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Author Quintin Jardine talks to us about his latest title Deadlock and shares the strangest letter from a reader he's ever received.
Quintin Jardine is the Scottish author of three much acclaimed series of crime novels, featuring the fictional characters Bob Skinner, Oz Blackstone, and Primavera Blackstone. His works include Cold Case (2019), The Bad Fire (2019) and The Roots of Evil (2020).
His latest Bob Skinner mystery Deadlock was published by Headline on 11th November and is also available through our catalogue.
I grew up in the 50s; heroes were not thick on the ground then. Mostly they were footballers. One who stands out is Andy Paton, centre-half of Motherwell, the team I have been cursed to support for a lifetime. Andy was ridiculously skilful, and hard as nails. A few years ago he was named ‘Motherwell’s Greatest Ever.’ Many of those who voted for him had never seen him play, but they were right.
These days, I am based in Scotland. If I’m in book mode, I will walk the dog then both of us will retreat to my office. I will work and he will sleep. In the early stages of a project there may be background music. Interesting, dogs don’t react to music; as I write this Sunny is sleeping through Santana, and you do not play Carlos quietly. When I get deeper into the story, the music is turned off.
That was a while back, a reference to a book in the Oz Blackstone series, when I explored an alternative ending. You could say that everything I do is ‘what if’, because very little of what I do is planned. I will begin with a scenario, and a concept in my head, then let it flow. The most satisfying scenes, and sometimes the best, are those that simply appear on the page without any forethought. For example, I had no idea that Stevie Steele was going to die, until he opened that door and walked into my in-laws’ kitchen.
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Skinner himself appeared spontaneously on the page, thirty one years ago. (I wrote the book in 1990.) I began with a dead lawyer (always a popular move) in one of my favourite Edinburgh locations, no idea how he got there or who was going to find out who killed him. Then this bloke turned up unbidden. He was wearing my black leather coat and he had my friend Tony’s prematurely grey hair. He’s been with me ever since. Tony’s gone now, God bless and keep him, but I still have the coat.
Deadlock is the perfect mystery novel. It’s not so much a whodunnit, more a hasanybodydunnit. At the end of the day there are questions that readers will have to answer for themselves, including one big mystery that’s left hanging. The answer is in the text, but I don’t spell it out. Oh yes, it begins with an emoji. Believe it or not, although they appear on every computer, tablet or phone keyboard, emojis are copyright, and can’t be used in a published work without consent.
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My latest project is a short story, ‘The One You’re With’, currently only available on Kindle. It’s the fifth in a series. The first, ‘Born to be Wild’, came about when finally I rose to the challenge of finding out whether Oz Blackstone was really dead. It turned out that he wasn’t; subsequent events, and stories have him, William Rider as he’s now known, teamed with his son Tom in a search for the missing Primavera, Tom’s mother. Now the saga is complete, it would be good if it was available in libraries. That’s something we’re exploring. My next project will be Skinner 34, working title 'Open Season'.
Deadlock, by Quintin Jardine. Failing that Dispatches, by Michael Herr.
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Years ago, I had a letter from a reader, complaining about typos in a book. On Page x, Para y, Line z , he said, the word ‘all’ was misspelled. Only, it wasn’t. I looked at it for hours, and so did some very skilled people and we could not work out what the guy was talking about. Until, I looked at it through a magnifying glass and saw that the first l was a micrometer thinner than the second. On that typeface, lower case ‘l’ and 1, (one) were that close to being identical. My reply to the complainant consisted of three words; Get. A. Life.
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