Spotlight Profile
August 2001
Pity the person who introduces Stephen Booth, our member in the August Spotlight.
His is a life of fascinating variety. There's his long and stellar career as a journalist. There's his teaching career, which ended with a riot. There's his expertise as a goat show judge.
And there's his debut crime novel, Black Dog, an international best-seller. The Evening Standard named it one of the top crime novels of 2000, and it has been nominated for an Anthony.
Stephen was born in the Pennine mill town of Burnley, Lancashire. He was brought up on the coast at Blackpool, where he began his career in journalism by editing his school magazine and wrote his first 'novel' at the age of 13.
Stephen studied for a bachelor of arts degree in Birmingham and after graduating moved to Manchester to train as an English teacher. He escaped from teaching when he discovered what big city comprehensive schools were like.
Starting work on his first newspaper in Cheshire in 1974, Stephen was a specialist rugby union reporter for a while, as well as working night shifts as a sub-editor on the Daily Express and The Guardian. Among other endeavors, he has been Regional Secretary of the British Guild of Editors, helped his company to pioneer modern training and assessment techniques, and was one of the country's first qualified assessors for the National Vocational Qualification in Production Journalism. He was deputy editor of a newspaper group covering North Nottinghamshire and parts of Derbyshire and South Yorkshire before leaving to write full-time.
In 1999, Stephen won the £5,000 Lichfield Prize, presented at the Lichfield International Arts Festival, for his mystery novel The Only Dead Thing, which is still unpublished.
Black Dog is the first in a crime series set in the Derbyshire Peak District and featuring young police detectives Ben Cooper and Diane Fry. The second in the series, Dancing with the Virgins, was published in May 2001 by HarperCollins.
Stephen began breeding and showing pedigree dairy goats while living on a smallholding in Yorkshire. He served on the British Goat Society's governing body for six years, and he has judged goats at shows all over Britain. He has been chairman of several clubs and societies, including the Just Kidding Goat Society, raising funds for charity.
Among other achievements, Stephen edited, produced and co-wrote a book on one of the country's oldest goat breeds, The Toggenburg. He is the current president of the breed's national body, the Toggenburg Breeders Society.
Stephen and his wife Lesley live in a former Georgian dower house near Retford, Nottinghamshire, in Robin Hood and Pilgrim Fathers country.
We asked Stephen if he had a special bit of poetry or a quotation to share. His reply:
"I don't have a particular bit of poetry to use, but the quote that means the most to me is the one from Reginald Hill ('Dalziel and Pascoe' series). Hill gave this as an advance quote for a first book written by someone he had never heard of, and I was quite overwhelmed by it. It was the very first, and it's the one I'll treasure most.
"It goes: 'Stephen Booth's Black Dog sinks its teeth into you and doesn't let you go. Powerful, atmospheric and as dark as its title, it is a serious novel of character and relationships as well as an ingeniously plotted and neatly resolved detective story. A dark star may be born!'"
IC
You wrote your first "novel" at 13. Did you just pick up a pen one fine morning and start to write, or were you influenced by a particular teacher or family member?
SB
Once I'd started reading books, it always seemed to me the natural next step was to try to write one. Doesn't everybody do that? I really can't remember when I started writing short stories, poems, and other bits and pieces -- it was just an instinct, I suppose.
I got no encouragement from my parents at all. In fact, they were convinced that writing was a bizarre and unnatural occupation for a child, and they called it "scribbling".
Then one day my English teacher, who had previously considered me a complete dunce, gave the class an assignment to write a short story. He was amazed at what I produced and read it out as an example to the others. That was my first bit of recognition, and I got a lot of encouragement from various teachers after that.
The novel I wrote at 13 wasn't the first one I started, but it was the first I finished, and it was science fiction.
IC
Do you remember learning to read, and what your favorite books or stories were?
SB
I was actually brought up in a house with no books, by parents who didn't bother to read very much. I couldn't read before I went to primary school aged about five, and I can clearly recall sitting in class trying to match up the letters with the sounds they made.
But once I had learned, reading became an obsession. It was hard having no books in the house, but I remember one day finding an ancient copy of George Eliot's "Silas Marner" hidden under some blankets in the bottom of a wardrobe. I don't suppose I understood much of it -- but it was a novel, and it seemed to open up a new world.
I pestered my parents until they enrolled me in the public library, and then I never looked back. Once I was old enough to get into the adult section, I read everything I could get my hands on. I was a big science fiction fan for years, but I tackled anything that my teachers mentioned.
I read Dostoevsky, Proust and James Joyce at much too early an age. And it really was an obsession. In fact, I was the only kid in my class who used to bunk off school to go to the library!
IC
You say you escaped from teaching when you discovered what big city comprehensive schools were like. Tell us more! What are they like?
SB
Well, the first big shock was that there were children involved!
At that time, graduate teacher training courses were very theoretical, and not much guidance was given on coping with a classroom full of unruly kids. I had been very lucky in my own education, as I got a local authority place at an independent school, where discipline was good and everyone wanted to learn.
My first placement as a trainee teacher was nothing like that at all. In fact, I did no teaching, because I spent all my time trying to stop the kids smashing up the classroom -- unsuccessfully.
When I had an all-out riot in class one day, I decided that I wasn't going to spend the rest of my life that way.
IC
How did you manage the switch from teaching to newspaper work? Your journalism career is impressive. Do you keep a hand in, or is your writing now devoted strictly to fiction?
SB
Journalism had been my first choice of career. I always wanted to write for a living, but had enough sense to know that you couldn't just leave school and become a successful novelist. So I took a degree and started applying for jobs in local newspapers when I graduated.
Journalism has always been a difficult job to get into, and the teacher training course was just something to fall back on, really. Luckily, I got a job as a trainee reporter within a few weeks of giving up the teaching placement. I enjoyed working in newspapers immensely, and I got quite a wide experience. But once I moved up the ladder and became an editor, I had to go back to writing in my spare time.
I gave up the newspaper job only in April this year, after 27 years, so I still feel like a journalist at heart.
IC
What sparked your interest in pedigree dairy goats?
SB
These goats have certainly proved to be talking point!
When I first moved to the countryside with my wife Lesley, we lived near a couple about the same age as ourselves, who were really into the self-sufficiency movement that was popular at the time. We helped them out by looking after their goats when they went away, and then we ended up buying a bigger place so we could keep our own.
Goats are fascinating animals -- intelligent and good-natured, like a pet, but incredibly productive. If you read mythology and folklore, they pretty well invented civilization too!
IC
You also have an interest in the paranormal. Looking at a map here, Stephen -- you were brought up in Blackpool, a coastal city on the Irish Sea, and not so far from Wales. This does conjure images! How influential was that environment in your development as a fiction writer? Have you had personal experience with the paranormal? Anything you feel comfortable talking about?
SB
There's nothing paranormal about Blackpool, I promise you.
However, I was born in another Lancashire town called Burnley, up in the Pennine hills. Burnley has a long history of witchcraft, which has become a bit of a tourist industry now.
I remember my grandmother teaching me how to tell fortunes with playing cards and tea leaves when I was a child, and it was quite usual in my family to spend our evenings holding séances with a ouija board. I think, as a result, I'm attracted to anything that is mysterious or unexplained.
We all like to think there's something else beyond the surface of life, don't we?
IC
Isn't "black dog" an Irish expression for a dark, deeply depressed frame of mind? If so did it have anything to do with the title of your book?
SB
It has a lot to do with the title! It's not only Irish, but also an old country expression in parts of England.
In Black Dog, one of my detectives, Ben Cooper, remembers his mother using it when he was a child -- if he was sulking or in a bad mood, she would say he "had the black dog on his back". Half way through the book, when everything seems to be going wrong for Ben, an old miner, Harry Dickinson, uses the expression too.
It is probably best known here from Winston Churchill, who suffered from clinical depression, which he called his "black dog."
IC
Your first novel, The Only Dead Thing, won a prestigious award and a nice sum of money, but is unpublished. Is your agent shopping it, or have you shelved it for some reason?
SB
This is a standalone mystery, and it's in a drawer at the moment waiting for the right time to appear. The timing of the award was awkward, as I had just signed a deal with HarperCollins for the Ben Cooper and Diane Fry series, and I wanted to concentrate on that.
IC
Black Dog created quite a stir worldwide. Did the idea come from a character, a setting, a conflict, or seemingly from thin air?
SB
The initial idea came from a story we covered on the newspaper I worked for. It struck me how often in this country, when we hear about a murder in the news, they say: "The body was found by a man walking his dog." Maybe it's because we live on a small, densely populated island, but in Britain it's difficult to conceal a body from the dog walkers!
In Black Dog, Harry Dickinson is the man walking a dog. As soon as he appeared in the first scene of the book, he seemed to come alive for me, and it was Harry who drove the rest of the story.
I always wanted to use the Peak District as a setting, too, and Harry very much belongs in that locality.
IC
What are the most surprising comments you've heard from readers? Do readers in the UK respond differently from readers in other countries?
SB
True to stereotype, UK readers are rather more reserved. Readers of all nationalities respond to the same things in the books, though -- the characters, the setting and the emotional intensity.
Some US readers have surprised me with their enthusiasm for finding symbolism in unexpected places. In an early scene in Black Dog there is apparently a symbolic onion, which I was totally unaware of!
I was also somewhat gobsmacked by the reader who said she had dreamed about me playing the role of Lara Croft in the film version of "Tomb Raider."
IC
What is the hardest lesson you've had to learn as a fiction writer?
SB
That you can never rest on your laurels and think you've written a good novel -- because somebody is always going to tell you to get off your backside and write another one that's better!
IC
Tell us a bit about how you write. Do you keep to a schedule? Do you write a first draft in one swoop, or do you edit and rewrite as you go? Do you outline? Do you write out character studies before you start or develop them as you go?
SB
I write every single day, if possible. When I'm first developing a novel, there are just lots of ideas floating around -- characters, scenes, settings, bits of dialogue, plot twists, etc. I write them all into a notebook or straight onto the computer, and as the characters develop, a story will emerge (I hope!).
There comes a point when I feel able to sketch out a plan, and by then I already have a few thousand words written -- just not in the right order. I re-write an awful lot, both as I go and after the first draft is finished.
As you can see, I'm not a very methodical writer, and I can't plot or outline in too much detail, because it takes the excitement out of the writing for me.
I think writing a novel should be a journey of discovery for the author, and I like my characters to surprise me occasionally. It's a lot more fun that way.
IC
Do you have a room or home office dedicated to writing, or do you write wherever you happen to be?
SB
Black Dog and Dancing with the Virgins were mostly written in a tiny room at home that we call a box room, with my computer desk completely surrounded by, well, boxes. I often wrote in my local library during lunch breaks from the day job, too.
Now I've been able to create a proper home office, and my colleagues at the newspaper bought me the furniture for it when I left. It was almost as if they were keen to help me go!
IC
What is the hardest part of writing for you? The easiest? The most fun?
SB
I love creating the characters and the setting. They are all completely real for me, and I can see Ben Cooper and Diane Fry going about their lives in Edendale quite clearly.
The easiest part is the dialogue, which just flows. This is because I can hear the characters talking -- it's almost as if I'm back to be being a journalist, desperately trying to record a conversation as fast as I can.
The hardest part is planning and outlining. To me, that's the unnatural side of writing a mystery novel, because real life just doesn't organise itself into chapters and a neat, satisfying ending. Not ever!
IC
You have a full schedule of appearances in connection with Black Dog and Dancing With the Virgins, the second in the Ben Cooper-Diane Fry series. What kind of questions do readers and audiences ask you?
SB
Wherever I go, there always seem to be aspiring authors who want to know all the stuff about how to find an agent and how to get published. They also ask me questions about planning and outlining, which are subjects I'm not the best person to be getting advice from (see answer above).
I love it most when I'm asked about the characters in my novels, because it means readers are responding to them as if they are real people, which is what I'm aiming for.
Sometimes I've been asked what happens to a character after the novel is finished. Strictly speaking, they just cease to exist, of course, but it's a shame to spoil the illusion.
IC
Was the series your idea or did your publisher ask for it?
SB
It was my idea, but I was steered towards it by my agent, who had to dissuade me from writing paranormal thrillers! She said if I wrote a crime series it would sell, and she was right.
IC
Can you tell us anything about your work in progress? Is it the third in the series, or will it stand alone?
SB
I'm just finishing the third book in the Cooper and Fry series, which will be published in the UK next April, and I'm contracted by my British publishers to write a fourth for 2003.
IC
Has success as a novelist affected your friendships and family relationships in either negative or positive ways?
SB
Fortunately, I have a very supportive wife, who never complains too much. She hardly saw me for days on end while I was writing the novels and working full-time as well.
As for my friends, many of them have been taken completely by surprise to find they know a successful novelist. Most of them are thrilled, but there have been one or two who haven't spoken to me since. It's almost as if I had let them down somehow by not being quite the person they thought I was.
Of course, I've also made lots of new friends in the business. Crime writers are a very friendly bunch.
IC
What (or who) prompted you to join Mystery Women in the UK and Sisters in Crime? What have you found to be important benefits and/or sources of enjoyment in belonging to these organizations?
SB
Well, I feel strongly about this for two reasons. First, having discovered mystery novels as a young reader, I grew up on all the great writers of the period -- Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh -- and later on, the likes of Ruth Rendell, P.D. James and Minette Walters.
There was a whole list of them, with one thing in common -- as far as I was concerned, great crime writers were female! Even today, when I discover a new author I like, the chances are that author will be female. Many male writers still write in a way that is too macho, too hard-boiled, too casual about violence for my taste.
A fairly recent addition to my list of heroines is Laurie R. King. A few months ago, I was raving about her in the journal of the UK Crime Writers' Association, and I got a note from King thanking me, which made my day.
So when I started hearing that there was a prejudice against female authors in the media and the publishing business, I was appalled. For me, this is not just an attitude straight out of the ark, it's actually a retreat from a position where women had already proved they were better than men about 60 years ago.
Secondly, I do have a personal interest. I don't know if you've heard the story about J.K. Rowling, the children's author, whose Harry Potter books have made her a millionaire several times over. There's a reason why she writes under her initials, rather than her full name.
When she wrote the first Harry Potter story, her publishers told her that boys would not read her books if they knew they were written by a woman. Talk about getting it wrong!
Well, in a similar way (but much less well paid, of course), I was told some time ago that I was writing books that ought to have been written by a woman. I presume this is because I tend to write about relationships and emotions -- all that difficult stuff that men don't understand. So I definitely feel as though I'm writing more in the tradition of Ruth Rendell than Raymond Chandler.
Of course, the great thing about both Mystery Women and SinC is that they are very supportive organizations -- and they are both non-exclusive, so don't mind admitting men. I have no problem with being called a Mystery Woman or a Sister in Crime, so I feel right at home.
IC
What are some of your favorite books when you read for pleasure?
SB
One drawback of having had such a busy schedule over the past couple of years is that I've lost out on the time to read for relaxation. There are a whole stack of crime and mystery novels which I've bought and not got around to reading yet.
Among the writers whose new books I look forward to with anticipation are Minette Walters, Kate Ellis, Laurie King, John Harvey and Reginald Hill.
IC
What advice would you give a writer just beginning a career?
SB
I've only just begun my own career, so who am I to give advice? Well, if pushed, I usually mention the "Three Ps" -- Professionalism, Persistence and Passion. You should present yourself and your work in a professional manner to editors, agents, etc -- don't let them view you as an amateur, even if you are one!
You should always keep on trying and trying in the face of rejection and never give up -- remember it's just a question of getting the right piece of work to the right person at the right time.
And you should also feel passionate about what you're writing -- it's that sense of excitement which communicates itself to the reader and makes your work stand out from the rest.
IC
Black Dogis an Anthony Award nominee for Best First Mystery Novel, and you'll be attending Bouchercon in November. Are you nervous? What was your reaction when you learned of the nomination?
SB
I can't tell you how thrilled I am at the Anthony nomination, especially as these are awards voted on by readers, which means a lot. The competition is very daunting, but just being nominated is good enough for me.
This will be my first time at Bouchercon, and I know it's a far bigger event than anything we have in the UK, so I'll probably be completely overwhelmed. Please take pity on me if you see me wandering around Washington DC in a dazed and confused state.
I'm not as nervous about speaking in public as I used to be, though -- once you start me talking, the problem is shutting me up. But then, you've probably noticed that by now.
IC
Have we overlooked something you'd like to mention? Please feel free to do so!
SB
Reading back over this interview, it's just struck me that the novel I found in the bottom of my parents' wardrobe all those years ago was written by a woman who had to pretend to be a man to get published -- George Eliot.
It really hadn't occurred to me before, but it's amazing how well it ties in. Now, that's what I call a neat ending. And it wasn't planned at all...
IC
Our thanks to Stephen, who is deep in his next novel right now, but made time to answer questions. His website is well worth a visit. There's a wealth of information about his books, and the Peak District, where they are set, his schedule, and the first chapter of Dancing With the Virgins.
Virgins is currently available in the UK, Australia and Canada from HarperCollins, in hardback and trade paperback. The US edition will be published by Scribner in October. Also in October, Black Dog will be published by Pocket Books in mass market paperback.
This interview was conducted during the month of July 2001 for SinC-IC
by Pat Browning.
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