MARK BILLINGHAM

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer. Welcome to The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity pave the way to subsequent success. My guest this week is author Mark Billingham. Mark worked as an actor, a TV writer, and a stand-up comedian before his first crime novel, Sleepyhead, was published in 2001, becoming an instant bestseller in the UK. His subsequent series of novels featuring London-based detective Tom Thorne now totals 16 books with the 17th Cry Baby due out imminently. Mark is also the author of the standalone thrillers In The Dark, Rush Of Blood, and Die Of Shame. His television writing includes several children’s series that he also starred in, Harry’s Mad, What’s That Noise, Made Marion and Her Merry Men, and Night School, and a series based on the Thorne novels in 2010 starring David Morrissey as Tom Thorne. Words like master and masterpiece are regularly flung about in his reviews, although possibly not quite as many times as the word grizzly. Mark Billingham, welcome to The Offcuts Drawer.

Hello, thank you for having me.

Are you happy with grizzly as an adjective? Was that what you were going for when you started?

I don’t think it applies as much now as it did when I started. I certainly think the books were a lot more grizzly, a lot more violent, you know, 10 or 15 years ago than they are now. And I think that’s because I hope it’s because I’m a better writer than I was then. And I think I’ve learned that less is more and you don’t have to throw the kitchen sink at everything. And a reader’s imagination is a far more powerful weapon than anything a writer can come up with. So, yeah, I think grizzly would have been fair enough when I started, certainly.

Well, let’s start with the basics. What do you need to have around you when you write?

Oh, God, I am one of those people who can only really write in my office at home. I’m terrible at writing on the go. I can’t write in hotel rooms or on trains. And I suppose the things I need around me are the terrible things I’m looking at as I look around me right now. Far more Beatles toys than any grown man should have. Yeah, you know, like yellow submarine figures and any bit of memorabilia, that kind of stuff. I’m looking right now at a stuffed woodpecker and an old ventriloquist doll and oh my god, some old figures from Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet and a huge standee of Elvis Costello. No. Well, I don’t know until you take them away from me. All I know is that I can’t sit and write in a sort of soulless hotel room. I can scribble a few notes in a notebook. You know, I can go, oh, must do that in Chapter 12 or whatever. But I can’t actually sit and put a book together anywhere but here.

Well, let’s kick off with your first off-cut. Can you tell us what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when it was written?

Well, this is a clip from a novel I eventually abandoned in favour of what actually became my first published novel. This is called The Mechanic and it was written in around 1999.

He was a stone cold mechanic out of Miami with a job to do. Just a regular killing, just some punk who was going to get what was coming to him. It would be a snip. The train now standing at Platform 2 is the 1237 to Coventry calling at Adderley Park, Stetchford, Lee Hall, Marston Green. He downed two fingers of beam and checked the glock strapped beneath his left arm. The weight of it felt good, like an old friend. Hampton in Arden, Barkswell, Tile Hill and Coventry. He slapped a five on a ten for the bartender and slid off the bar stool. It was time for work. Travellers are reminded that there is no buffet service available on this train. We apologize again. The man was late. He might have to slap him around a little later on, once the job was done. The man had lousy timekeeping habits, but he had a bag of money. And he had the name of the poor sap who had an appointment with the Glock. Nobody ever beat the Glock. He smiled. Beat the Glock. Good one. Andy! Maybe he’d do the beat the Glock routine for the guy he was going to ice. Give the poor mutter belly laugh before he bought the farm. Andy! Oh, sorry, Keith. I was— Yeah, course you were. Where the fuck have you been? I said half twelve under the clock. It’s nearly twenty-two. Christ, what have you come as? Andy Bagnell self-consciously pulled his shirt down over his beer-gut and adjusted his ponytail. We’re supposed to be inconspicuous, you dozy prat. I am inconspicuous. In a Hawaiian shirt? You look like you’ve puked up on it. This is from Florida. Trevor got it when he took our Karen and the kids to Disney World. Doody wasn’t listening. He was staring across the busy station concourse towards the public toilets. Bagnell watched him and, for want of anything better to do, he stared as well.

So tell us about this mechanic then. What was it about?

Well, it was a comedy caper set on the Birmingham Canal system. I’m from Birmingham. I thought I should write about the city I grew up in. So it was this sort of comedy caper where this guy imagines himself as some noirish character and talks in this ludicrous way all the time. Actually gets involved in this horrible caper where he robbed somebody in the toilets at New Street Station. I wrote about probably five or six thousand words of it at the same time as I was writing five or six thousand words of what became that first novel Sleepyhead. I sent them both off to the one person I knew in publishing who said ditch the funny one. Now, well, it may well be because it wasn’t remotely funny. I do not know, but what I since learned, what I subsequently learned was that publishers are quite scared of humorous books, which is a bit sad really. I mean, later that year, I actually went to a crime writing convention where one of the sessions was called, Does Humor Hurt Your Sales Figures? I’ve never forgotten that. I suppose it’s because it’s such a subjective thing. And an editor might read a book and think, well, I think that’s hilarious, but will anybody else? Or I don’t find it funny, but maybe that’s just me. And so the safest thing is to just reject it. And when you think about the incredible history of brilliant humorous writing we’ve got in this country, it’s really, really sad that that should be the case. But, you know, you can count the number of bestselling, humorous writers on the fingers of one hand. It does seem to be something people are a bit afraid of. So I went with The Grizzly One and The Mechanic never saw the light of day. I did look at it again, obviously, when I dug it out for your show and thought, you know what, one day I might finish this. I should have done that during lockdown. That’s what I should have done.

But why were you starting two books at once? I mean, you’ve not published any before, and most people have enough trouble coming up with the first book. So how come two?

Well, it’s certainly something I’ve never done since. I wish I could tell you. I don’t know. I mean, I definitely had had the idea for what became Sleepyhead, the grizzly serial killer novel. But because I was still working as a stand up at that time, and I love crime fiction, so it seemed natural to at least try a comedy crime novel. And they’re incredibly hard. They’re incredibly hard. It’s like the comedy horror film. I kind of think you can’t be both. You can certainly put humour into a crime novel, into anything. I would not want to read a book that doesn’t have some humour in it because it would just be irredeemably bleak. But a book that just sets out to make you laugh is a very tough ask, I think.

Absolutely. But it’s just the fact that you decided to start them both at the same time, or pretty much the same time. What were you thinking? I’m going to write two books.

I’ll send two books off to publishers to see what they think.

You must be incredibly dedicated and disciplined to be able to sit down and go, I’ve never written before, I’m going to do two.

It was a discipline that I maybe had 20 years ago, but I certainly don’t have it now. I mean, I don’t have more than one idea at one time. I was doing a thing the other day when somebody said, what do you do with all the ideas you reject? And I went, I’ve never rejected an idea. You know, I just kind of go, that’ll do. Let’s write that, you know.

So this one just disappeared. You didn’t look at it again.

No, I didn’t. I didn’t look at it again until really, really recently. And actually I’m really quite happy with it because there’s way more of it than was read out. And I kind of think one of these days I’ll get around to finishing it. And even if my editor went, well, it’s not really what you’re known for, I’m sure I could find somebody who put it out somewhere. Also the idea of any kind of crime fiction set in Birmingham, I started to feel was problematic because by that time I wasn’t living there anymore. And I think it’s easier to write about the streets you walk down. And that accent, I did have a problem with that accent.

But nowadays you’ve got more Peaky Blinders, of course.

Yeah, nowadays it’s become trendy. My name’s Tom Thorne, mate, you’re nicked. It just felt easier to make him a Londoner.

Let’s move on to your second offcut. Can you tell us about this, please?

Oh, well, this is a treatment, in inverted commas, for a spoof TV magazine show called It’s Bizarre. And I think I wrote this sometime in the mid 1990s.

Presenters, Valentine and Cordelia Trevelyan, married. He, overweight, flamboyant, effete. She, skinny, blonde, distant, both very gothic. It’s Bizarre is a 30-minute magazine programme dealing with all aspects of the paranormal, with features on everything from telekinesis to yetis, and articles ranging from the spiritual to the downright eccentric. It has a regular cast of slightly off-the-wall presenters who are actors and play all this completely straight. Features include Coincidence Corner. The Trevelyan sit in wing-backed leather chairs and regale the viewers with tales of coincidence to boggle the mind. On June 17, 1972, 14-year-old Colin Hoxton was appearing on the BBC quiz show, Ask The Family. One question involved the identification of an object photographed from a strange angle. Colin correctly identified the object, Cheesecake. At precisely that moment, 3,000 miles away in Houston, Texas, a man was struck and killed by a slice of cheesecake dropped from the 14th floor of a skyscraper, the dead man’s name, Robert Robinson. Bizarre but true, a series of astonishing facts. All the ties worn by film 93 presenter Barry Norman are made from the wool of a single sheep. It’s Bizarre obviously has its tongue firmly in its cheek, but although the format is preordained and many of the initial articles and features are scripted, the great strength of the show is that much of the content would be viewer driven. It’s Bizarre is in many ways a That’s Life of the paranormal, although of course unlike That’s Life, it is interesting and funny.

Ooh, that’s a bit snarky.

Oh dear.

Not a fan of That’s Life, hey?

No, well, I certainly was when Cyril Fletcher was doing his odd odes and humorous vegetables and all that kind of stuff. Jake Thackeray used to perform on That’s Life and, you know, Jake Thackeray is a huge idol of mine. So that was, yeah, that was a bit pointlessly nasty. And, you know, yes, I think I introduced it as a treatment. That’s probably overstating the case. I think this was a few pages scribbled in a notebook.

They were very tidily scribbled. It wasn’t, you’d obviously thought it out. There were no spelling mistakes or ink blocks or anything like that.

I’m very neat. I’m very neat and organized. Well, I think this was definitely a period in my writing life. So this is, you know, five years before I started trying to write a novel. So I’m writing a bit for television and largely hating it, doing kids’ shows and, you know, collaborate lots and lots of in inverted commas collaborating, which just means writing by committee quite often. So there’s a lot of that going on. And I was just in that period of which, which every freelance writer is in of just throwing as much shit at the wall as you can until something sticks. And, you know, this is, this is from the notebook of shit to throw at walls. And God knows, maybe I’d eaten a bit too much cheese one night and just sort of woke up and thought, God, I quite like some of it.

Yes.

I quite like some of it. I quite like that coincidence corner story.

Yeah, I like the wool of Barry, Barry Norman’s ties.

I’d watch it.

Yeah.

Or maybe I wouldn’t. I think it was, do you know what? It was also in that period of television where, you know, the kind of late night shows that seem to be very much designed for people coming home from the pub. And you just turn them on and watch any old nonsense, you know, with the kebab and you know, three cheese to the wind. And I think I thought, yeah, I can come up with something like that. Clearly, I couldn’t and can’t. That was my best attempt. I don’t think it never got submitted. I mean, I didn’t ever show it to anybody, I don’t think.

Oh, oh, I see. Oh, that’s quite disappointing. I’d be very interested in their feedback. What they would say about why it wouldn’t work. So what kind of television and reading and culture basically were you a fan of when you were growing up?

Oh, lots of crime stuff. I always drawn to anything with violence and car chases and, you know, the Sweeney, all the American stuff, Kojak and Columbo, of which I remain. You know, it is the greatest cop show ever made. And you can argue with me. I’m curious.

Why is it the best?

Oh, my God. Well, you just have to look at the people that worked on it. You know, far from anything else. I mean, Spielberg directed the pilot. You had people like Steven Bochco, who went on to great Hill Street Blues. Jonathan Demme, who directed Silence Of The Lambs. Incredible people behind the scenes. And the people that created it, Levinson and Lincoln, actually based it on Crime And Punishment. And they wanted their detective to be like the detective in Crime And Punishment, the constable or whatever it is. And it’s actually a show about class. You know, when you think about it, it’s about this working stiff, who the villain always underestimates. And the villain is always an architect, a classical musician, you know, a TV chef. They’re always somebody from the sort of upper classes.

And he’s just this working stiff.

Yeah, very high status. And they underestimate him and they don’t imagine that he’s got a mind like Steel Trap. And what it did, of course, most famously, was to completely invert the classic format of a crime drama where you knew exactly who the killer was and exactly how they’d done it in the first five minutes. And the rest of the show is this sort of dance of death between Columbo and this villain. How is he going to catch him? What’s the mistake the villain’s going to make? It’s a show I’ve always loved. And of course, Peter Falk. Peter Falk. And I got to do a… I made a documentary about the show a few years ago on radio and got to interview him, not long before he died. So somewhere on tape, I do have that man saying, one more thing, Mr. Billingham. And that, you know, I can go to my grave a happy man.

So what kind of family were you from? Do you have a history in your family of performers or creators, or were you the first?

No, God. No, absolutely not. Yeah, I was the first. Just big show off. And it has just been what’s lawfully called a career is just an attempt to show off and avoid a proper job. You know, I’m now showing off writing books. It’s still a performance. I’ve always been a performer of one sort or another. And it just, you know, from that first moment, I was at the kind of school where it was easy to be a bit anonymous if you weren’t a brilliant sportsman or a brilliant scholar. And I was neither of those things. And then the school play came along. And from the moment I got cast as the artful Dodger in Oliver, that was it. That was me sorted. That’s all I ever wanted to do, really.

Well, time for your next off-cut. Can you tell us what this is, please?

Well, I mentioned stand up. This is a piece of stand up material that I wrote in around 2001. I’m not sure I ever performed it, but it’s about complaining.

Are you having a good time? Okay, by and large. But would you say so if you weren’t? There’s certain things that British do very well. Obviously, there’s queuing, talking about the weather, and choking at major sporting events. But one thing we cannot do is complain. We’re shit at it. Some clumsy twat sends me sprawling in the street. I stand up and say sorry. Sorry? It’s at its worst in restaurants. Not only are we shit at complaining, we’re hugely embarrassed if somebody else does. Now, I happen to be married to one of this country’s few truly great complainers. She bloody loves it. I’m easily pleased in restaurants. You can slap a plate of food in front of me that’s cold or burned or bears no resemblance whatsoever to the thing I actually ordered. Basically, something the third chef has vomited onto the plate. The waiter says, is everything all right, sir? And I’m like, lovely. Couldn’t be better. Thank you so much. My wife is slightly different. If we go out for a meal, she’s not had a good night unless she’s changed tables three times, sent back the starter and called the head waiter a cunt. I mean, I do complain, but for some reason, it’s inversely proportional to the amount of money I’m spending. If I’m out celebrating in a flash restaurant, I’m Mr. Weedy. I’m Monsieur Iselie Pleased. If I’ve spent £35 on a Chateaubriand, you can stick a turd on a plate in front of me and I’m like, oh yum, that’s perfect. Put me in a greasy spoon on the other hand. I mean, get me in McDonald’s and suddenly I’m cocky fucking dick. Excuse me, my good man, but my sesame seed bun is a tad undercooked and these chicken McNuggets are an absolute mcfucking disgrace. Talking of which, posh people should not be allowed in McDonald’s. They just open one in Hampstead and eating in there is a fucking nightmare. Posh people and fast food is not a good mix. They just don’t understand the concept. You stand there in the queue behind Jeremy and Amanda with little Georgina and Freddie in tow, but do they decide like the rest of us what to order in advance? Do they bother to consult the huge fuck off menu above the counter? No, you’re stuck behind these fuckers. You’re in a hurry. They get to the front, the 14 year old serving says, can I help you? And they’re like, yeah, what’s good today? Nothing’s good. It’s McDonald’s for Christ’s sake. Now order something quick and fuck off. But no, they stand there discussing the menu and then the kid with the stars on his badge makes the fatal mistake of asking them if there’s anything they’d like to drink. No, McDonald’s does not have a fucking wine waiter.

Goodness me. So you didn’t perform much in front of children, I’m guessing.

No, and it’s weird the way, again, that was dug up from an old notebook, that you actually write the swear words in. It’s really bizarre. Like you think, well, you know, that will just come when I perform it. You know, I’ll be riffing and improvising and that stuff will sort itself out. No, I actually wrote in every fucking and I was hoping when, you know, because I kind of knew you’d play that. I was hoping you’d have sort of dubbed in some audience laughter.

No, that would sound awful.

Yeah, it would, wouldn’t it? I mean, any stand-up routine written down is a bit odd, isn’t it? But no, I think I either never did it or I did it once and it died and I never did it again.

I thought it was pretty basic, not basic, but you know.

It was basic. No, completely basic.

No, but basic in as much as it should do fine. It may not be blindingly brilliant, but there are some good jokes in there. I could see audiences laughing at that.

Late night, very drunk at the comedy store. They’d have to be. I think by the time I wrote that, I was already falling out of love with stand-up or either the books had started to do better because there was a few years when they overlapped.

There was a crossover.

There was definitely a crossover and it actually became a practical thing as much as anything in that I was starting to have to travel quite a lot to promote the books. And you can’t work as a stand-up without an awful lot of traveling up and down the motorway, two nights in Leicester, three nights in Nottingham, whatever it might be. So I had a young family and I just wasn’t seeing them. And by that time, I’d already been doing stand-up for at least 20 years. And I just thought, really? Well, in 1987. No, no, not by the time I wrote… When did I write that? When was that? That was about 2001. 1997? Okay, I’d been doing it 15 years by then. And I just kind of had enough. It’s a very good job for a single person. I always think that. And if you’re perfectly happy to… Especially if you’ve got an agent and you’re happy for them to say, here’s your schedule for March, here’s your schedule for April, you’re doing these clubs. You can’t do that when you’ve got a family and you’ve got to sit down with diaries. It’s like a military operation trying to figure out what you’re doing. And I’d had enough of sitting in grotty dressing rooms at 3 o’clock in the morning. I mean, I still miss that 20 minutes on stage. I do. I still miss that buzz you get from that, which is a buzz you can’t get anywhere else. And I get some jollies from doing similar things at book festivals and trying to sneak in as many knob jokes as I can into a discussion about literature. But I don’t really miss the rest. I still hang out with comics all the time. I play poker every week with a bunch of comics who keep me up with what’s happening on the circuit. But that was the most embarrassing bit of old stuff I dug out for you, I think.

No, there’s nothing embarrassing about it.

Oh, there’s worse to come, is there? Yes, much, much worse.

Yes. Sorry to interrupt, but if you’re enjoying the show, please do subscribe to The Offcuts Drawer, give us a five-star rating, leave a review, tell your friends about it. All that stuff’s really important for a podcast like this. And visit offcutsdraw.com for more details about the writers and actors, and to find out about future live shows. Thanks for your support. Now back to the interview. I was going to say that Stand Up influenced your novel writing because I read somewhere, well, obviously, Tom Thorne is named after fellow Stand Up, Paul Thorne, apparently. Does he know that?

Yes, he does. And there are also characters in the books called Brigstock, Kitson, Holland. It’s certainly in all the early books. I mean, Thorne’s lasted 20 years, but in all the early books, lots of the characters are named after Stand Ups I was working with.

Do they know that?

Yeah, they do. And I would regularly just get asked, can you put me in this? Can you put… The only time I’ve ever asked was when, now, who was it I made? Who was it I made into a hideous paedophile? It will come to me. It will come to me.

I know plenty of comics who would jump at the chance.

Yeah, but that’s the only time I actually asked permission. I thought, you do need to know what I’m gonna do with your character’s name. Yeah, no, I did a lot of that by then. But it did, if I’m guessing where you’re going with this question, Stand Up did really influence the writing later on, because, you know, as you know, you can’t walk out on stage at the comedy store and go, stick with me, I’ll get funny in about 10 minutes. You’ve got to be funny straight away. And I knew I had to engage the reader straight away and keep them engaged and build towards climax and all that sort of stuff. But also, crime writing uses a lot of the same techniques, you know, in terms of the reveal, the pullback and reveal. When you reveal certain bits of information, the timing is very important. Crime novels are full of punchlines. They’re just really dark ones.

And also, I imagine the maverick, hard drinking, hard living rule breaker, the cliche of the stand-up comedian has quite a lot in common with the cliche of the hard-bitten thriller detective. So, probably not a huge leap to make.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. But one of the things you realize quite quickly about that cliche is that it’s an archetype that you can throw away if you want, but you might be in danger. You can decide you want to write a western, in which you have a cowboy who doesn’t have a hat or a horse or a gun, but he’s probably not a cowboy. You know, there are certain boxes you do have to tick. And there are certainly a lot of things you can do within the genre, and there’s no limits to it. You can, you know, write crime novels, set in space. You can do whatever you want. But there are certain boxes you’ve got to tick, I think.

Right, well, let’s have another off-cut. Tell us about this one, please.

Well, it’s another treatment for a TV show, for a TV panel show from the Throwing Shits At The Wall Notebook of the mid-90s, and this one’s called Hot Air.

Chairman Dickie Branston, DB, overseas crew selection and flight. Flight always, ultimately doomed, crew doomed, DB always survives to fly again next week. Only one celeb will survive the fated balloon journey, different route every week. Panel, four celebs, round one, crew selection. Each panelist given two celebs, broadly speaking, a goodie, much loved public figure, and a baddie, a figure the public love to hate. Up to panelist which one they want to promote and which one they want to ground. One minute to vigorously defend the one they want to see grounded and attack the celeb they want to see stepping into the basket. So Stephen Fry gets Saddam Hussein and Glenn Hoddle. Tony Banks gets Naomi Campbell and Tim Henman. Francis Edmonds gets Chris Evans and Frank Bruno. Panelist gets Tony Blair and Silla Black. At end of round one, DB awards points for originality, wit and good questions and selects the four members of the crew. Now each panellist for the duration of the flight becomes that celeb, vigorously defending their alter ego in the face of an assortment of on-board crises. Round two, altitude. The balloon is losing altitude and we need to lose a crew member. Rather like an old-fashioned balloon debate, it’s strictly every person for themselves and while each in theory has a chance to speak on why they shouldn’t be callously thrown overboard, swiftly degenerates into a free-for-all with DB trying to keep peace as we descend into vicious insult, scurrilous rumour, lying and blatant self-interest. Political figures tend to thrive in this round. At end of round, DB decides which crew member to sacrifice and four becomes three. Round three, dinner time. Crew are starving. One has to become the on-board meal, but which? Each celeb has to actively pursue one another describing how they like them cooked and eaten, with points for originality, recipe-wise and imagination. Ultimate decision, as always, is DB’s. At end of round, one crew member becomes dinner, down to two. Final round, hot air. Each of final two compete to lift balloon. How much hot air can they generate by waffling about their lives, loves, careers, while being shamelessly heckled and sidetracked by other panellists? Losing celeb is yoiked overboard. The celeb-winning panellist is announced, end of flight, with losers to nominate future flight crews for future flights. According to the notes on your script, there were three possible titles for this. Hot Air, which is the one you’ve gone with, Flight To Nowhere or Celebrity Plane Crash. Now that’s the one I like the best. That’s such a bad taste title. I love it.

It is. I still quite like it. Yeah, no, I still like it. Again, I think that would be, you know, one of those programs on Channel 4 or Channel 5 now that you came in after the pub and stuck on. And it’s fatally flawed. Even listening to it, you can see it because when it started, I thought, oh, that’s quite interesting. But then the idea that these panelists have to pretend to be Chris Evans or Cilla Black or boy, those names, all those people that were big celebs back then.

Half of the people are dead.

Yes, I know.

You see, it really does date it. You’ve got names like Tony Banks.

Tony Banks.

On the back of…

And I presume, I mean, Tony Banks, the MP and not Tony Banks, the keyboard player at Genesis.

Presumably, he’s the political figure who would thrive in all that lying.

But I think I looked at it in the cold light of day and went, you cannot be serious. You really think somebody’s going to make that?

Well, they would make it nowadays.

Well, that’s the thing. I do look at some of the stuff that’s on now. I mean, the way panel games have kind of gone with that degree of sort of craziness and bad taste and yeah.

Well, now you’re Mark Billingham, bestselling novelist.

Yeah, I might have more of a chance now.

Obviously, you’ve done a lot of television writing. This was a panel show. I couldn’t find any reference to any panel shows that you’ve written for. You’re mainly children’s television, weren’t you?

I was doing the air. I was doing a lot of kids’ TV drama and animation. I mean, some of which was quite good. But when you’re writing animation, the money for these shows comes from all over the world, from a dozen different countries. So you would get a dozen different sets of notes. You’d put a script in and then you get, here’s a note from France. Here are the notes from Lithuania. Here are the notes from Eurovision. And eventually, you’d go, can you put that stuff back in to the eighth draft that you took out two drafts ago? And you’d start going, life is too short. It really was tremendously hard work just to write a half hour episode of an animated kids show. And some were more fun than others, but eventually I just got heartily sick of it.

But it was while you were writing Night School in 1997 that I believe you and your writing partner had the personal experience of crime violence. I wondered, was that what made you shift from the television children’s writing to crime novels?

I don’t know whether it was quite as clinical as that. What I can certainly say is that when I did start writing the novels, which was only two years later or 18 months later, that fed directly into it.

So what exactly happened?

Definitely. We were attacked and held hostage in our hotel room. We were in Manchester working on this show, Night School, and we’d gone out the first couple of nights, gone out on the town. On the third night, we said, right, let’s stay in and we’ve got to do some work on the script. So you come over to my room. We’ll watch, I remember it was on the telly, we’ll watch ER and we’ll watch University Challenge and we’ll have food delivered to the room. We had pizza and a beer for a fiver each. We were sitting in my room watching telly, talking about the filming we were due to do tomorrow, and there’s a knock on the door. I went, oh, that’s going to be room service, come for the trays. I opened the door just without thinking, and it was three guys in balaclavas who just burst in and beat the shit out of us and put bags over our heads and tied us up and ran around Manchester with our debit cards and took whatever they could take, cash and phones and watches and just threatened to kill us for three hours, held us in there for three hours because this happened at about nine o’clock and they needed to use the cash point cards either side of midnight so they could get two days worth of money. And yeah, it was truly, truly horrible and when I started writing, I thought I want to write about victims and I want to write about what it’s like to be properly afraid, you know, not sitting on a roller coaster afraid, but am I going to see my wife and kids again afraid? So yeah, it definitely, it fed into becoming a crime rights.

Did they ever get caught?

Oh, God, no. No, no, no, no. You know, there was all the police were there sealing all the rooms off and CID were there going and actually they’d never heard of anything like it happening. But it was quite a serious crime. You know, they had gone down for some hard time, these lads. And about one really interesting little detail that I think I put in a book somewhere, quite a few things that happened. I used it as a direct plot point in my second book, but they wouldn’t let us into the room. Obviously, we were put up somewhere else and the room was sealed off. But afterwards, we needed to go back into the room to get a few things. I needed to get some clothes or whatever and I said, can I go back into the room? And I went back into the bathroom and there’s no way to put this delicately, but the people that were holding us hostage had made rather a mess in the bathroom. Just in a way that made it very obvious to me they were as terrified as we were.

Oh, really?

It was a strange little detail, but they had…

So many questions. I can’t actually formulate one of them.

I know. I know. And they got nothing out of it. I mean, what did they get? A few hundred quid and a couple of phones and risking… And why you?

And also, why two people? Surely there’s more of a risk. Surely choose one person.

Well, I think what the police did conclude was that it was some kind of inside job in that they got them on CCTV coming into the hotel and it wasn’t like they wandered around randomly knocking on doors. They came straight up to whatever floor I was on and came straight to my room because I’d ordered room service. But I just think they just knocked on the door thinking that if I get… Because there were no spy holes in the door. And if I’d gone, who is it? They’d just have said room service. And as it is, I just opened the door without… And this was the time I was still working as a standup. I was staying in a lot of hotels. To this day, I don’t feel particularly safe in a hotel. Somebody says, hello, come to change your bed or whatever. I’m like, yeah, I want ID. I want you to sit. I’m not letting you in. You just don’t expect something like that to happen in a hotel room, do you? That was one of the reasons it was so shocking. And weird, little weird details that… I was the one that answered the door. So I answered the door and the guy smacked me in the face and I kind of ran back into the room and these three guys burst in balaclavas. And my mate, Pete, who was sitting in the chair in the corner, literally jumped out of his chair. You know that expression, he jumped out of his chair. I saw him. There was no part of it making contact with the floor or the chair, but it was bonkers. And I think they thought we were a couple, which is the other kind of interesting little detail because at one point they said, give us your pin number or we’ll hurt you. And I was going, oh, oh, oh, oh, I don’t know. And they went, no, give us your pin number or we’ll hurt your mate. And all I was thinking was, hurt my mate. Just fine. We’re not we’re not an item. Yeah, there we are.

God, how dramatic and interesting.

As brushes with violent crime go, it wasn’t too bad.

No. And you lived to tell the tale quite a few times.

I did live to tell the tale and get a few books out of it.

Right. So let’s have one more off-cut. Tell us about this one now.

Well, talking about violence, this is an article I wrote about the notorious murderer Ian Brady in 2017.

It was, of course, the terrible suffering inflicted on their victims by Brady and Hindley that led to their notoriety as the very personification of evil. And while I find it easy to understand the celebration, first of Hindley’s death in 1992 and now her partners, there is one word which has cropped up repeatedly in much of the coverage that, I must confess, makes me somewhat uncomfortable. Monster. For me, it is a word that is too easily trotted out, too convenient. It implies a creature that is somehow otherworldly or supernatural, and sadly Ian Brady was anything but that. It’s a categorisation that allows us to put the likes of Brady and Hindley in a box marked Not Us to point and shudder and say, that’s what monsters look like. I do not have the slightest doubt that Ian Brady was clinically insane. He saw visions and heard voices. That in no way excuses his heinous crimes or diminishes the unimaginable suffering endured by his victims or their loved ones, but elevating these incomprehensible acts to almost mythic levels of evil, while perhaps making them easier to process, is not helpful to any of us in the long run. There have been others who have committed crimes as dreadful as Ian Brady’s. Robert Black, four young girls, raped and murdered. Mohammed Bijay, 16 young boys, raped and murdered. Javed Iqbal, over a hundred boys, aged 6 to 16, raped and murdered. And it would be naive to believe that there won’t be more. It must be at least arguable that defining such criminals quite as simply as we often do, could hinder attempts to prevent such atrocities in the future. In researching the Moors murders, it was actually the actions of Myra Hindley, rather than those of Brady that disturbed me the most. Not because she was a woman, which seems to me the reason she attracted so much opprobrium until her death. That was not, after all, how women were supposed to behave. It went against the laws of nature. It was rather because while Brady’s murderous perversions were rooted in psychopathy, I could find no evidence whatsoever that the same applied to Hindley. Put simply, she did what she did because she loved Ian Brady, because she wanted to please him, which is something I will never understand.

So tell us about this article, then.

Well, this was, again, an article commissioned just after Ian Brady had died, and an article that never ran because I don’t think it was quite what the paper wanted. I think they wanted a kind of response to Brady’s death, similar to the ones I’d seen in an awful lot of the coverage, which was, you know, good riddance to an evil monster. And I wanted to write something a bit more thoughtful than that. I’d already made a documentary about Brady and Hindley some years before that. And I started formulating the kind of stuff that was in that article. I mean, bizarrely, during the making of that program, Brady wrote to me. He wrote me a letter while he was still alive, which is very disturbing. I remember my wife wanted me to destroy it, didn’t want it in the house.

What did it say?

Well, he first of all, he wanted me to know what a terrible time he was having. Well, you know, boo hoo, Ian. But he also wanted to let me know in a kind of real Hannibal Lecter kind of way, how clever he was, literally how clever he was, telling me what his IQ was. It was really important to him that I realized what a smart bloke he was. It was very, very weird. But yeah, in researching that program, I came to the conclusion that Brady was properly bonkers, properly, properly bonkers, but that she wasn’t. And it was all rather odd, also great, wonderful little things emerged. You know, he was apparently on this hunger strike for years before he died. Various people that had personal connections with him, you know, prison guards and so on, were happy to tell me that he secretly hid cream eggs and would stuff his face with cream eggs when nobody was looking. Who would have thought that? But now I stand by it. He lied even about the hunger strike. I mean, I stand by every word of that article, actually. I did think it was a little unseemly, the coverage. And not remotely useful. We do the same thing with any one of these, you know, whether it’s Shipman or Fred and Rose West, we go, they’re monsters and put them in that box over there. That’s what they look like. They’re not us. They’re not. Yes, they are. You know, they’re the bloke next door and the friendly doctor and the neighborhood builder. And, you know, you can’t see them coming. And people always pop up at the woodwork whenever something like this happens. They go, yeah, I always knew they were a wrong one, that bloke next door. No, you didn’t. Of course you didn’t. You know, that’s the whole reason they were able to get away with it for so long. And I just, the word monster, the word evil, I don’t think those words are helpful.

So you never met him then when you were doing the menu making the documentary?

He, I think the program makers approached him. God, I don’t know. I mean, I’ve been in plenty of prisons in the course of, you know, 20 years writing about crime fiction, done stuff with prisoners and whatever. But that, I’m not sure I could have done that. I’m not sure I could sit and talk to him.

Have you ever interviewed people who have committed the sort of crimes that your villains do?

Yeah.

You’ve managed to actually interview these people.

Yes, I have. Yes, I have. And it’s very, very odd. Very, very odd. The best example is a man called Christian Bala, who was a Polish killer.

He was Polish or the people he killed were Polish?

No, he was Polish. Yeah, these serial killers, they all have these weird little quirks with him.

He didn’t like Poles.

He didn’t like people from Poland. No, he was a Polish killer and it was a very notorious case that had been unsolved for many years. Horrible, brutal, brutal murder. And he then wrote a book. He wrote like a novel in which it became clear that it was him. And he was like, again, had this vastly overestimating his own intelligence and his own skill and whatever. And eventually some cops went, hang on a minute, the stuff that happens in this book is awfully familiar. And he ended up getting caught and whatever. And he became a sort of big, cool celeb. But yeah, so I did a documentary about him and I got to go and interview him in prison in Poland. And it was horrible. I mean, he was just, he did have a kind of, you know, much as I’ve said, I don’t like the words monster and evil. He wasn’t like sitting and talking to a normal person. I mean, yeah, it was like sitting to somebody who’s been in prison for a few years. And so that’s always, you know, people become institutionalized. But because this was the BBC, we were making this, he seemed to think that I could help him in some way. You know, I want you to tell my story. I want you to get this out there so that, you know, the truth will be known. Not the truth that I’m not a killer, because everybody, including him, you know, acknowledged it by that point, but that the world will see my genius.

Oh, gosh. Because that was his angle, was it?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, he’s quite convinced that this book, which is called A Mock, it’s called A Mock.

Should we be publicising this?

No, it’s just, trust me, you know, it’s garbage. But he’s convinced it’s a great work of philosophic literature. But yeah, whenever I’ve been into prisons, for whatever reason it is, you never come out particularly cheery. But I don’t think that’s the point.

Right. Time for your final offcut. Tell us about this one.

Yes. Well, I’ve always fancied myself as a songwriter, God forbid. These are the lyrics for a song, I don’t know what you’ve done with this. These are the lyrics for a song which I wrote only last year in 2019. One of many attempts at writing a country standard. This is called The Taste.

When the bottle is laid down upon the table, as I pull across the glass and start to pour, everything I need is right there on the label. Every flavor that a drinker has in store, dark and smoky, honey sweet, it just don’t matter. Not the grain, the malt, the barley or the blend. I can drink it neat, I can drink it down with water. It always tastes the same way in the end. It tastes of the woman I lost and the pain that cost a life I don’t deserve to see. A nice shot of shame and a kick of blame and the man I was supposed to be. The friends I knew and it tastes of you and the money I blew when I was betting. Whatever it says on the bottle, it tastes of forgetting. Around me I see love and I hear laughter. The workings of the whiskey and the beer. But I will never taste a sweet hereafter, so I’ll keep drinking till the memories disappear. It tastes of the woman I lost and the pain that cost and lies that came so easily. Blood, sweat and tears and wasted years with a hint of all the misery. The friends I knew and it tastes of you and now I’m through with the ways I was set in. Whatever it says on the bottle, it tastes of forgetting. Whatever it says on the bottle, it tastes of forgetting.

So what do you say to that?

Well, they’re very, very nicely read. Obviously it needs a pedal steel and a bass.

I thought it worked quite well as a poem.

It has been made into a demo with some music and stuff. Yeah, this has always been a dream. It used to be a songwriter and I’m a huge fan of country music as is my detective. Couple of years ago, I did a put a show together with a brilliant country Americana act called My Darling Clementine, where I wrote a story based around some of their songs and we toured it. We toured around the country and so I was reading the story, they were playing the songs and it was a whole thing.

Did you join in with being a musician or were you just the narrator?

Yeah, I read the story and then at the very end, I came on and did a song with them. Yeah, I’m getting those kicks now as part of a band called The Fun Lovin Crime Writers.

Great name. Great name.

Yeah, isn’t it? There’s six of us and we are of course, crime writers. Three of us, and I’m not one of them, are brilliant, brilliant, proper musicians. The other three of us are just clinging on. Stuart Neville, Irish crime writer, Stuart Neville on guitar, who’s a guitar god. I mean, he’s probably brilliant. Doug Johnston, similarly on drums and Luca Vesta on bass. Then there’s me, Val McDermid and Chris Brookmire up front, and me and Chris thrashed at our guitars and Val sings. And we started this off as a bit of fun two years ago, just to do at festivals and stuff. And then last summer we played Glastonbury. Last summer we were on the acoustic stage at Glastonbury. So it’s all got a bit silly, got a bit out of hand. And we had a big tour. We had a big spring tour that the pandemic managed to put the kibosh on. But yeah, we just do cover versions. We’re a party band. We do cover versions of songs about murder. That’s the gimmick. So songs about crime and murder, you know, I Fought The Law, Falsom Prison Blues, Psycho Killer, you know, that kind of stuff. But-

What about original material?

No, we couldn’t, no, no, no, no. That’s absolutely off the table because if six of us, we’re all writers, can you imagine six of us going, I’ve written a song. No, I’ve written a song. Your song’s shit. I’ve written, you know, it would never work. So we just stick to those cover versions. But secretly I harbor this desire that, you know, I can one day write a country standard and that somebody, I’m going to get a call going, X wants to record one of your songs. I mean, most of the people I’d like to record them are long dead, of course, you know, George Jones and Johnny Cash and all those kind of people. But yeah, it’s something I just do in my spare time is write songs that never see the light of day.

Well, you’ve got to have a hobby, I suppose.

Yeah, I mean, you know, well, recently, I’ve discovered jigsaws thanks to the pandemic. But they’re all music based jigsaws, album covers and stuff. But but no, songwriting is a major passion of mine. I mean, I love the perfect pop song or country song, just two minutes, 45 seconds that can tell you a brilliant story. You know, I love songs that tell stories owed to Billy Joe by Bobby Gentry. You know what I mean? The end of which you just go, what? Hey, what was he throwing off the bridge? Oh, my God. Yeah. Any song that tells a brilliant story, I love.

Do you think that’s what you’re going to be aiming for in the future? I mean, you’ve got 20 books now. Is it not time to make another change, perhaps?

I only if I don’t want to make a living anymore. It’s quite a bold move, Laura. Quite a big step.

The thing is, you’ve been quite dramatic and you went from you wrote two books when you’ve never written a book before. You’re somebody clearly who can make things happen when it needs to be done. You’re not someone who sits around and waits for someone to come to them. So I’m just imagining you’re probably…

Yeah.

All right. Don’t give up the day job as such.

Again, it’s such a weird thing to think that writing these stories has become the day job. I mean, it is the best job in the world and you’ve got to treat it like a job, but it’s not, you know, it’s just telling stories. When my kids are annoyed at me, I’ll just go, oh, shut up, get up to your office and write another one of your stupid stories. And it doesn’t matter how many times I tell them that those little stories have put shoes on their feet, pay for their phones in case they’re listening. You know, no, I do love it. I absolutely love it. Well, I don’t necessarily love the writing, I always love the sitting down and doing the writing. But I love all the perks. I love the, I love standing up at stage on a book festival and gobbling off about it. Events in bookshops and book festivals and, and the stuff with The Fun Lovin Crime Writers. It’s just been a joy. It’s showing off. It’s a showing off bit. You know, the writing has become the job. And you can’t always enjoy your job, can you? Especially when people dig out all the old shit that was never deemed good enough.

Well, to be fair, you were the one who sent it to me because my final question would be, are there any off cuts that you’ve still got that you didn’t share with us today?

There are some bits of old stand up, I think, scribbled in that stand up notebook that, oh boy, no, I couldn’t bear to see the light of day.

That bad?

That bad. Because even when I looked at that one that you did, the one about complaining, I thought, yeah, I know, like you said, probably could get away with that if the audience were drunk enough. But there were bits when I just, what were you thinking? Why did you think anybody would find that remotely funny? I suppose you’ve always got to think you get better at stuff, haven’t you? So I mean, I know that when we first spoke about it, you were like, oh, stuff you wrote when you were a kid or whatever. And I remember the first thing I ever wrote. And if it had been written down, if I could have found it, I would have sent it in. It was a Sherlock Holmes pastiche play that I wrote at school when I was about 12, called The Case Of Sherlock Houses. See what I did there? Genius, genius. The Case Of Sherlock Houses and The Golden Goosberry. I can still remember all of it. That was it. And I put it up in front of the class. Well, me too, but I couldn’t find it. I don’t think I’m not sure. It must have been written down in a school exercise book.

That sounds wonderful. Nervous laughter there.

Yeah, very nervous.

Well, Mark Billingham, it’s been absolutely fabulous to talk to you today. Thank you so much for sharing the contents of your Offcuts Drawer with us.

Thank you very much. It’s been a hoot.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Mark Billingham. The Offcuts were performed by Emma Clarke, Chris Pavlo, Keith Wickham and Chris Kent, and the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutsdrawer.com and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.