Frequently Asked Questions

1. On your website you mention that you learned how to write through your journalist training on the Daily Mirror Graduate Scheme. Is this a path that you would recommend to aspiring writers?

I think any job which requires generating lots of words is a good background for a writer. Journalism worked for me, but plenty of writers come from an advertising or public relations background. As a journalist I had to deliver several thousand words a day, every day, often to very tight deadlines. After you’ve done that for a few years, you are no longer scared by a blank page. You know the words will come.

Journalism is also a big help when it comes to research. A large part of a journalist’s work happens before a word is written, during the researching of a story. Ditto for fiction-writing. Even though you’re writing fiction, generally you have to base your story on facts and those facts have to be obtained, and checked. Journalism prepares you for that. Most of my work is based in the real world, and I’m not afraid of ringing up a stranger and asking if I can pick their brains. That’s what I used to do all the time as a journalist.

You also tend to accept criticism of your work better if you have come from a job where your work is often scrutinised. When I was on the Daily Mail, half of what I wrote never even appeared in the paper. Of my stories that did appear, I’d say that half were rewritten (ie improved!) by the sub-editors. Coming from a background like that, I’m not hurt when an editor suggests rewriting one of my novels.

I also worked as a sub-editor for several years, rewriting and laying-out stories written by other reporters, and that too was great training. You can work on copy without becoming too emotionally involved with it, and that’s very important during the editing process - you mustn’t let your ego get in the way when other people want to improve your work.

2. Your books are well researched, and reality based. Does this come from your background as a journalist?

Very much so. That’s not unusual either, a lot of thriller writers were journalists before they moved into fiction. Frederick Forsyth and Ken Follett, to name but two. It is important when writing a thriller to make sure that the facts you use are correct, from the number of bullets in a gun to the sort of uniform a policeman wears in Bulgaria. Make a mistake and your readers are usually quick to point it out!

Journalists are generally voracious readers, and that also helps as a writer. Ideas can come from anywhere, but more often than not the premise for a thriller will come from an article I’ve read in a newspaper or magazine.

3. You have lived in Hong Kong, America, Ireland, Thailand and England. This has been reflected in your story locations. Which is your favourite location to write about, and why?

I love Thailand, and I have already set two of my books there (The Solitary Man and The Tunnel Rats). Thailand is an amazing place, like no other country on earth, full of contradictions and surprises, and I love to write about it. The problem is, generally my books that are set in the UK tend to sell better, something my publisher is quick to point out!

I also love to write books set in Hong Kong, where I lived and worked for three years. The Fireman is just about my favourite book, it’s probably got more of me in it than any other of my thrillers. I was working as Business Editor of the South China Morning Post when I wrote it, and I came in for quite a bit of flack in Hong Kong because it was seen as an anti-Hong Kong book and everyone assumed that’s how I felt about the place. They didn’t seem to realise that it was character in the book who hated the city, not the author.

I think I captured Hong Kong quite well, and several of the characters in the book are based on people I met there. And lots of things that happened in the book actually happened to me - for instance there’s a scene where the hero finds an injured cat and I wrote that the night it happened.

4. Have you written many short stories?

Not one. Short-story writing is a totally different discipline and one that I’m not particularly good at. Many beginners assume that it is easier to write a short story than a novel, and so when they start writing they try to write short stories. Their plan is to hone their writing skills on short stories before embarking on a novel. That’s a big mistake, in my opinion, because short story writing is much harder, the difference between producing a diamond and building a house. With a novel you have time to develop plots and characters, but in a short story everything must be as perfect as possible. When a lot of established writers turn their hand to short stories, it’s generally disappointing - it’s not fair to point fingers but I think Frederick Forsyth and Jeffrey Archer produce much better novels than they do short stories. I would actually love to produce a book of short stories but I know they wouldn’t be any good!

5. You have placed four excellent stories on your website which are free to download. They are written in different genres. This is a very generous gesture on your part. What motivated you to make them available, rather than put them to one side, in the hope that maybe a future publisher would be interested?

I doubt that they will ever be published, though I do have hopes that one - Private Dancer - will eventually get into print in Thailand. The problem is that all four books are very different from the thrillers that I write and my publisher thinks that they will confuse my readers. (They’re available free at www.stephenleather.com/unpub.html).

Private Dancer is the story of a writer who falls in love with a Thai Bargirl, and the havoc that ensues. It’s written in the first person, from the point of view of all the characters involved, and is based on a lot of stories I heard around the bars in Bangkok.

The Basement is the closest to a traditional thriller but it is quite short and doesn’t really stand up as a novel. Without giving too much away, the nature of the story, and the twist at the end, means that it has can’t be too long or the twist will be too obvious!

Dreamer’s Cat is a science fiction story. I wrote it about ten years ago, and since then there have been a couple of films using the same premise (though I have to say, I was first!). It’s set in a world where virtual reality is a way of life and with an imaginary cat as one of the main characters! It’s actually one of my favourite stories, certainly the most imaginative and the least grounded in reality.

Once Bitten is a vampire story, set in Los Angeles. I think it would make a great movie, but getting a film made in Hollywood is about as likely as a lottery win.

I’m happy for my readers to read them for free. I have a lot of work in print, and I know that people who read one of my books do tend to go on and read them all. Having four books for free seems a nice way of saying ‘thank you’.

6. On your website you have provided information and advice relating to television script writing. Since you have been involved in successful shows, have the doors opened wider for you?

You know, it doesn’t really work like that. Just because you’ve worked on successful shows doesn’t make it that much more likely that doors will open. Television is a dog-eat-dog business, and one I’m not very enamoured with. There is only so much money to go around, and the men and women in charge of commissioning guard it jealously.

Getting a TV project off the ground means endless meeting where you pitch your ideas, and more often than not you are turned down by people who don’t have a creative bone in their body! The fact that I’ve had previous shows made means that they are perhaps a little more likely to have me in for a meeting, but they are by no means more likely to green light a project of mine.

Writing books can be a lonely process, but at least you have effective control of the plot, the characters, and the dialogue. Any editing is done once the book is finished, and every book editor I’ve ever had has been diligent, hard-working and supportive. That is one of the best things about working as a writer, you’re working in an industry which loves the product. People work in publishing because they love books (which is just as well because the pay is generally lousy!)

Television is much more of a collective process, which is fine so long as you are dealing with people who know what they’re doing. The snag is, the British television industry has become a haven for very untalented people who want to work in a creative industry. They can be a nightmare to work with. They want to have input into the creative process but generally don’t have the talent. They do however have the power and control over the money. It isn’t unusual for a story editor who has only been out of university for a couple of years to lecture me on story development! I got told off by one BBC story editor for saying a character gave another character ‘a black look’. Not politically correct, she said. I wouldn’t mind if it had been in dialogue, but it was a stage direction! The same girl then took the following day off because her nanny was ill and the following weekend flew off to Tuscany for a holiday! She also, it became clear, hardly watched any television. That’s something I’ve noticed about a lot of the folk at the BBC and ITV - they work in the industry but rarely watch the product.

I’ve worked on shows including The Knock, London’s Burning, Murder In Mind, and have had two books turned into made-for-TV movies (The Stretch and The Bombmaker) but I still have to join the queue to pitch ideas to TV executives. The doors haven’t opened any wider at all!

7. Will there be a film based on one of your novels?

Two of my books have been filmed as two-parters for Sky One, The Bombmaker and The Stretch. I wish more of my books would be filmed, but it’s such hard work getting a project off the ground. I have been talking to various producers about getting The Tunnel Rats filmed for the last four years with nothing to show for it. That includes me writing half a dozen drafts of the script!

8. Where do you see yourself in five years time?

Still writing. I don’t think I’ll ever stop. I’ll continue to write thrillers, but I’d like to write in other genres too. I’ve just started the first of what I hope will be a series of detective books set in Thailand. They’ll be in the first person, based around a private eye called Bangkok Bob. I have the titles already lined up - Bangkok Bob and the Missing Mormon, Bangkok Bob and the Lovelorn Ladyboy, Bangkok Bob and the Crippled Kickboxer, Bangkok Bob and the Jilted Jockey, Bangkok Bob and the Much-Maligned Monk. All I’ve got to do is to write them! They might never get published, but at least I’ll have fun writing them. I hope to do one a year, so in five years I should have five under my belt. We’ll see.

I hope to write at least one film script that gets made, but as I said earlier, that’s very much a lottery. And I’d like to develop at least one TV series of my own. Watch this space!

9. Would you ever consider releasing a novel written under another name?

Sure. Stephen Leather is a brand name for thrillers, so obviously I should take advantage of it. But for other genres, the Bangkok Bob novels for instance, there would be advantages in putting them out under another name.

10. What part of writing do you find the most difficult and why?

The daily grind of putting words into a word processor. I don’t know any writer who actually enjoys the process. It’s lonely and hard work. The creative side is what I enjoy, producing characters and plots, but I hate the physical typing. Tap, tap, tap, for hours on end. That’s what differentiates the writer from the wannabe writer. A lot of people want to be writers, but they don’t want to write. They spend all their time planning, and talking about, the novel that they plan to write, rather than sitting down and getting on with it. I’ve lost count of the number of people who ask me how to go about writing a book. I tell them to sit down and write a thousand words a day. After four months, you will have a book. It might not be any good, it might need a huge amount of work to make it good, but you will have a book. Ninety per cent of being a writer is stamina.

11. How much time do you spend writing each day?

It varies. When I start a novel I write as few as five hundred words a day, which might well take less than an hour. But I might have spent six hours prior to that thinking about what I was going to write, playing and replaying the scene in my mind over and over again until I get it right. By the end of the book I could be writing three thousand words a day in eight concentrated hours.

I don’t write every day. Sometimes I might go for a month without writing. But I am always thinking and plotting. I tend to write by seeing the scene in my head, like a movie, and describing what I see. If I have a lot of scenes in my head, I write a lot. If my head’s blank, the words won’t come, no matter how long I sit in front of the word processor!

12. How many e-mails do you receive in one day? What are the most common questions?

Considering I get up to three hundred people a day visiting www.stephenleather.com, I get surprisingly few e-mails from readers. Maybe one or two a day. That's good for me because it means I can reply to them all. The most asked question is if Private Dancer is a true story or not. I usually say that it's a novel so it's a work of fiction, but based on events that have happened, if not to me then to people I know.

Several times a week someone will write and ask if I’ll read something they have written. Sadly, I always have to say no. Almost all published writers have to refuse to read unpublished work. It’s too easy to accidentally plagarise someone else’s work. I suggest that they send their work to publishers and agents because it is their opinion that counts, not another writer’s.

13. Which of your novels is your personal favourite and which is your favourite novel from another writer?

I love Private Dancer and am proud of the way it shows the same story from so many different viewpoints. All the viewpoints are slanted, but valid, and by getting inside the heads of all the characters you come to some understanding of why the situation developed in the way that it did. You can sympathise with everyone involved, and even when they do bad things you realise that they are often acting from the best of intentions or because they really had no choice. I think that it goes a long way to explaining why relations with bargirls often go so badly wrong.

The book I've read most often is One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovitch by Alexander Solzheinitsyn. I never tire of it. One man's struggle against adversity, taking small victories whenever he can.

l4. Why did you choose human trafficking as the subject of your novel, THE EYEWITNESS?

I prefer to base my thrillers on real situations, and human trafficking is one of the growth crime areas. It’s becoming even more profitable than the drugs business.

15. Where did you go in the course of your research?

I spent a week in Bosnia and Croatia, and the bulk of the book is based in London, a city I know well. I spent a week with the International Commission on Missing Persons, an organisation set up to identify the war dead in the Balkans. While in Bosnia I met with several police officers and UN workers. In London I spoke to crime reporters and police officers, and met dozens of working girls and their maids.

16. Did you meet prostitutes in the course of your research? Do you really believe they are happy to be on the game? Do you think prostitution should be legalised and if so why?

In all I probably spoke to forty working girls, from high priced escorts to girls in Soho walk-ups who spoke little English. I didn’t meet anyone who would say that they were forced into prostitution, and while that definitely does happen all the girls that I met had made a choice to sell themselves. It was in effect a career choice.

Most would probably prefer to be doing something else, but that applies to most people no matter what job they do. Given a choice, most people wouldn’t want to work in Burger King or man a till at Tescos. They do it because they need/want money. Working girls are the same. They are doing it because it is a relatively easy way to earn money. A did met a couple who actually did genuinely enjoy their work, but they are a real minority.

The fact that so many of the working girls are from abroad, and especially from poorer countries, is because they can earn more in London in six months they could in ten years back in their own countries. A girl working for a big London escort agency can easily earn £200,000 in a year.

Funnily enough, the girls who are the least happy at being on the game seem to be the British girls. They were the most buisinesslike, the most suspicious and the least likely to engage in any sort of chit-chat. They also appeared generally to be bitter about having to do the job.

Girls from South East Asia, the Caribbean and South America seemed to be much more at ease with their role and were happy to chat about how they had got to London and the sort of work they did.

Most decide to work for a set period of time, a few years at most, and save their money to set up their own business back in their own country. Some of the foreign ones end up marrying clients. Most do not see it as a long term career. The ones that do stay on the game for many years are the ones with drug problems or with a pimp, as both drugs and pimps prevent them from saving their earnings.

Prostitution is already legal in the UK. A woman who accepts money for sex is not breaking the law. As explained in the book, it is the offering sex for money - soliciting - or offering money for sex - importuning - that breaks the law. The act itself is legal. The law allows for a prostitute to work from a flat, but not more than one. Though she is allowed a maid who can answer phones and show callers in and out. More than one working girl in a flat means it is classed as a brothel and is therefore illegal.

Providing the girl isn’t being coerced, and she’s not underage, and providing that everything that takes place is consensual, then I personally don’t see that there is a problem.

Even the police accept this. A girl working on her own from a flat is never hassled. Vice are more interested in organised prostitution, girls who are being abused, and illegal immigrants, as well as getting prostitutes off the streets.

The illegality that does occur is if someone is pimping. There is an offence of living off immoral earnings which can be punished with seven years in jail and confiscation of assets. Rightly so because a lot of pimps do pressurise their girls to work.

In my opinion the business should be totally legalised and regulated. Escort agencies could be sold licences, their girls would be taxed and have to have weekly/monthly medicals, and VAT would be charged. (A lot of prostitutes are already registered for tax as they know they will have more problems with the tax authorities than with the police).

I also don’t see why working visas couldn’t be issued to girls from overseas who wanted to work as prostitutes in the UK. That way they could also be regulated, taxed, and medically checked. At the moment the foreign girls are working illegally and so tend to avoid health checks, or talking to the police if they are robbed or abused. Regulation would also solve that. Regulation would offer protection to both parties, to the girls and to the customers.

17. Is your hero Jack Solomon based on a real person?

No, he’s fictional, a blend of several people I know. I do have a friend who is a former policeman who is now based in Sarajevo overseeing the identification of the war dead, but he isn’t Solomon. Generally characters I write about are a blend of real people mixed up with fictional characteristics.

18. At one point Jack Soloman says 'you won't go far wrong if you just assume that people are basically evil.' Is this something you believe?

Nah, that’s Solomon’s bitter and twisted view of the world!

19. Where/when were you born and brought up?

Born in Manchester, in 1956, and was there until I was 18, then went to university in Bath.

20. What ‘real’ jobs have you had?

I had a succession of jobs while I was at school and university, including stocking shelves in a supermarket, working on a farm, working in a bakery, pumping gas at a filling station, working for the Inland Revenue, working as a barman, labouring in a limestone quarry, and working for HM Inspector of Taxes in Manchester and Bath.

My CV after graduating with a degree in biochemistry is as follows:

1978 - 1980. The Daily Mirror Graduate Training Scheme. I spent two years being trained as a journalist and working for local newspapers in the South West of England including the Mid-Devon Advertiser and the Sunday Independent.

1980 - 1981. Glasgow-based Freelance Reporter. I worked shifts for newspapers such as the Glasgow Herald, the Daily Record and the Sunday Mail, and filed news stories for major national newspapers including the Daily Mail, the People and the Sunday Mirror.

1981 - 1982. Features Sub-Editor, the Glasgow Herald.

1982 - 1985. Business Reporter, Glasgow Herald. I also produced and presented a weekly radio programme on Radio Clyde analysing local businesses and industries.

1985 - 1986. City Reporter, Daily Mirror.

1986 - 1986. Business Reporter, Daily Mail.

1986 - 1989. Business Editor, South China Morning Post.

1989 - 1991. Night News Editor (Business), The Times of London.

1991 - present. Full time writer