Mark Billingham introduced Linwood Barclay
as one of the nicest guys you could ever hope to meet (and a man with a passion
for trainsets). He was born in America, but moved to Canada with his parents at
the age of four and has been living there ever since. He sets his books- about
ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events- in America. There was some
banter about Canadians being boring and Barclay, clearly used to this, made
certain to get his jokes in first: `If they were set in Canada, after they’d
killed you, they’d say, ``I’m so sorry!’’’ And then, `How do you get 20
Canadians out of your swimming pool?... Please get out of the pool!’
At 16 Barclay’s dad died and he found
himself looking after his mum, his older brother, who has schizophrenia, and
the lakeside resort cottages and trailer park his dad had invested in after his
career went down the swanny. (He’d been a talented automobile illustrator for
ads, until photographs came to be used instead.) For this reason Barclay had to
go to uni within commuting distance, so he could continue to clean and fix the
toilets and bury fish guts.
When he graduated, he thought he could
write a bestseller (didn’t we all!). After he’d received lots of rejections, he
decided to go into journalism, working initially for a local paper. He finally ended
his 30 year newspaper career writing a humorous column for the Toronto Star.
As a teenager he’d discovered Ross
Macdonald (the pen name of Kenneth Millar, the American-Canadian writer of fiction
and a great favourite of my own mum’s; I grew up seeing her curled in a wing chair
reading his thrillers, while crunching on Granny Smiths dipped in salt).
Barclay wrote to him c/o his publishers,
saying he wanted to write about him for his dissertation and asking what had
been written about him before. Macdonald got in contact and Barclay told him
he’d written a book and asked whether Macdonald would critique it, which,
amazingly, he did, and they remained in contact. Later Macdonald said he was
going to be in Barclay’s home town and asked whether he would like to meet up. Barclay
spent one of the best evenings of his life at the age of 21 having dinner and
hanging out with Macdonald and his wife. He remembers him as a very generous
man who wrote in one of his books: `For Linwood, who will some day, I hope,
outrank me.’
Barclay wrote 4 comic thrillers, which,
although published, didn’t do very well (`Sold 72 copies’ was his dry comment)
because, as he said, humour undercuts suspense. Even now, he said, he has to
reign himself in, although, as Mark Billingham- who was once a stand-up- pointed
out, you do need humour in thrillers, but largely in the dialogue.
Barclay spoke of his wonderful agent
(that would be nice!) who’d kept faith with him while he tried to come up with better
ideas for thrillers. And then one day he woke up at 5am and had the idea for
`No Time for Goodbye’- a stroppy 14 year old girl wakes up to find her whole
family has disappeared overnight. Are they all dead or have they just abandoned
her? When he phoned his agent, she said, `That’s it! So what happened to them?’
`How the hell should I know?’ he responded. `I haven’t written it yet!’
This was a life-changing book, the fastest
selling Richard and Judy book ever. And then, he said, comes expectation. What
next? His books have a shifting cast of characters, `regular’ people, like the
ones he knows in real life: teachers, contractors, car salesmen. These people’s
families are threatened and that’s why they can’t just run away from danger.
He wrote a novel a year for 7 years,
then he pushed himself to write a trilogy and managed all three in 15 months.
Now, he says, he can `sit on his butt’ for a bit, but I got the impression this
was unlikely, since his first YA book (for 9-13 year olds, think Bourne
Identity, but it’s a dog), out next year, is finished and he’s already had a
good idea for a final book set in the fictional town of Promise Falls.
When he’s not writing or sneaking
downstairs for coffee and an Oreo or admiring his basement trainsets, he reads favourite
writers like Stephen King or Richard Russo. He tries to write a better book
each time, has scribbled notes and maps at his desk, but no spread sheets or
white boards. Mark Billingham interjected to say that the only thing written on
his own white board was `Get Dressed!’
Barclay said his favourite book is
probably `Trust your Eyes’, about a man who is obsessed with a fictional
equivalent of Google Maps and spots a dead body. In 2012 it was the object of a
film rights bidding war between Universal and Warner Bros, but then `It died-
there’s Hollywood for you.’
At the close of the interview the talk
turned inevitably to politics. Barclay said, `Trump is beyond fiction, beyond
even science fiction.’ Why does he like/need to write every day? `At least in a
fictional world there is justice.’
