BLOODY

SAVAGE

Allan Guthrie’s back and this time it’s bloodier and more violent than ever. Over the course of a dark Edinburgh (savage) night, two families are locked together in something of a battle royale where only the strongest will survive. It’s mean, it’s gripping, but there’s also a right few laughs along the way. It’s so bloody, in fact, that if you’re a haemophobic like main character, Andy Park, better give this one a miss.

DAVID LEWIS: Savage Night starts with two seemingly normal families, but as we explore them further, they unravel into a depraved, blood-thirsty "animals" with psychotic tendancies. What made you start thinking about the theme?

ALLAN GUTHRIE: I don't think I ever stop thinking about it. The working title for almost every single novel I've written has been Blithe Psychopaths. I love exploring abnormal psychology. And the idea of the primitive and the modern working together - as exemplified by the character of Andy Park, a man who's a bundle of apparent contradictions - really appealed. I’m not exactly sure what you mean by "animals", though. Some of the characters in Savage Night may act on emotion, but they plan their revenge in a way that animals could never do. Well, cats maybe.

What I meant by "animals" is that when your characters' best-laid plans are fucked up, they often act on instinct. Do you know where you're taking them when you start? Or do you just think along the way 'yup, he's gotta blow the other guy's brains out now.'?

I'd have said that most of the time my characters act against their instincts. For instance, Park's instinct is to pop someone in the mouth, but he can't because he's haemophobic. And there's a scene with Liz (his wife) where he could easily allow biology to take over, but he chooses not to. It's true that Tommy becomes increasingly instinctive as his intellect is stripped away, but for most of the book he's trying to be decent and civilised. Effie's perhaps the most instinctive character, but I think her instincts are largely positive.

I had no idea where I was taking them when I started. In fact, the book was originally planned with Richie Park as the main character, yet he only appears in the finished version in a short flashback scene or two.

Chronological, Savage Night is certainly not. How did you go about it - did you write it in order first, then mash it all up?

The fragmented chronology evolved slowly over the course of several drafts. It was clear to me early on that the narrative shouldn't be chronological and once I realised that, I ran with the idea. The structure was largely in place by about the seventh or eight draft.

Your books don't tend to feature an obvious 'good guy', at least what criminal justice defines as a 'good guy'. Does law and order exist in Guthrie's world? Can you ever see yourself writing from a detective's (public or private) point of view?

There's law, yes, but my characters aren't big fans of it, being criminals. Even when they're genuinely fucked over, the law is unsympathetic. There's an argument that my books are concerned with justice and morality, especially the books that are revenge dramas. If there's no obvious 'good guy', that's maybe because the concept of the hero is largely alien to noir. I could certainly write from a detective's point of view, but he'd have to be personally involved in the story and not just doing his job. Police work per se seems pretty boring to me. I like the idea of writing a police procedural where a bunch of cops rob a bank and have to steer the investigation away from themselves, though. Something like that might be fun.

How difficult is it to come up with killers who still attract sympathy from the reader?

I'm thinking of Park and his family life...

It's almost impossible. Usually, the most I can hope for (and what I aim for) is empathy.

I trust in the reader to make the leap, and I try to write well enough to allow them to share

the emotions and sensory experiences of the characters. I tend to write non-judgmentally

from the point of view of the main character in the scene, which helps too. And, as you

suggest, I try to round out the characters with a significant present and a significant past.

Humour can work wonders as well. As can establishing a strong positive trait.

Get the feeling you don't spend weeks and months plotting and planning before you get down to it. Is that what makes your stories so unpredictable and suspension-filled, because even you don't know what's coming?

You'd think so, but the reality is quite the reverse. The unpredictability and suspense is very much the result of painstaking rewrites. While it's true I don't spend months plotting before I write, I do spend months plotting afterwards. With Savage Night I used what a very brilliant friend of mine calls a retro outline - a step-by-step plot outline that allows me to juggle scenes around to see if it's possible to add more suspense by switching the order in which information is revealed. As for me not knowing what's coming, I think it was the great Theodore Sturgeon who pointed out that just because an author doesn't know what's coming, there's no guarantee he won't write something blindingly obvious. Sadly, I can confirm that he was right!

Why do you think Edinburgh is such a fertile city for crime writers? Also, you hail from Orkney originally, would it be possible to set the kind of bloody tales you tell on your home turf?

Paradoxically, I think Edinburgh's probably such a fertile city for crime writers because it's a nice place to live. It's an attractive city, so those of us who aren't natives feel the pull, and those who are born in the city are often happy to stay here. When I moved here twenty-odd years ago, the furthest thing from my mind was that in years to come the city would inspire me to write crime fiction. But it does do that, I think.

As for Orkney - one of my earlier novels, Kiss Her Goodbye, is partially set there. A whole novel would require a different approach, but it could certainly be done. I could envisage a scenario where Pearce goes to Orkney to get away from the hubbub of the city and find some peace and quiet. And I can easily imagine him getting into a misunderstanding with some of the locals while he's there, which, Pearce being Pearce, wouldn't take much to get out of hand.

You said earlier you produced many drafts of Savage Night. What sort of time process are we talking about here? How long does it take you from the original spark of an idea through to the stage where you're happy to stick your name on the front?

I tend to rewrite a lot. Savage Night ran to around 30 drafts, which is a lot, even for me. I finished the first draft - it was called A Cold Case at that point - on (excuse me while I check my computer) 12th June 2006, but I've no idea when I started it (I'd guess maybe five or six months earlier). The first person to see it - as always - was the mighty Ray Banks (not just a great writer, but also a great editor), and that was in November of 2006. We went through a few rounds of edits and I handed it in to my publishers at the start of January 2007 to see what they made of it. Meanwhile, I kept rewriting it, cause I knew I could strengthen it further. Between the US and the UK there were another six rounds of edits. Somewhere in the middle of those edits, I decided to cut 12,000 words, which concerned a few people, I think. But I built it back up in a much better, more oblique way. I was still making changes right up to the day the final copy went to the printers.

We know you've got Savage Night coming out, but what else has been happening we might not have already heard about?

I co-wrote a couple of screenplays a while back and we're just about signed off on them. Both are adaptations, one of my own novel, Two-Way Split, and the other is of Duane Swierczynski's Philadelphian bank heist novel, The Wheelman. The film rights for both books were optioned by Plum Films in Edinburgh. Hopefully we'll be able to use the scripts to persuade people with money to part with large chunks of it so we can get these films made. Apart from that, I'm just about to finish the first draft of my next novel. Only another 29 drafts to go! And then I'm writing a novella for Five Leaves' brilliant Crime Express series.

How does it feel chopping up your own work for the screenplay? Always thought it'd be almost impossible to write a script from your own novel, so how did you find chopping out huge slices and stitching the story back together?

I enjoyed the process (most of the time) and learned a lot, both about the way the industry works (over here, at least) and about writing screenplays. I'm not exactly sure how many versions of the script we've been through, but I suspect it's close to fifty. We kept getting further and further away from the book until at one point we got so far from the original story that it was largely unrecognisable. The current version of the script is much closer to the book once again, however. That's not to say there aren't some significant changes, there are - one in particular that I wish I'd thought of myself when I was writing the book. If I was to write Two-Way Split again, it'd be very different.

DAVID LEWIS is a journalist living and working in Edinburgh. He's written for many newspapers in the UK and magazines in the US and Canada. Currently, he's working on what he hopes will soon be his first novel. Contact him at: davidflewis@hotmail.co.uk