Angels, demons and serial killers

Steven Savile is an acclaimed horror, fantasy and thriller-writer with around half a million sales to his name. He’s also a friend, and we often meet up in Stockholm to chew the fat over coffees and blueberry muffins. I’ve only read one of Steve’s many novels so far (though I intend to rectify that): Silver. This is a slam-bang action thriller about an off-the-books international counter-intelligence team trying to stop a terror plot by religious disciples of Judas Iscariot. Yes, you read that last bit right. It’s a rollicking thriller in the vein of Lee Child, but it’s also very well researched and rather scary.

That came out in January, and Steve is now working on the sequel (titled Gold, naturally), as well as a slew of other projects, as he tends to do. Last time we had coffee he told me about one of these that has just come to fruition. His first novel, which he wrote at the age of 19, has been out of print since 2000. Steve wrote it on obsolete floppy disks, but managed to find someone who could recapture all the information from them. Reading it through again, he decided he was rather proud of it, and he has now published a digital edition for just 99 cents (until August 1), with some haunting artwork.

Here's a brief synopsis:
'Gabriel Rush takes a photograph of a beautiful sad-faced hooker in a downtown bar and is stunned by what he sees when the picture is developed. At first he thinks it is a flaw in the photograph, but then he recognizes it for what it is, the mark of the Trinity Killer. It is the same mark that scars the faces of mutilated corpses that are turning up all over New York City. Racing to warn the woman, Gabriel instead finds himself haunted by visions and fighting against time to save his future, the woman he loves, his friends, and – when the killer’s identity is finally revealed – his own sanity.'

And here's Steve with a brief explanation of the novel's genesis and what it means to him. 

The Last Angel

By Steven Savile

In my final year at university I knew I wanted to be a novelist, just knew, and sat down at the typewriter intending to prove it.

I wrote the first draft of The Angel of Pain (which became The Secret Life of Colors and eventually The Last Angel) late at night. I had it in my head that a 'scary' novel would benefit from the whole heart of darkness creation. Thomas Harris had just released The Silence of the Lambs, and I'd just watched Angel Heart in the uni cinema and couldn't shake the idea that it'd be fun to write Silence meets Angel Heart, so that's what I set about doing. Looking back now, I am immensely pleased with the result. It was long-listed for the Best Debut Novel for the Bram Stoker Awards and the British Fantasy Society Awards, sold out its short print run in a matter of days, and has been out of print for a decade.

The Kindle gives it a fresh lease of life, but I've resisted the temptation to tinker, leaving it as the 'young me' wrote it. I can still remember writing the end. I had maybe 500 words to do when I started the day, but those 500 words were the hardest of my life and left me physically shaking and sweating and just flat out beat. I lay on the floor in the lounge, to all intents and purposes unconscious, but it didn't matter. I'd done it – I'd written my first novel. It went out to 10 agents the next day and within a week had offers of representation from eight of them. It then went out to publishers and, well, from there that's where the story of my 'overnight success' begins.

The Last Angel is available at Crossroad Press, Smashwords, and Amazon.

Favourite thrillers: Meg Gardiner on Seven Days In May

London-based American thriller-writer Meg Gardiner is the author of the best-selling Evan Delaney and Jo Beckett series, and counts among her very vocal fans one Stephen King, who in 2007 wrote a whole column advocating her talents, calling her ‘as good as Michael Connelly and far better than Janet Evanovich’. Her first novel, China Lake, won an Edgar. Her eighth novel, The Liar’s Lullaby, is published this week. On July 25, she will be hosting the panel James Bond, Eat Your Heart Out at the Harrogate crime writers’ festival, featuring Jo Nesbø, Zoë Sharp, Sean Black and me.


Here she is on one of her favourite thrillers.

Seven Days in May by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W Bailey

By Meg Gardiner

Seven Days in May hooked me when I was young, and hasn’t let go. It was the first political thriller I ever read, the story of an attempted military coup against the U.S. government. I saw the movie on TV when I was a kid—the excellent film starring Kirk Douglas, scripted by Rod Serling. It chilled me, just grabbed me around the throat. Then I found the novel, by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey. The book gave me the chance to spend more time with the story, so I couldn’t wait. I dived in and didn’t surface till I’d finished it. (Yes, I was a goofy, academic tweener, who read political thrillers beneath the boy-band posters on my bedroom wall.)

Written during the height of the Cold War, Seven Days in May tells the story of the impending coup, led by a charismatic general, and the desperate attempt by the President and loyal military officers to stop it. As the clock ticks down, the tension ratchets up. It’s relentless. The stakes couldn’t be higher: first the end of constitutional democracy in the United States, then nuclear Armageddon. Because, if the coup succeeds, the U.S. will fall into the hands of men who think they can win an all-out thermonuclear war with the Soviets.

The book contains not one single gunfight, not one car chase, but the suspense is amazing. The villains are calculating, self-righteous, and utterly ruthless: people whose fear and arrogance combine to justify their lust for power. The heroes are flawed but noble. They fight back while trying to hold onto their honor—because preserving the Constitution is deeply honorable, and worth risking their freedom and their lives for.

For a junior thriller reader, it was nailbiting, inspiring stuff.

It still is. Think I’ll go dig it out and read it again.

For more information about Meg Gardiner, visit http://www.meggardiner.com

Favourite thrillers: Tom Cain on Wilbur Smith

Today's guest post is by Tom Cain, the pseudonym of an award-winning journalist with 25 years experience working for Fleet Street newspapers, as well as major magazines in Britain and the US. He is also the author of a series of thrillers featuring Samuel Carver, ‘a good man who makes bad things happen to bad people’: The Accident Man, which was shortlisted for the Theakston Peculier Thriller of the Year, and three sequels, The Survivor (published as No Survivors in the US and twice nominated for a Barry Award), Assassin and Dictator. The series has been optioned by 20th Century Fox.

Without further ado, then, here is Tom on one of his favourite thrillers.

The Leopard Hunts in Darkness by Wilbur Smith

By Tom Cain

In 1985, I was commissioned by the Sunday Times Magazine to write a story about an improbable European Cup-Winners Cup tie between the mighty Real Madrid and the minnows of Bangor Town. This necessitated an incredibly long train journey to the far north-west of Wales. By the time the train had got to Crewe I’d finished the book I’d brought with me, so I dashed onto the platform, sprinted to the bookstall and bought the first vaguely interesting-looking thing I could see: The Leopard Hunts in Darkness by Wilbur Smith.

I’d never read any of Smith’s stuff before and so had not experienced his style of unashamedly traditional swashbuckling adventure. This one was set in Zimbabwe and as I recall culminated in a brilliant, extended chase sequence across what felt like half of southern Africa that kept me completely gripped through the journey to Bangor and quite a lot of the way back. The Sunday Times piece never ran, but that book got me reading Wilbur Smith and really made me think what fun it would be to try to write books of similar scope and excitement. Almost twenty years later I finally started work on what would become my first thriller, The Accident Man. Of course, I have a host of influences, from Ian Fleming to 24, but the sheer, visceral pleasure I derived from the experience of reading The Leopard Hunts in Darkness is something I still try very hard to give my readers today. And now the wheel has come full circle. My latest book, Dictator, is set, in part, in a fictional country called Malemba, located north of South Africa, west of Mozambique… and not a million miles from Zimbabwe.

Tom Cain’s latest Sam Carver thriller, Dictator, will be published in August by Bantam Press, £12.99.

Favourite thrillers: Matt Hilton on David Morrell

Free Agent was selected by the Daily Telegraph as one of its thrillers of the year for 2009. Also on the list were:

Dead Spy Running by Jon Stock

Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child

Innocence by David Hosp

Trust Me by Peter Leonard

The Last Child by John Hart

The Dying Light by Henry Porter

Dead On Time by Meghnad Desai

Lockdown by Sean Black

Dead Men’s Dust and Judgement and Wrath by Matt Hilton

Sean Black posted here on Tuesday on his favourite thriller, and today it’s the turn of Matt Hilton. A former policeman, Matt burst onto the scene last year with Dead Men’s Dust, a tough and fast-paced thriller that introduced former counter-intelligence officer Joe Hunter. He has since published two sequels to it, Judgement and Wrath and Slash and Burn, with the fourth book, Cut and Run, out in August. Here he is on one of his favourite thrillers.

The Brotherhood of the Rose by David Morrell

By Matt Hilton

Mention David Morrell and a name that immediately springs to mind is that of his most famous literary creation, John Rambo. Now, while First Blood was a landmark novel and firmly set the bar for any author writing in the thriller genre, not to mention earning David Morrell the title of ‘The Father of Modern Thriller Fiction’, it isn’t the book that has influenced me so much as another of his.

For me, Morrell’s The Brotherhood of the Rose (1984) is a book that all other action thrillers should be judged by, particularly those dealing with espionage, assassins and hidden government agencies. The story sounds clichéd these days, but that’s because so many other authors have used elements from Morrell’s book, and in its day it was a first. As an author writing in a similar field, I feel that I owe a lot to The Brotherhood of the Rose insofar as I have borrowed the idea of a hidden assassination bureau to give back-story to my own character of Joe Hunter. The Brotherhood of the Rose introduced me to the kind of thriller fiction I’d been longing to read, but had never found before, and as such, all these years later remains one of my favourite books in the field.

In short, The Brotherhood of the Rose is built upon a pact of secrecy among various intelligence agencies, and they run a network of safe houses throughout the world (The Abelard Sanction) wherein agents are forbidden from taking action against each other. Members of the brotherhood each cultivate and train loyal assassins from a tender age, and the book concentrates on two orphans, Saul and Chris, who discover a conspiracy of murder and are targeted for death by their ‘father’, Elliot. When Chris is killed, Saul seeks revenge on the man he loved as a father and in the act contravenes the ‘Abelard Sanction’ and the stage is set for a thrilling chase and counter-attack that sees Saul going up against the most deadly killers the security agencies can send against him.

Two further books formed a loose trilogy, The Fraternity of the Stone and The League of Night and Fog, and David Morrell even revisited Saul’s character to pen the short story The Abelard Sanction for inclusion in 2006’s bestselling anthology Thriller: stories to keep you up all night (Mira Books).

A TV mini-series starring Robert Mitchum (Elliot), Peter Strauss (Saul) and David Morse (Chris) aired in 1989, and I’ve heard recent whisperings about a new Hollywood treatment of the book. I can’t wait.

Matt Hilton is author the Joe Hunter thrillers. See http://www.matthiltonbooks.com/ for more information.

Favourite thillers: Sean Black on Gregg Hurwitz

The Debrief has now been going for three months, and I thought it was time to stretch its scope a little. So today I proudly present the first in a series of guest posts by thriller-writers on their favourite thrillers. Kicking us off is Scottish writer Sean Black, whose debut Lockdown, published in hardback last year, introduced ex-military bodyguard Ryan Lock. The Daily Telegraph picked it as one of their thrillers of the year, while The Daily Mail wrote that Lock confronts ‘one of the finest female villains since Ian Fleming’s Rosa Klebb with a style that would bring a smile to the face of his spiritual father – Lee Child’s Jack Reacher’. High praise, indeed! Sean and I will be appearing together on the panel ‘James Bond, Eat Your Heart Out’ at the Harrogate Crime Writers’ Festival on Sunday, July 25 (details here).

And now, without further ado, here’s Sean on one of his favourite thrillers.

The Kill Clause by Greg Hurwitz

By Sean Black

Sentence for sentence, paragraph for paragraph, chapter for chapter, Gregg Hurwitz is one of, if not the, greatest thriller writer working today. The first book of Gregg’s that I read was The Kill Clause, the first in a quadrilogy featuring US Marshal Tim Rackley. A profound meditation on violence and vigilantism, these four books somehow manage to transcend the blurb hype emblazoned across the covers of so many titles.

Gregg manages to combine prose which forcefully rebuts those who claim that thrillers can never compete with the wordsmanship of literary fiction, and a masterful control of narrative with an often coruscating examination of both classic and contemporary themes. There are no chinks in this writer’s armour. He is, to my mind at least, the complete package.

Since the Rackley series, Gregg has moved on to write a number of self-contained Hitchcockian thrillers. The latest, which is entitled Or She Dies in the UK (They’re Watching in the US) is a great place to start reading the man that esteemed US critic David Montgomery dubbed ‘the best thriller writer you’ve never heard of’. If you’ve read this far, then you no longer have that excuse.

Sean Black is the author of the Ryan Lock series of thrillers. The first book in the series, Lockdown, is published in paperback by Bantam on the 24th of June. The sequel, Deadlock, will be released in hardback by Bantam/Transworld on the 22nd of July. See http://www.seanblackbooks.com/ for more.