Home truths

The actor turned thriller writer talks to Steve Pratt about his love of the North-East, his T-shirt collection and about going to prison

AUTHOR Martyn Waites was excited about the idea for his latest novel. He'd created a Get Carter tour around the North-East sites featured in the Michael Caine gangster movie and written it into the book.

"I was so thrilled I'd thought of this idea. Then I phoned a mate and said how excited I was - and he said you mean like the tour that happens in Gateshead?'. I was furious that someone was actually doing it," says the Newcastle-born and bred actor turned writer.

It's to be hoped that events depicted in his latest thriller novel, White Riot, don't come to pass in his home city, as the story discovers Newcastle on the brink of race disturbances organised by a criminal group for their own evil ends.

The book is the latest in the Joe Donovan series about a troubled investigative journalist trying to find his lost son and solve the complex cases that come his way.

Waites makes no excuse for setting the stories in a place he knows well. After several previous novels, his publishers were keen for a series set in Newcastle.

"It's where I'm from, although I don't live there now," he says. "In the same way that Ian Rankin has Edinburgh and John Harvey has Nottingham, I wanted to claim Newcastle. That was the thinking."

Not living there any more - he lives with his wife and children in Hertfordshire - makes it easier to write about, he feels. "I do come up to Newcastle quite regularly and have contacts there. I just have to ask what's changed and what's happening.

"I get squired about when I go back, usually ending up crawling around the pubs. If I'm putting somewhere in my books I try to be accurate. A lot of the restaurants and pubs and cafes I write about are there. I can go in places like The Cluny and sit and watch."

The West End of Newcastle tends to crop up quite a bit in his work because that's where he's from.

"If you want to write about Newcastle honestly, you have to say it's not the same as it used to be. There are very easy stereotypes you can fall into in portraying the North- East if you don't know it, flat caps and ex-miners which it isn't any more. It's very much a 21st Century city now, possibly more so than a lot of others in Britain.

"When I was growing up, it felt like you were cut off from the rest of the country. It wasn't Scotland, it wasn't England, it was Newcastle. It's opened up so much more now, in theory you can get to London in three hours.

It's not so cut off from the rest of the world now.

"If you portray it in any work, novel or television, you have to reflect it honestly."

Occasionally, as with the Get Carter tour, you can get pipped to the post. But he's not been afraid to shy away from hot topics, be it real events like the miners' strike, the Mary Bell case or developer T Dan Smith.

"With crime novels, you're uniquely placed to explore social issues. You're taking the cultural temperature of society, usually by what crimes happen and the judiciary's reaction to them.

"If you're writing a contemporary crime novel, you send them into a world that, hopefully, your readers will recognise. You have to look at race, drugs, sex traffic, immigration. It's not about issues, it's something that's intrinsic because it's about people."

Waites has moved from actor/writer to writer/actor as his books have occupied more and more of his time. He went to drama school, working as an actor for ten or 11 years before his first book Mary's Prayer, a gangland thriller set in the North-East, was published a decade ago.

"I only realised in hindsight how much I wanted to write," he says. "When I got a script, the other actors would see how big their part was and I would look at the structure of the play. I was looking at it more from a writer's perspective.

"I thought that if I was an actor and going to write, I was going to write plays. But I wrote two god-awful plays and thought that's not for me'."

The turning point came after being "quite handsomely"

paid for a couple of BT commercials which gave him the financial security of not having to look for acting work. He sat down and wrote Mary's Prayer. Two more in the Stephen Larkin series followed.

They were followed by Born Under Punches, based around the miners' strike and its legacy, and The White Room, set in 1960s Newcastle and based on the life of preteen child killer Mary Bell.

The theme running through his Joe Donovan is of a man looking for his son and how he puts together a surrogate family that becomes the Albion detective agency.

So is he Donovan? "Because I write it, I suppose I'm everyone,"

replies Waites. "People have said you're Joe Donovan' but I'm everyone because they all come from me.

"Donovan, I suppose, is an idealised version of me. He has my taste in music and books and a Tshirt collection which is like mine.

I've just bought another comic book T-shirt, I can justify them as expenses on my tax return.

"There have been a couple of instances where people have told me things and I wondered how I could spin them out in a book. I would never take anyone's life wholesale and stick it in because it's disrespectful for one thing."

His work in prisons has helped his writing indirectly.

He's held two writing residencies, one at a young offenders' institution and the other at HMP Chelmsford. The work he's done in prisons has informed the books.

He went inside by accident. A friend suggested he should apply to be a writer-in-residence in prison after recalling that he'd worked with young ex-offenders as an actor.

The experience behind bars made a lasting impression.

"Prison is such a polarising experience.

You're either up or you're down, nothing in between,"

he says.

"And it's absolutely exhausting working there. I was so physically drained afterwards I couldn't do anything for a couple of months. But working with prisoners, especially young offenders, there's the opportunity to turn someone's life around."

He's currently working on a literary fellowship at Essex University. "It sounds different but isn't a million miles away from what I was doing in prison, except some of the students don't turn up in university and they don't have that luxury in prison,"

he says.

Acting takes a back seat these days, although he and fellow actor Bob Horwell, currently appearing in Coronation Street, made a short trailer for White Riot which they posted on You Tube. Former Bill actor Mark Wingett plays Donovan. Only Waites' voice is heard.

"I didn't realise how much I'd missed acting until I did that. I just thought the trailer would be a good way of selling the book, a marketing tool to get people excited about it."

It could act as a calling card for adapting his novels for TV or film. "When Bob finishes Coronation Street we're going to do a little touting around and say this is what we do with virtually no money, give us a bigger budget and we'll show you what we can do'. You make your own luck, I believe," he says.

The only acting he's done of late is recording audio books of his novels. But he does harbour one ambition - to play the villain in panto again.

"Which isn't a very king of noir thing to say," he admits.

* White Riot is published by Pocket Books, £6.99.