s finding the time when we’ve all got the time to do it. We’ve got a long way to go down the road for it to happen.”
Meanwhile, Charlie is developing a couple of TV shows and a possible film of The Enemy series.
“But it’s bad luck to talk about them in any detail because they inevitably fall through and then you do another interview and it’s ‘so what happened to your musical about the Boer War?’”
Charlie Higson is looking forward to Aberdeen’s Granite Noir festival
Before any of that, there’s Charlie’s stint at Granite Noir – something which is looking forward to. And he hopes the audience at his In Conversation evening will enjoy it as much as he will.
“I hope they will get an insatiable desire to buy several copies of my book and give it to everyone they know,” he joked.
Charlie Higson will be In Conversation at The Lemon Tree on Saturday February 25 as part of the Granite Noir festival, which runs from February 23 to 26.
For more information and tickets for Granite Noir, including Charlie Higson’s appearance, visit granitenoir.com
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