I can write what it’s like to be afraid pretty well... because I was once held hostage and beaten
BESTSELLING author Mark Billingham admits he never expected to still be writing about Detective Inspector Tom Thorne 20 years after creating him on a whim in his first novel. He is “astonished” to be on his 20th book, Cry Baby, a prequel to his debut, Sleepyhead, which sees the no-nonsense detective investigate a child abduction in north London in 1996.
In this book, set while England were hosting the European Football Championship, Thorne is a detective sergeant before being promoted in the longrunning series.
Billingham says: “The first book was not even supposed to be about Thorne, it was about the victim.
“I just needed a police officer because a crime had been committed, so I just stuck him on the page, little knowing that I would still be writing about him 20 years later.
“That is absolutely astonishing to me.”
The father-of-two, 59, who lives in north London, started writing the Thorne series after working as a scriptwriter for Granada TV while also a stand-up comedian and actor. For the first two novels, Sleepyhead and Scaredy Cat, he channelled his own harrowing experience as a victim of a violent crime while working for Granada in Manchester in 1997.
“I got held hostage in a hotel room,” he says.
“Three masked guys broke into my hotel room in Manchester, beat the **** out of me, put a bag over my head and tied my hands behind my back and held me hostage in the room for about three hours because they wanted to use my ATM card either side of midnight. “They took my watch and rings, my mobile phone and my plastic cards – and threatened to kill me.” As Cry Baby is set a year before this ordeal, writing it took Billingham right back to that night.
He says: “The tone of the prequel is really dark and I guess I haven’t written anything that isn’t informed by what happened in that hotel room. It’s always in the back of my head when I’m writing and I think I can write about what it’s like to be afraid pretty well, I do draw on that stuff when I need to.
“I know that as violent crimes go it was extremely mild. It was not like I was badly injured, it was just a few hours of terror.
“Certain moments of it really stick with you, I can remember all the details of a training shoe of one of them as that’s all I could see as I was on the floor with a bag on my head and he would lean down and lift the edge of the bag up to try and get information out of me, like pin numbers.
“All I could see were his training shoes and I still get a little shiver when someone runs past me in a pair of white training shoes.”
The thugs, who were never caught, also left him with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which wife Claire, a TV director, helped diagnose while researching the condition for BBC drama Our Girl.
“I still dream about it occasionally and there is a degree of PTSD,” says Billingham. “It is a huge family joke but any loud noise, anything that happens suddenly, I just react in a ludicrously over the top way.
“If my wife comes into a room behind me and I have not heard her come in and turn around and see her, I don’t just jump, I scream the place down.
“This is manageable, it’s not something that I have to seek help for but it’s a constant reminder of what happened.”
The compassion in which he writes
about victims of crime has helped all 19 of his previous novels become bestsellers, with more than six million copies sold across the globe and his books translated into 30 languages.
The first two, Sleepyhead and Scaredy Cat, were adapted for a Sky One series back in 2010 starring The Walking Dead’s David Morrissey as the down to earth detective.
Another three episodes were in the pipeline when a new head of drama came in and let it go. Billingham was contacted by TV executives keen to resurrect Thorne earlier this year, when advance copies of Cry Baby were released.
He says: “I still talk to David Morrissey about it quite a lot and in fact he is playing Thorne again in special dramatised audio version of Cry Baby, which is something we have never done before. He would play Thorne again on TV in the drop of a hat, he has always said that and every so often there is interest in rebooting it again.
“There have been some discussions, so I just don’t know but fingers crossed.
“I have signed a deal for developing one of my standalone books, Rush Of Blood, in the US but I can’t really say too much about that.
“Lockdown has put all that on hold, so I really don’t know what is happening, other than that they have bought it.”
ANOTHER standalone book (but connected to the Thorne universe), In The Dark, was adapted with Thorne novel Time Of Death for a BBC miniseries with Twilight and Ripper Street star Myanna Buring in 2017.
Billingham adds: “I am lucky that I have had two TV adaptations, I was unlucky they did not run for longer but I am not going to complain.”
He keeps himself busy, crossing over into the music world too. He performs with rock band Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers alongside the likes of fellow bestsellers Val Mcdermid and Chris Brookmyre – they appeared at Glastonbury last year.and he recorded a critically acclaimed album, The Other Half, with trendy UK country band My Darling Clementine, Billingham’s narrated mystery Western love story set against beautiful songs – with guest appearances by David Morrissey as well as singer Graham Parker.
He has enjoyed taking Thorne back to 1996 in Cry Baby but was surprised by how much has changed since those days.
He says: “It felt like I was writing a historical novel – it was so weird, you don’t have to go back too far before it feels like you are writing about hansom cabs.
“Writing about a time when you used an A-Z book to get around and you got your photos developed at the chemist, which kids would laugh at now but seemed perfectly normal at the time.”
His working methods also hark back to the past – he uses pen and paper, and makes his corrections on manuscripts in red pen.
But Cry Baby will be the only book looking back to the old days: “It would be a bit weird to be writing two different series with the same character at the same time.”
Meanwhile the future is busy... he’s written another novel during lockdown – it’s set for next summer – and is planning another Thorne novel for 2022.
Billingham is driven by his whirlwind lifestyle. “I would not know what to do if I did not have another book to write,” he says.