Patrick Woodrow’s first book, Double Cross, became a No 3 best seller in Taiwan and his books are translated into seven languages, including Chinese. Born in 1971, he came to writing late having worked as a strategy consultant until Double Cross was published in 2005. He sets his stories in exotic locations, and with fast-paced, gripping thrills, he is fast becoming known as the Wilbur Smith of the teenies.
What made you realise you are a writer?
Walking in to WH Smith at City airport in August 2005 and seeing ‘Double Cross’ stacked 3-wide by 4-deep on the New Releases shelf. It was a week before the official publication date and I hadn’t been expecting to find it. I was travelling to Amsterdam to discuss the acquisition of a Dutch boiler manufacturer by a private equity group and I remember thinking ‘Wow! I don’t have to do this anymore.’ Until then it had all been a pipe-dream.
What was the last book you read?
‘Kiss of Evil’ by Richard Montanari, which was re-released in the UK on the same date that ‘First Contact’ was published. We share the same publisher and had exchanged emails a month earlier. I don’t usually ‘do’ serial killers but I wanted to see what had made Richard a regular on the bestseller charts. I was slightly underwhelmed by the plot, which I found rather generic, but it was comfortably one of the best written thrillers I’ve ever read. Economy of expression is essential in a thriller and I’ve never come across anyone who manages to be so visceral and vivid in so few words. I wish I could write like that. The guy is a serious talent.
What achievement in your life are you most proud of?
Would it be terribly smarmy to say being blissfully married in a very happy home with a gorgeous wife and daughter? It would? Right, yes, I see your point. I hung a gate the other day. It’s still standing.
If you were stranded on a desert island which three fictional characters, who would you like to be there with and why ?
Harry Potter. That kid’s had it coming to him for a very long time. Molierè’s Alceste – because I’m not massively sociable either. I reckon we could take one end of the island each and see how long we could ignore each other for. And, finally, Bigwig from Watership Down. Slightly more meat on him than Hazel.
What was the first book you ever bought with your own money?
No idea. Probably something with knights or dinosaurs in it. The first thriller I ever bought was ‘When The Lion Feeds’ by Wilbur Smith. It has the best fight in literature in it.
What phrase do you find is the most played in your head?
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
It’s quite a confident decision to take a year off to write, what led up to that to make it possible, and how does Fast Track fit in?
In 2002 I was an overworked, underpaid management (yaaaaaaawn) consultant. I’d just come back from a year in Singapore, where the economy had tanked after 9/11. But the tax rate had been very favourable compared to the UK so I’d managed to save some money. I’d always wanted to write. Being totally disillusioned with my career, I decided to give it a go. I wrote a spy thriller called ‘Fast Track’, which I cringe at now. It was VERY young and full of autobiographical anecdotes, which should never have seen the light of day. I sent it to a handful of agents. Darley Anderson (who represents Lee Child and Martina Cole) replied within 24 hours to say that he might be able to get me a publishing deal but frankly it wasn’t going to sell many copies. On that basis, he wasn’t prepared to take it on, but if I wrote something else he would be happy to read it. So I sat down the next morning and began work on ‘Double Cross’. The rest, as they say, is a mystery.
Did your friend Boris Starling have any influence on your career?
Boris had just released ‘Messiah’ when I was first thinking of writing a book. ‘Messiah’ became an instant classic and was subsequently serialized by the BBC. I didn’t think for a second that I could emulate his success but he had the grace not to laugh when I told him I was penning a thriller.
You have a first in English from Cambridge but you are known to object to the sort of prose that appeals to literary critics, so is that why you chose the fast paced thriller genre?
I need to clarify here, lest people think I’m a total Philistine. I do appreciate good prose – the second and third pages of The Rainbow by DH Lawrence, for example, are as good as it gets. Anyone who hasn’t read them, should, just to see what it’s possible to achieve with a pen. But too much of it can give you literary indigestion. After three years at Cambridge I had read so much – some of it mainstream, some of it obscure – that I couldn’t remember any of it. What’s the point of reading Anna Karenina and Crime & Punishment in the same week if you can’t remember what happens two days later? After I graduated I was desperate for a decent story, so I began reading thrillers, which were a blast of fresh air compared to sixteenth century voyage literature and Piers bloody Plowman.
In fairness, I don’t object to literary prose at all – just bad writing. A lot of stuff that gets nominated for the Booker is so far up its own arse, you need a torch to read it. Why do people feel the need to describe everything in minute detail? Just get on with the story and leave the artistry to the poets, who’ll achieve a greater effect with far fewer words. I shouldn’t be too disparaging. It’s all subjective, of course. But one man’s meat is another man’s poison, and ‘Middlemarch’ damn near killed me.
You do still like a good word play though, tell us about Dependencies.
Yes, I admit it. I’m a word geek. I love crosswords, anagrams, palindromes. Do geese see god, for example. How cool is that? Word-searches can piss off, mind. They are the sluts of the puzzle world. Cheap, easy, predictable. Meanwhile, over at the original question… Dependencies are words that can only be used in a certain context i.e. they are dependent on another word or phrase for their meaning. ‘Figment’ is the classic example. It can only be used with the words ‘of the imagination.’ Daylights is dependent on ‘the living’, and you can’t swim ‘amok’, you can only run ‘amok’. I am trying to build a definitive list because some things in life are important. I’m also about to start another game to identify words that can only be used as negatives. For example: dismantled, disillusioned, disgruntled. There must be loads.
Where can we take part in this with you?
You’ll find rules and examples of Dependencies on the December 2009 blog on my website (www.PatrickWoodrow/blog). Submissions can be made via email or on my Facebook page. I will be VERY impressed if anyone gets a new one. They are few and far between these days.
You maintain a Facebook Page, you Twitter, can Skype, have you tried the live phone cast Ipadio, and what do you think of all the new media – or does it just stave off social isolation as a writer
Ipadio is part-owned by my best man so I have indeed used it. Not many of your reader’s will know it yet but it’s going to be huge. I very reluctantly started to do Facebook and Twitter on the advice of another author. Despite my initial reservations I have found both to be extremely useful: not so much for self-promotion (which interests no one) but for community, contacts and – in the case of Twitter – philosophy. It turns out there are a lot of very funny people out there, all trying to make sense of life and failing with great humanity. I can relate to that.
I saw from your Facebook page the enchanting video clip of the Tribesmen singing, and it is mentioned in almost every interview that you traveled to Papua New Guinea for your honeymoon. You famously used that experience in First Contact, did you choose the storyline or where you want to go on holiday first for the next book.
For my third novel, the storyline came first. Having written an underwater thriller and a jungle thriller, I wanted to set my next book in the mountains. It starts in the Pakistani Himalayas and then moves to Argentina and the South Atlantic via London and Northampton. I haven’t been to the Himalayas yet but I have climbed to 6,000m in the Andes so there’s a bit of experience to draw on.
Just for fun and because your first book, Double Cross, features a hero called Ed, and your second, First Contact, is set in the jungle, I wondered whether you had heard about Ed Stafford, a real-life adventurer who is walking the Amazon from source to sea? How do you think he would fare in a fight with your own Ed?”
I’ve just checked out the website and walkingtheamazon looks hardcore. That is a genuine adventure. I’m immediately envious. Stafford looks the real deal – but, listen, he’s gonna get his ass kicked by Strachan. Strachan has three things going for him. One, he knows Krav Maga, which teaches you to escalate any violence you encounter without thinking about the consequences. Two, he’s quite happy to fight dirty. And, three, he’s lucky. That’s a pretty powerful combination. It would be over before Stafford could say “athlete’s foot”. I wish him well, though. Hell of an achievement.
Travel, writing, scuba diving or six nations .. what order for you?
I’ve recently become a Dad and the stone walls around the garden have all fallen down after the snow and ice. So – on the basis that I currently have neither time nor money, it’s: (i) Six nations (ii) writing (iii) travel (iv) diving.
Tell us a where railing against incinerators fits in?
You can’t destroy matter. You can only change it. So when you burn waste, it doesn’t just disappear. Some of it turns into tiny particles of dioxins and furans, which are too small to be trapped by an incinerator’s filters. They end up being dispersed on the wind and are subsequently inhaled by local populations. The scientists haven’t been able to prove a causal link yet but the fact that infant mortality is higher downwind of over twenty major incinerators in Britain than in corresponding upwind areas is unlikely to be chance. Oxfordshire County Council is planning to build an incinerator the size of Arsenal football stadium on the edge of the Cotswolds. It’s a hopelessly myopic scheme because safer, less polluting, more efficient technologies exist. I’ve been heavily involved in the campaign to stop it because our area has the highest recycling rates in the entire country and we simply don’t need one. I’m going to have to stop myself there otherwise we’ll be here all day…
Thank you for giving us your time. Finally, how did you get involved in the Book Swap night?
My pleasure. This has been a fun set of questions. My publicist at Random House sent Scott Pack a copy of First Contact and suggested I would make a good guest. Scott doesn’t normally read thrillers and I think he was looking for a change. Fortunately, he didn’t hate the book. Really quite enjoyed it, I think. (Which is just as well because he’s not afraid to speak his mind).
What do you hope to achieve with the evening?
This will be the first time I’ve been on stage since my primary school nativity play. If I can get through the evening without making a total tit of myself, it will be grounds for wild celebration in the Woodrow household.
Can you give us one good reason to come along?
My wife’s lemon drizzle cake is world class.
- The Book Swap with Patrick Woodrow in on the 18th February 2010
at the Firestation Arts Centre, 7.45pm
more can be found about
Partick Woodrow here:
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