The Dying Hours (32 page)

Having studied drama at Birmingham University (‘It was a doss of a degree. Three years pretending to be a tree. Great fun.’), he helped found a ‘socialist theatre company’. Influenced by writers such as Edward Bond and Trevor Griffiths, Billingham toured art centres and shopping malls performing self-devised plays about the arms race or discrimination in the workplace. ‘It was 1983. The Miner’s Strike, CND and sexual politics. We didn’t make any money, but it was great.’

After three years, Billingham moved to London to try and make it as a professional actor. By his own admission, he spent much of the time unemployed, winning occasional walk-on parts in television series like
The Bill
,
Juliet Bravo
and
Dempsey and Makepeace
. ‘I played a lot of coppers and villains. In my first TV job, I was blown over a car with a sawn-off shotgun. It is kind of weird. I did a lot of crime even then.’

Frustration with life as an actor inspired a change of direction. An avid fan of stand-up comedy long before it became the new rock and roll, Billingham decided to try his hand after witnessing a ‘frankly terrible act’ at a club in Brixton. He formed a double-act called The Tracy Brothers with Mike Mole, a fellow alumnus of the socialist theatre group.

‘We started off writing comedy songs: original words, original music, very good harmonies. Within six months, we were headlining The Comedy Store and then our act just got worse and worse. Once we’d got to a point where we were doing really well, we stupidly went down the easy route of doing parodies. It is so much easier than actually writing songs, but for some reason audiences think it is the cleverest thing in the world. And it just isn’t.’ Billingham cites a performance at the Comedy Store on the day that George Michael was arrested in a Los Angeles public lavatory. The Tracy Brothers received a standing ovation merely for walking on and playing the opening chords to ‘Faith’. The hastily improvised lyrics were entirely beside the point.

If Billingham’s next transformation – from comedian to author – began with writing the lyrics to these comedy songs, it progressed when he went solo as a stand-up. The culmination came courtesy of ‘the one genuinely brilliant acting job’ he ever had: as Gary, the Sheriff of Nottingham’s less-than-cerebral henchman in Tony Robinson’s BAFTA-winning
Maid Marian and her Merry Men
. Billingham wrote a script, ‘Tunnel Vision’, for the final series, and a career in television beckoned.

While collaboration had previously proved fruitful, its allure was rapidly beginning to diminish. ‘From day one as a TV writer, I thought, this is not for me. I don’t play well with others! At its best, television is collaborative, but sadly, a lot of the time I found myself working with idiots. I was trying to write children’s comedy and having to deal with TV executives saying things like, “Put a rubber chicken in it – kids
love
rubber chickens.” This was at a time when what kids
actually
loved was Vic and Bob or
Blackadder
.’

If Billingham’s enthusiasm for his new day job was waning, then his passion for stand-up was also wearing thin. Today, he can talk almost nostalgically about ‘sitting in horrible dressing-rooms at 3 a.m. thinking, What the hell am I doing here?’ But it didn’t take long before the extended absences from his wife and two young children, combined with the comedy circuit’s intensely competitive atmosphere, began to take their toll.

‘I sometimes miss the company of comics,’ Billingham says now. ‘I play poker once a week with friends from stand-up. I still get that banter which is nice, but trust me, it can be far more twisted than anything you’ll ever hear from a crime writer. If you want sick, you should hang out with comedians. They are competitive by nature because they have to be. Back when I was still doing it and standing in the dressing room waiting to go on, it might have been my best friend on stage before me, but part of me wanted him to die on his arse because it would make my life easier.’

The autonomy provided by writing novels was a way out of this impasse. Billingham’s childhood love of crime fiction had deepened over the years. He had become a collector, amassing a vast library: forced to choose, he nominates Dashiell Hammett’s
The Maltese Falcon
as his favourite crime novel of all time. Having reviewed a number of thrillers for the
Hampstead and Highgate Express
and
Time Out
, he began interviewing his heroes in the genre, like Michael Connelly. It was only a matter of time before Billingham shifted his focus from writing screenplays to narrative fiction.

Back in 1999, Billingham faced two central dilemmas. Should his books be dark or light-hearted? Set in London or Birmingham? To begin with, he chose both. ‘When I tried to write my first crime novel, I was actually working on two books at the same time. I wrote twenty thousand words of a story called
The Mechanic
. Imagine a sub-Carl Hiaasen everglades caper set on the canals of Birmingham. The other novel was
Sleepyhead
, which was much darker and set in London.’

Unable to choose between the two halves of his own character, Billingham sent both manuscripts to the only person he knew in publishing. He was advised to drop the funny one. ‘That’s probably because it wasn’t funny. But I think the other reason it wasn’t working was because of the setting. I hadn’t lived in Birmingham for well over a decade by then. Even though I didn’t quite feel like a Londoner at the time, I instinctively knew I had to write about the streets I was walking down.’

Published in 2001,
Sleepyhead
provided a gothic twist on the classic serial killer investigation. Billingham’s villain was a mass murderer by accident: his gruesome M.O. was sending his female victims into a form of living coma, also known as locked-in syndrome. Billingham looks back on his debut with a mixture of pride and calm self-criticism.

‘I think it takes any writer two or three books before you find your own voice. Before you sound like yourself. I think I was trying very self-consciously to write muscular prose. I had probably been reading too much American hard-boiled crime fiction. It’s what I liked; it’s what I still like. But it’s not necessarily the kind of writer I am.’

The novel also introduced Tom Thorne. Looking back, Billingham has reservations even here. ‘I made Thorne have conversations with the dead, which now just make my skin crawl, it’s so clichéd. I also had him like techno music!’ Billingham rolls his eyes. ‘I realised quite quickly these were the wrong things to do. But the early books are where you make your mistakes.’

In fact, if any one character is the star of
Sleepyhead
, it is the defiant Alison Willetts, the only person to ‘survive’ the killer, albeit in comatose state. This intimate and intense portrait was central to Billingham’s purposes. ‘I wanted to write about victims. I had read so much crime fiction about a killer and a cop as the central collision. The victim is literally no more than a plot device, which is why Alison is the most important person to me in that book. I know about being scared. Not like you’re scared on a rollercoaster or watching a horror movie, but scared enough to wonder whether you’re ever going to see your wife and kids again.’

Billingham is referring to the terrifying night in 1997 when he and his then-writing partner, Peter Cocks, were held hostage in a Manchester hotel room. Having spent the evening working on a script, they were interrupted by a sudden knock. Expecting room service, Billingham opened the door to find three men in black balaclavas. ‘It was just the most surreal moment. I can remember my thought process.
This is a joke. Who the hell’s that?
Getting punched in the face. Realising it’s not a joke when they run in shouting, “Down on the floor or you’re dead”.’

Viewed from the safety of 2013 and his own living room, Billingham can define the ordeal as a lesson in the power of fear and humiliation. ‘We didn’t see a gun or a knife, but the fact is they didn’t need a weapon. They just created a sense of intense panic. They grabbed a bottle of beer and sprayed it all round the room. They turned the TV up loud and shouted.’

Billingham and his friend had their hands bound behind their backs, and bags shoved over their heads. For the next three hours they lay in fear of their lives. Any movement or noise provoked a kick from one of their captors. ‘That was the worst thing: they didn’t go. They wanted to use our cards in cashpoint machines either side of midnight, so that they could get two days’ worth of money. We didn’t know that then. We didn’t know if they were going to kill us. You begin to cramp up pretty quickly. After about half an hour it was complete agony. I just wanted them to kick my head in and go. I just wanted it to be over.’

It is a testament to Billingham’s resilient sense of humour that he finds a grain of black comedy in the aftermath. ‘The adrenalin was pumping. I picked up a chair, Peter picked up a fire extinguisher and we legged it down into the foyer of this hotel. They didn’t have any idea that this had gone on. You’ve got “The Girl From Ipanema” or whatever being piped into this serene reception area and suddenly these lunatics come screaming down the stairs, shouting about being kidnapped.’ The perpetrators were never caught, and continued to haunt Billingham’s imagination for years afterwards. An inveterate hotel guest thanks to stand-up tours, he admits that he never answered a knock at a hotel room door ever again.

This persistent fear found an outlet in his writing: he began
Sleepyhead
just over a year later. One could argue that the coercive power of terror is the defining theme of the entire Thorne series. It is unmistakably present in his breakthrough sophomore effort
Scaredy Cat
: from its title through the sub-plot of hotel room break-ins to the central murder story, in which Stuart Nicklin manipulates his accomplice, Martin Palmer, through sheer terror. It unites the kidnap of Luke Mullen in
Buried
and that of Helen Weeks in
Good as Dead
. Fear pulsates through the finale of
Lifeless
, set amongst the homeless community who inhabit the subways under Marble Arch. And it is on every page of
The Dying Hours
, in which our villain exorcises a long-held grudge by making offers his victims are too petrified to refuse.

What has changed over the years, Billingham argues, is how these killers are portrayed. ‘I think I began almost as a horror writer. My first three novels were certainly marketed according to how scared you were going to be. “Don’t read this when you’re alone!” That kind of thing.’ These almost generically gothic bogeymen have gradually retreated to be replaced by killers driven by circumstance and more naturalistic concerns.

‘There are no such things as monsters. I genuinely don’t believe in evil. It has religious connotations that I’m uncomfortable with. You can characterise something as an evil
act
, but I don’t believe that evil exists as a force. These days, I’m a lot less interested than I was in writing about serial killers. The kind of people who kill because the moon is full or their mum made them wear a dress. I’m far more fascinated by the idea of good people who snap, because that’s something that can happen to anyone. We’re all capable of killing.’

Billingham tells me about the extraordinary murder of Peter Nielsen by Vitaly Kaloyev in 2004. Nielsen was a Swiss air traffic controller held responsible for the crash of Flight 2937, in which Kaloyev’s wife and two children died. Kaloyev took part in the search for bodies, and actually discovered his daughter’s corpse. After a year in which he practically lived beside his family’s graves, Kaloyev finally tracked Nielsen down and thrust a photograph of his family in his face. After Nielsen refused to talk and struck the photograph from his hands, Kaloyev stabbed him to death. He later claimed to have no memory of the murder. Released from prison after serving two years of an eight-year sentence, Kaloyev returned to his home region, Ossetia, as a hero. ‘He was a good person who had never done anything wrong, and was probably never going to do anything wrong again. There was just that one moment when an otherwise good person did something horrific.’

This emphasis on credible, everyday motivations for his characters has pushed the Thorne series in new directions. This hasn’t always been to everyone’s taste. Billingham cites the first review of
The Burning Girl
, which ended his literary apprenticeship (the criminally enjoyable first three novels –
Sleepyhead
,
Scaredy Cat
and
Lazybones
) and signalled his growing confidence as a writer. ‘That review said, “What a shame Billingham has changed a winning formula.” I remember thinking at the time – This is a lesson. If it was a formula then I was absolutely right to change it. The stories were clearly in danger of becoming formulaic. I don’t want that.’

This is only one way of many ways Billingham’s work has evolved over the past twelve years. Technology too has had a different, but no less profound impact on plotting and police procedure, not to mention human relationships in general. This has advanced so quickly during Billingham’s writing career that parts of
Sleepyhead
seem almost quaint. Forget 4G, his early characters weren’t guaranteed to have a mobile phone or an email address. And the scene in which Tom Thorne recalls buying a Massive Attack tape from a ‘smug little git’ in Our Price makes you feel almost tearfully wistful.

Hercule Poirot may have been able to solve crimes by deducing that the narrator committed them, but modern detectives have little recourse to such literary ingenuity: Billingham estimates that ‘Ninety-five per cent of 21
^st
century crimes’ are solved by recourse to mobile phone technology and CCTV footage. ‘Technology has completely changed my writing. There are only so many times that you can say, “The battery on his phone died.” Or, “The CCTV was broken, Guv.” It has definitely made the job harder. You want those gleeful moments of revelation that would make Agatha Christie or Conan Doyle readers gasp because the explanation is so clever. I almost envy writers of historical crime fiction, even though they
really
have to do research.’