CATHI UNSWORTH
The crime writer known as the queen of noir shares the books that have shaped her career as an author
‘My third novel
Bad Penny Blues is republished by Strange Attractor Press, by Mark Pilkington, whom I met working for Bizarre. Bad Penny directly relates to Dora Suarez and Red Riding. It is an evocation of a crime that really did happen – the ‘Jack the Stripper’ murders of West London between 1959-65. Eight women were killed, their naked bodies left in and along the Thames. It sparked the biggest manhunt in Metropolitan Police history but was never solved. When David Peace recommended I read David Seabrook’s true crime account, Jack of Jumps, I realised Ladbroke Grove, my home of the past thirty years, was the central location. Now the home of multi-millionaire bankers and oligarchs, in 1959 you could expect to find: “more boys fresh from the nick, and national refugee minorities, and out-of-business whores, than anywhere else, I should expect, in London town,” according to resident Colin MacInnes in Absolute Beginners, published that year. Trying to make sense of what happened by re-evoking that world ushered me into the same darkness Derek Raymond experienced writing
Dora. But it led me to some inspirational types who were sharing the cheap rooms of W11 then, including students at the Royal College of Art, an institution central to Michael Bracewell’s Roxy book. We are both aficionados of Pop artist Pauline Boty, who I cast in my story as Jenny Minton and who, I discovered, once lived in the house behind the one in which I currently reside. So many strange coincidences dogged the writing of this novel I have written a new Afterword about them. The book’s epigram, about the geography of murder, comes from Lydia Lunch.
‘My writing routine is based on the best advice ever given to me, by Ken Bruen, who I interviewed for Bizarre. “Write
250 words a day, every day and you will have a first draft in six months,” he told me. I promise you it is true and it is what I did while working full time as a sub-editor. My lunch hour was my daily trip down The Time Tunnel.
‘I got made redundant from that job a week before Jordan got in touch. For the next two years I worked more or less full time on Defying Gravity – interviewing people, going through archives and researching the background took up just about every second of my day. Since then, I have been teaching novel writing for Curtis Brown Creative – inspiring work that allows me to put back in some of the support and encouragement that was shared with me. I keep to Ken’s Kommandments by setting aside an hour a day to write those 250 words. Along with Ken’s advice, my own would be to get to the end of the novel at all costs. Everything else can be done in the edit – just keep ploughing on until that first draft is done.’