The Idea of Death - An Interview with Mark Blacklock and Austin Collings

On June 26th, Mark Blacklock and Austin Collings are appearing together at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester to discuss how death, shock, trauma, brutality and macabre figures from British crime history have informed their writing. Blacklock's debut novel, I'm Jack (reviewed here), published this month by Granta, is a fictionalised account of the 'Wearside Jack' hoax, which seriously derailed the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. Collings' collection The Myth of Brilliant Summers (from Manchester-based indie imprint Pariah Press, and reviewed here) explores life on the outskirts of cities, filled with menace and decay. Here, they discuss crime fiction, media reporting of sensational cases and the blending of fact and fiction in their work.  

Whereas 'Golden Age' crime fiction tended to focus on the detective, in both cases you are more interested in the perpetrators of crime. Could you see yourselves writing in the 'procedural' style in future, or is it not something that interests you, personally?

MB: I’ve no immediate plans to do anything like a police procedural, although I can see that it could be interesting to deploy similar compositional strategies to those used in I’m Jack, particularly with regard to recreated forms of documentation, within the more formal arrangement of a police procedural. It could be interesting, particularly, to see how far the generic expectations of that form could be warped. But by and large I find the procedural form fairly conservative and doing something that conforms to those traditions wouldn’t be of much interest.

AC: As with certain musicians who are incapable of writing a hit record I think I’d struggle to master the formula. When Elmore Leonard or Richard Price are at the helm then you know you’re in capable hands but it is ultimately a limited template that aims to find a solution in the chaos one way or another and that doesn’t interest me greatly. I’m also drawn to works that almost refuse to be what they are: thrillers that are not quite thrillers etc. One of my favourite crime films is The Offence starring Sean Connery and directed by Sidney Lumet, released in 1972. A savagely open-ended study of corruption and mental breakdown, it was shot in Bracknell but the place remains nameless in the film. It could be any drab part of England, any anonymous pocket of concrete, any child-molester's heaven, where girls are found crying in local woodlands and coppers are burnt-out like dropped wet matches. It’s a film that seems tattooed into the downbeat world-view of crime-writers like Derek Raymond and David Peace and co.

In your work, you both make much of the disparity between the significance of criminal acts, and the relative insignificance of the people who commit them. Do you think that there's a problem in the way that the media tends to report high-profile cases, putting the perpetrator at the centre of the coverage?

MB: I’m Jack is a story about a media intervention that went tragically wrong. I think of the hoaxer as a vanguardist for trolling and mediation is a key thematic of the book.

This is the heart of the thing, really. Unless we are directly affected as victims of crime, we all encounter these events as already mediated and mediation has become so native and normalised that we rarely examine it, a situation that has only been amplified by the ubiquity of social media and of rolling news. Were we to gauge the increase in media volume between the two periods of recent history narrated in I’m Jack – the late 1970s and the mid-2000s – we’d see three terrestrial television channels – which closed down at or before midnight – overwhelmed by the pulverised media environment of mobile and online. How that affects our perception of the world can be intuited in myriad ways, but what is certain is that in all mediation at source some kind of narrative is imposed on events and that those events themselves, and the information to which they give rise, are commodified and abstracted. Having an angle sells, having a strong lead sells, character sells: complexity, ambiguity and chaos do not sell. Even in the most professionally and responsibly reported news media, presentational gloss and theatricality have been significantly exaggerated and in the less responsible news media that plays out in unashamedly lurid ways (and that aspect of it has long been the case – researching I’m Jack in newspaper archives I was struck that the tabloids of the seventies were, if anything, even more firmly committed to the mantra “if it bleeds, it leads,” but you’d have little trouble making an argument that also placed the crusading nineteenth century journalism of W.T. Stead on that trajectory, or even the first wave gothic and its close proximity to first-person narratives in journals like Blackwoods). Problematic it may well be, but it seems like a trajectory to which as a culture we are broadly committed and in our co-dependency on mediation are only accelerating.

AC: The news is a disturbing form of modern theatre. I think certain newsreaders must have psychopathic traits in order to do what they do. I met Jon Snow recently at the BAFTA awards. I asked him what he’d won his award for. He looked down at me with professional contempt. “The news,” he said. I asked, “What news?” He was aghast at this.

Mark Blacklock

In both of your books, particularly I'm Jack, your accounts of crime are deeply rooted in real situations and environments, whilst remaining fictional. What does fiction give us that purely factual accounts would not? And why were you drawn to one, rather than the other?

MB: This question is continuous with the previous one, I think. The standard response is the Truman Capote line about fiction providing access to a “truer truth” but I’ve always been deeply suspicious of that, as I think we should all be of any claim to absolute truth – although, perhaps, the key to Capote’s term is the relativity of that qualifying “truer”. I’m not sure that we can or should hope for any answers but should instead aim to pose the correct questions and fiction and speculation provide access to more nuanced ways of thinking about these events – and of exploring structures of feeling around these events – than does true crime writing, which insists upon its truth claims and typically maintains a very narrow emotional register. I’m Jack might be a truer untruth, or an untruer untruth. Fiction made it possible to deal with this material in a messier, more churned up way, and to bring into question notions of authority upon which true crime writing relies.

AC: As soon as I sit down to write I become like one of those possessed girls in Enfield in the 70s, something wholly demonic or demonically holy takes over. The difference between fact and fiction is beyond me. I gave up on reality at the age of 4. I’m drawn to surface and secrets, something in-between fiction and fact: a hinterland where danger and secrets meet and where anybody – myself included – could get in trouble. 

Is there a danger in crime writing, whether fiction or not, that the author and audience lose sight of the victims, in the rush to explore the psychology of killers or else the investigative techniques used to catch them? Do you think this is a problem? And if so, what can be done about it?  

MB: This is a form of historical fiction but the fact that individuals directly affected by the events narrated are likely still to be alive makes the authorial responsibilities more acute. I anguished over how to negotiate this and have responded in a number of ways. Firstly, I needed my Humble to encounter directly the response of a victim to his crime, so Beryl Leach, the mother of Barbara, is quoted verbatim in one of the few reported elements of the book. Her perspective demanded voice and testimony seemed the most appropriate way to provide that. I also worked hard to ensure that the reader was shuttled between different perspectives and in some sense implicated. And I needed the tone of the entire piece to be uneasy, to refuse the reader comforts, so I aimed to do that both formally and linguistically.

AC: The problem with this line of questioning is that you lose sight of the perpetrator as a victim as well. To see oneself as a victim can be a dangerous habit to fall into. It can unlock cruel spaces in the mind that are then filled with the worst kind of feeble thinking. Many brutal killers saw/see themselves as victims. I also don’t know what can be done about anything. The stories in Myth of...are a reflection of the impotence of humanity. 

Austin Collings

What have been your key influences, in this type of writing?

MB: I first encountered the hoaxer in David Peace’s 1980, so that was seminal. Iain Sinclair’s White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings was also an early informant. I’ve read a lot of Gordon Burn and am still on a Delillo kick. Dracula hovers around I’m Jack, as do a number of occasionally slightly strange intertexts – I’m interested in the literary history of fictional responses to crime, so read around that, from De Quincey to Marie Belloc Lowndes and Robert Bloch. But the formal stuff comes from all over.

AC: There are obvious works such as Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song (which hasn’t dated in any way unlike Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood), Gordon Burn’s Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son and Happy Like Murderers, Don Delillo’s Libra and then slightly less well-known books such as Brian Master’s Killing For Company and Edna O’Brien’s In The Forest and more recently Dan Davies’ In Plain Sight: The Life & Lies of Jimmy Savile. However, one book that made a lasting impression on me is David Seabrook’s All The Devils Are Here, which lifts the shitty lid on the underworld of Kent and reads like a hallucinatory migraine.  

How did you first become interested in the 'classic' murders? Was there a particular book, case or situation which you remember?

MB: See above, although I think you’re right to put the term ‘classic’ in inverted commas – I think that indicates something of our shared implication in these events.

AC: It seemed as if my whole childhood was shadowed by crime, petty and major. The street I lived in was a mixture of Twin Peaks, Gummo, Coronation Street and the Jim’ll Fix It chair. The weird levels seemed amped up to a demented degree. The dramas were daily and deranged. 

I also remember reading a News of the World colour supplement on Fred and Rose West as a kid. I can still feel the cheap paper it was printed on.

How much research is involved in your writing?

MB: This project was very research-heavy and conducted over a number of years alongside an academic research project. The research was text-based, primarily, although I did speak to a number of witnesses and participants, mainly to clarify certain elements of the case in my own mind.

AC: Every minute I’m on the lookout for a story spark whether I like it or not.

What are you both working on next?

MB: I’m working on another research-heavy project that will result in a larger novel but that will continue some of the formal explorations of I’m Jack. It will be a historical novel set in the second-half of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth and describing the life of a theorist of four-dimensional space who was convicted of bigamy and left England, lived for six years in Japan and twelve in the USA where he achieved national fame for inventing a baseball-firing canon. After that I have planned a very contemporary piece, about anti-democratic movements and code (I realise how rubbish that one sounds but you never know!) I hope I can do them justice, because they’re cracking stories.

AC: I have a few possible projects in the offing. One is an autobiography of sorts about a boiler man who worked at Prestwich Mental Hospital in the late 70s and 80s. He was a friend of Mark E Smith's who took a series of photographs inside the hospital, which are on a par with the works of the great William Eggleston. I’m also hoping to get a short film off the ground: a coming of age tale where nobody comes age – do we ever come of age?

The Idea of Death event will take place at The International Anthony Burgess Foundation at 7pm on Friday June 26. For more information, and to pre-book seats, visit the IABF website.