I N T E R V I E W . W I T H . C H R I S . M A R T I N

Q: "Adventures in Capitalism" was an incredibly diverse book of short stories. After that you could have gone anywhere. Why have you ended up writing a road book and then a crime novel?

A: I suppose I don’t really think of them in quite that way. Beatniks is a story told very much from the main character’s point of view. I wanted to write about growing up in the middle-of-nowhere (in this case, Bedford). I was also interested in ‘youth’ novels.

I’ve got this great book called ‘Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir’. It’s got several examples of the kind of thing I mean: David Dortort’s Burial of the Fruit (cover quote: “A realistic novel of teen-age gangsters in the slums of Brooklyn - their brutal loves and deadly hates!”)

But, for most people growing up, it’s absolutely nothing like that. Ridiculously unlike that, if fact. Nor is it like up-to-the-minute dispatches from the front line of youth culture, such as Two Fingers and James T Kirk’s Junglist.

So, I ended up writing about people who are about as far from the centre as you can get - in England, anyway. They’re happening, but ‘happening’ just isn’t happening.

With Corpsing, I started off with the idea of a character being shot. Not just film or cartoon shot, but really, medically, messily shot. And the situation surrounding the shooting wouldn’t be a simple case of right and wrong. And, after the shooting, the situation would be more rather than less complex.

Q: Do you like experimenting with formats (short stories, Babylondon etc…)

A: I’m wary of calling anything being written now ‘experimental’ - much less anything that I write myself. The story (‘Alphabeds’) for the babyLondon website did, in some ways, take advantage of new technology.

‘Alphabeds’ has 26 sections, to be read in a random order. It doesn’t matter if you don’t read them all. Now, if this had appeared in a book (which half of it did: Girlboy, ed Elaine Palmer, Pulp Faction) then you could only say something like, ‘Sections to be read in any order other than the one printed’. But you know that people are likely to read front to back, as printed. So, it was good to be able to have the website design force the reader to go through randomly.

Basically, short stories don’t require the writer to be as sensible as novels do. If you know an idea has to keep you going for a couple of years, you’re not very likely to choose a flippant idea.

Q: You’ve been called the British Douglas Coupland, you often get bracketed with the techno writers and now apparently you’re a mover and shaker in Lad lit. Is someone missing the point here?

A: I think they may be. In September, I’m going to be a New Puritan. (As a contributor to the anthology All Hail the New Puritans!)

Q: I’m trying to work out some kind of question about curiosity. It seems to be the factor that runs through all your work. Probably the best example is the guy in "Fortune Hotel" who unscrews the fire place in his hotel room and finds himself in a sexy and exciting cold war adventure.

Well, he finds a vintage camera, a Leica, which is also a McGuffin of sorts. But the story (‘My Cold War [February 1998]”) starts out with boredom, rather than curiosity. So, it doesn’t take much to get the main character interested.

One thing didn’t make it into the finished story. When I went to Berlin, to research ‘My Cold War’ (although I’d written most of it already), I unwittingly arrived on the eve of The Love Parade. So, there I was, trying to find atmospheric, pre-Wall, East Berlin whilst surrounded by the youth of Europe wearing sub-Carnaby Street tat and screaming Techno-Techno-Techno.

Quite a few of the stories in Adventures were about characters whose identity was imposed rather than innate. For example, the Boots’ Please-Use-a-Basket Girl. She’s trying to deal with being corporately defined. Branded.

Q: Conrad’s curiosity seems to drive him in "Corpsing". I say curiosity because almost everything he finds out is pretty negative against him but he doesn’t seem to care.

A: Being shot (and then going into a coma) leaves him with very little left: no job, no girlfriend. He does have lots of time. And he gets very bored. Again, it doesn’t take much - at least at the start - to get him going.

Q: Conrad is no charmer. Starting the book as a very much the victim, his subsequent treatment of everyone around him either shows either a man having a slow mental breakdown or a guy who was always a real bastard.

A: Well, I think he’s trying to put things back together. The fact that he seems so much to enjoy being shitty to some people suggests that he’s almost given himself a holiday from being nice. In going after revenge, he feels - old-fashioned word - righteous. If people get in his way, they’re going to get hurt.

Q: What’s going on in his head as he builds his plan for revenge? You never really get the sense that he trying to avenge Lily’s death or really his own shooting.

A: As Big Black once sang, ‘There’s kerosene around/ It’s something to do.’

Q: Was it a conscious decision to make him a video editor. The ones I’ve met tend to be a touch freaky. I remember one guy was cutting the show reel for the villain in "Lethal Weapon 2". He had to watch the few seconds where Mel Gibson gets stabbed in the leg about 200 times (and just that bit) in a dark room in the middle of the night. It can’t be good for you.

A: No, I don’t think it is. One day soon, I hope, people will be able to sue for being made to put up with a job that is inhumanely repetitious. The person I’ve seen with the strongest case was working in Argos. They had one of those kiddy rides next to the check-out. It was a little aeroplane which said, on a 30-second loop, ‘Climb on my back and we’ll take to the skies!’ It surprises me more people don’t go postal.

I went through a phase where everyone I met seemed to be doing promotions production, either for the BBC or the satellite channels. It’s a very frustrating occupation. Some of these guys are shit-hot editors, and they all want to make movies, but they’re stuck making trails for bad TV shows.

Q: The voice of Alun Grey resonates in my mind across a thousand Radio 4 plays and drunken school trips to see crappy Shakespeare. Is he based on anyone in particular or is that too libellous?

A: Far far too libellous. Though, in truth, I’ve taken the ripest aspects of the ripest characters from a not unripe field.

Q: Although the book takes place on the fringes of glamorous and celebrity London I don’t get the feeling you’re really into satirising that rather that you just think that’s what London’s like now.

A: Well, it is, isn’t it?

Q: You told me some funny stuff about doing the research for the bullet wound sequences in the book. Is there really a kind of ghoul’s gallery in the British Library.

A: I first heard about this when I saw Will Self on TV. He was walking along among the sicko-shelves in the British Library basement. This is where they keep things like de Sade.

If you want to look at something a bit dodgy in the British Library - something that some particularly sick person might get off on - then you have to do it under supervision. In the old British Library, there were some seats in the North Room. In the new St Pancras one, they’re in Rare Books and Manuscripts.

When I was researching gunshot wounds, I had to look at some fairly extreme material. And so I found myself in the so-called ‘Seats of Shame’. It only took a couple of days before I realize I was too ashamed to continue. So, I ordered the books from the publishers and continued at home.

Q: Did you get as excited about guns as Conrad does? Your description of the Gruber and Litvak gets almost kinky.

A: Well, Conrad obviously falls in love with his gun. But the section that is supposed to come out of a gun catalogue is based very closely on actual promotional materials. Just look at an American gun magazine, and you’ll see that the equipment is pre-fetischized.

Q: What about other research? My favourite character is the wonderfully down trodden Asif. Did you get all Patricia Cornwell and hit the path lab.

A: No, I read a lot of Patricia Cornwell, though.

Q: The tabloids seem to get a bit of a drubbing in "Corpsing". I take it you don’t think much of them or is it the case that (like glamorous London)...

A: I was interested in the predictability of the way the the press follows a news story. When the Jill Dando and Tim Westwood shootings took place, the reaction was quite similar to that to the shooting of a minor celeb in Corpsing. On Day One, the tabloids will go for Shock Horror. The inkies will try to restrain themselves, but on Day Two will report on the tabloids. Depending on who has died, Day Two will also be Horror but will also start heavily in on Questions Must Be Asked. By Day Four or Five, the tabloids will have had enough time to assemble their now libel-free Exposés. No-one deserves to be shot, but the implication the tabloids make is likely to be that "if you live that kind of life, you run those kinds of risk". Again, depending on public reaction, they will either settle down to a long campaign of regular doses of It Was A Terrible Tragedy (as in Dando's case) or very intermittent reports of There's Something Fishy Here (as in Westwood's).

Q: What are you up to next?

A: I’ve just been writing a story to go in this New Puritans anthology. Also, hopefully, something for The Time Out Book of London Short Stories.

The next novel is fairly well advanced.

Q: Last Friday was the closest we’ve come to it. Do you think we’ll ever have lunch or do you think that there’s some kind of conspiracy probably involving Alan Titchmarsh and the Ground Force team?

A: And a slightly bemused Nelson Mandela.