Author Interview

John Bennett talks to Caroline Lindsay about his new book and offers tips to would-be writers

In a way life has gone full circle for John Bennett. “I started my professional life as an editor, before moving into digital start-ups back in the 1990s,” he begins.

“I was made redundant during the dot com crash in 2002 and decided to go travelling, and when I was in China I decided to start writing.

“My first novel was published in 2006 by Random House in the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany, but by that point I was getting married and having kids, and I needed more to live on than the average novelist makes, so I decided to go back to work in the digital world.”

“I came back to writing in the last year or so, and decided to give it another go – The Summer Crew is, I hope, the first of several more books.”

The Summer Crew is set in the late 1980s on the salmon netting at the mouth of the River Spey and John explains the inspiration behind it.

“Summer Crews, which were a mix of permanent employees, students and part-time workers, were hired to fish the summer grilse run for the months of June, July and August,” he says.

“The book follows the progress of the new recruits as they struggle to learn the ropes and integrate with the older, more experienced crew.

“For the most part it’s a broad, gently comic look at Scottish rural life in the vein of Para Handy or Compton MacKenzie – there are chapters about local agricultural show, the village fete, a grouse shoot and the wider community beyond the salmon fishing.

“However, towards the end of the book, as summer comes to an end, the tone of the book changes, the salmon fishery is facing hard times, and difficult decisions have to be made.”

While the two books John has written have a strong strand of humour in them, he reveals it’s hard to get people to laugh out loud at a book. “So I get inspired by writers who can do that, anyone from PG Wodehouse to Joseph Heller to Neil Munro whose Para Handy tales were a definite inspiration for this book,” he says.

“If you, or someone you know, likes Para Handy or Auf Wiedersehen Pet or Whisky Galore, then this book’s for you, or them.”

His top tip for would-be authors is to start by writing about what you know.

“I worked on the salmon nets, so it was easy to write about that world,” he says. “Obviously that doesn’t work if you write science fiction, but it’s a good place to start for most people.

“Also, don’t worry if the first draft is a bit rubbish, writing is mainly rewriting. Keep going, get it done, then figure out what’s wrong with it, fix it and do it again and again until it’s right.”

John is currently working on a couple of other projects and he reveals some exciting news: “There’s television interest in The Summer Crew, so I might well be doing a bit of writing for that.”

The Summer Crew by John Bennett is published by Spey Books, £8.99.