An Interview with Abir Mukherjee

And don’t forget to cast your vote to decide who will take home the UK and Ireland’s most coveted crime fiction writing award.

Tell us your story – when and how did you start writing fiction?

It was a bit of a mid-life crisis. I’d spent my whole adult life working in finance. I was thirty-nine, hurtling towards forty and I thought, there has to be more to life than this.

Then I saw an interview with Lee Child on BBC Breakfast where he talked about how, at the age of forty, he started writing, and I thought, why not, I’d always wanted to write a book but had never had the confidence, and anyway, it seemed safer than buying a motorbike and piercing my ear.

I started writing A Rising Man in September 2013, and a few weeks later, I came across details of the Telegraph Harvill Secker Crime Writing Competition, looking for new and unpublished crime writers. The judges wanted the first five thousand words of a novel, together with a two page synopsis of the whole thing. By this point I’d already written about ten thousand words, so I tidied up the first few chapters, wrote the synopsis and sent off my entry. By some miracle, I won, and it changed my life.

We’ve heard of some unusual writing habits over the years, what would you say is your most interesting writing quirk?

I can only write fiction while sitting on a bed. I can only write non-fiction sitting at a desk. Is that weird?

What’s the one line or paragraph you’re most proud of in your shortlisted book?

He rose to his feet.

And ran.

Running was what men like him did. It was the only course of action the powerless had in the face of the strong. Running, from their homes, their villages, their countries, not because they were weak or lazy or cowardly but because the only alternative was to give up, to surrender and die.

Let’s say you’re going rogue: which crime fiction villain would you most enjoy being (just for research, of course)?

Brilliant question, simple answer: Tom Ripley! Who wouldn’t want to be a charming, cultured, and utterly amoral, manipulator and murderer?

Which writers have influenced your own writing the most?

I owe so much to so many great writers, people like William McIlvanney and Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay (he’s the godfather of Indian crime fiction), it really is a case of standing on the shoulders of giants, but I suppose I’ve been most influenced by two of the greats, Philip Kerr and Martin Cruz Smith.  I love books about good but flawed heroes upholding evil systems and Kerr’s Bernie Gunther and Cruz-Smith’s Arkady Renko are the best.

You’re cast in a gritty crime drama. Are you the detective, suspect or the wildcard witness?

I’m the killer, mate. And I get away with it!

What book would you always recommend to someone who “doesn’t usually read crime”?

The Long Drop by Denise Mina. It reimagines the events surrounding the real-life 1958 trial and execution of Scottish serial killer Peter Manuel and centres one night in 1957 when Manuel spent hours drinking with William Watt, the man whose wife, daughter, and sister-in-law Manuel is accused of murdering. It’s more than just a novel, it’s a study into the human mind.

What’s the best book you’ve read recently?

White City by Dominic Nolan – It centers on a real-life robbery of a mail van in London in 1952. It focusses on the impacts of the robbery on two families whose fathers fail to return home from work that day. Dom Nolan is a terrific writer and should be on every crime fiction afficionado’s reading list.