Murder-mystery novelist Alex Pavesi talks to us about his latest publication 'Ink Ribbon Red' and how he changed careers from software engineer to crime fiction writer.
Alex Pavesi lives in London, where he writes full time. He previously worked as a software engineer and before that obtained a PhD in Mathematics. His first book Eight Detectives was a Sunday Times ‘Crime Book of the Month’ and a New York Times ‘Thriller of the Year. His latest book Ink Ribbon Red was published by Michael Joseph in November. You can find Alex's books on the Suffolk Libraries catalogue.
I grew up in a small village but luckily it did have a library, as did the nearest town. Plus both my parents are English Literature graduates so the house was full of big, intimidating novels. Having said that, I was quite slow to take up reading them. I was very attached to some of the authors I’d read as a child – Dr Seuss and Janet and Allan Ahlberg in particular – and thought adult books were boring. I was probably about sixteen when I realised that grown up literature can be just as much fun as Green Eggs and Ham, which is when I started reading in earnest.
My undergraduate degree was in Maths and Philosophy, so I’ve always liked a mix of numbers and words. I wrote a few unfinished things while I was at university, then didn’t seriously take it up again until I was in my mid-thirties. Unfortunately, I just didn’t have the time. There’s a lot to learn in the world of software and it changes almost every year. But by thirty-five I’d moved into a more managerial role and was able to return to writing as a hobby. I wrote my first book, Eight Detectives, in odd hours before work and over lunch – choosing to write a crime novel in the hope that the structure provided by the genre would help me see it through to the end. It took me about a year and a half. Then I sent it to some agents and was very lucky in getting a positive response quite quickly.
I always start with pen and paper, either writing notes or full sentences. I do that in an armchair, with a view of the communal gardens surrounding my house, or sometimes in a coffee shop. Then I move to a desk and work on my laptop. I try to keep to the routine of pen and paper in the mornings, laptop in the afternoons, but of course sometimes those plans go awry.
Over the years leading up to writing that book I’d spent a lot of time thinking about unconventional detective stories – for example, a murder mystery with only two suspects, a detective solving their own murder, and so on. It was just something that interested me. I didn’t plan to do anything with those ideas until I realised, I could write a novel about a book of unconventional detective stories, with the author as one of the characters. The rest of the concept evolved over time, as I worked out how to make a novel out of a series of stories.
To begin with, it presents a familiar situation: six friends spending a weekend together, somewhere remote. But the host wants them to play a parlour game that involves imagining each other's murders and writing them down as stories. The game gets personal and leads to arguments, which lead to real murders – to the point where truth and fiction become hopelessly intertwined.
I think the more planning I do, the better it works out. But you can only spend so much time planning before you start to worry you might be wasting your time. I don’t think you can really realise things like character, atmosphere, etc, until you’re actually writing them. And those things need to work for the book to be good. What I tend to do now is plan the whole thing quite vaguely, then fill in details for certain sections, then write those sections, then go back to planning.
Book three is well underway. It has something to do with codebreaking, which straddles all my interests. But that’s all I’ll say for now.
And Then There Were None is easily the greatest thriller ever written. It’s a flawless piece of plotting and has bucketloads of atmosphere, which is not something you can usually say about an Agatha Christie novel. It’s the most famous crime novelist’s most famous novel – why would you not want to read it?
I love writing and I love getting to do it with some (certainly not all) of the anxieties removed. It’s a wonderful privilege to be writing a book and to be able to feel fairly confident that it’ll be on book shop shelves with a beautiful cover not too long after it’s finished.
I have an Italian surname but I’m very English. I’m only about four percent Italian. It just happens to be through the male line. When the Italian edition of Eight Detectives came out the publisher set up an event for me, assuming I could speak the language – luckily someone stepped in to translate, or it could have been very embarrassing.
