The Hex Files

WHEN Z-cars creator Troy Kennedy Martin was researching the TV police show, he spent a lot of time talking to rank and file officers. “They told him, ‘The whole world’s going to pot, senior officers don’t know what’s going on, we have all this red tape and don’t have time for ordinary policing’,” laughs author Ben Aaronovitch. “We’re talking 60 years ago, but you could go into any nick and ask a policeman the same questions every single year and you’d get the same answers. So either British policing’s been in continuous decline since then or cops like to moan.”

Having spent a lot of time talking to police officers while researching his gloriously eccentric, two million-selling police procedurals with a twist, Ben strongly believes it’s the latter. But he believes the Thin Blue Line is more stretched now than at any time in recent memory.

“The Met Police had got itself to a good place in about 2008. It had systems in place that caught criminals and could deal with some of the volume crimes people don’t like,” he explains.

“Then austerity came along and cut thousands of officers, and the security situation got worse, and police were being asked to do other tasks. Austerity had an impact on policing; cuts in social services affected them.

“At the moment, the complaint from the police is that they’re expected to deal with all these social problems that shouldn’t actually be dealt with by the law. They’re very grumpy, the grumpiest I’ve ever seen them. They have been staunch supporters of the Tory Party and the Tories came and kicked them in the face with austerity and they are not happy.” This year of Covid and lockdown has undoubtedly made things worse, which is why we should celebrate the wonderful escapism of Ben’s latest paperback.

False Value, the eighth novel in his Rivers Of London series, takes up the story of young black PC Peter Grant, facing fatherhood and an uncertain future as he investigates dodginess among London’s Silicon Roundabout tech start-ups.

Peter is not your average copper – he works for a secretive Met outpost known as The Folly which investigates supernatural crime, using long-forgotten magic to catch lawbreakers. One critic memorably described the first book – Rivers Of London – as what would happen if “Harry Potter grew up and joined the Met Police”.

Ben, 56, laughs: “For me, it was ‘Gandalf joins The Sweeney’. That dates me but I wanted a working-class hero vibe with Peter; you know, ‘You’re nicked, sonny! I don’t care if you’re a werewolf’.

“The series is a police procedural about a young PC who while guarding a crime scene in Covent Garden one night meets a ghost. Instead of running away screaming, he takes a witness statement and comes to the attention of the last official wizard in Britain, Detective Chief Inspector Nightingale. The next thing Peter knows, he’s a trainee wizard and working for the branch of the Met that deals with supernatural crime.”

Ben had the idea while working as a script writer on TV shows such as Doctor Who and Casualty in the 1980s. The working title was “magic cops”.

“Originally, it was going to be a TV series, but at the time the BBC wouldn’t buy anything that had any fantasy element. The BBC hates science fiction. They’d kill Doctor Who in a moment if they thought they could get away with it.”

So Ben stuck it in his bottom drawer and only returned to it years later while working as a bookseller at Waterstones in central London after finally realising his TV career was over.

“I think I upset the guy who was running Casualty,” the affable author admits. “If you upset the producers you never work again, but no one tells you that. There were only about two people who could commission you to get something made.

“The rest of the time you were just talking to associates and doing a lot of speculative work for which you never got paid. They don’t tell you you’re out of favour, you find out when you don’t get paid. I was going bankrupt.”

He continues: “Working at Waterstones,

I suddenly thought, ‘It must be easier to get a book published than a TV series commissioned’, so I wrote a book. I opened the drawer to see what ideas I had and ‘magic cops’ came out.

“I just thought, I’m going to do all the things I’m not allowed to do on TV. So I set it in London, which is expensive for TV, it was going to have more than two black characters, it was going to have plenty of explosions and Mark Two Jaguars, which are phenomenally expensive to have on screen.

“I wanted my hero’s name to be very anodyne like Harry Palmer or James Bond. The more extraordinary the story was, the more mundane it needed to be.

“I was noodling around and the character of Peter Grant popped into my head. I sent him to my school to save time, he grew up around my area.”

Ben wrote book one by getting up at 4am every day before work, while looking after his young son as a single parent.

“As I wrote the first five pages I thought, ‘This is hot, this voice will sell’. The dark secret is that ideas are the easy bit. The hard bit is stringing the words together!”

Despite defying categorisation, crossing the genres of crime, urban fantasy and science fiction – and no doubt sparking debate among former bookshop colleagues about which section it should sit in – it was a hit when it was published in 2011, winning critical approval and an appreciative audience which has grown with each new book.

False Value was a Sunday Times No 1 bestseller in hardback, Ben’s first. “I gave it to a friend and asked, ‘Did you enjoy it’, and he said, ‘No, my mother’s nicked it and she won’t give it back’.

“His mother’s the kind of woman who reads Sophie Kinsella, and books with the rolling hills of Yorkshire and a 1920s-style heroine staring defiantly into the middle distance on the cover...”

After eight books, two novellas and a graphic novel spin-off series, Ben signed a seven-figure deal for his next four books. In a nice twist, the series has now been optioned for TV by Stolen Pictures, the production company run by Hot Fuzz stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.

“They both really like the books so they came running at me, but I’ve got to write the scripts,” chuckles Ben.

Does the books’ quirky, outsider nature owe something to Ben’s left-field childhood in north London, the son of working-class

‘You’re nicked, sonny! I don’t care if you are a werewolf’ ‘We were brought up at a 90-degree angle from everybody else’

intellectual, academic and senior Communist Party member Sam Aaronovitch?

His older brothers Owen and David are, respectively, an actor and a newspaper columnist and commentator.

Ben smiles: “Actually, it was a very normal impoverished middle-class family. I went swimming in the lido, I went to my local comprehensive school. As my brother says, we were brought up at a 90-degree angle from everybody else.

“Back then, I was against racism and apartheid in South Africa before they were fashionable causes. That was how we were brought up. In some cases, the world has caught up.

“Apart from that, families like ours were the same as everyone else’s. Had my dad been a member of the local Conservative Party, I’d have still gone to socials, it just would have been the Tories, not the Communist Party.”

So just how likely is it that the police are hiding a secret supernatural unit?

“The Met does all sorts of things we don’t know about. Not because they necessarily keep them secret, just because people aren’t interested,” says Ben.

“Ask a policeman why they do the job and they say it’s because no day is the same. It attracts people who like a bit of chaos in their lives.”

As for actual wizards, who can say? Fortunately, until we know for sure, Ben’s novels provide a highly entertaining, what if?

False Value (Gollancz, £8.99) is out now. Call Express Bookshop on 01872 562310 or visit expressbookshop.co.uk (UK P&P £2.95)