Christmas in the heat (with gangsters and stuff)
The difficult second novel.
Ah, yes, that difficult second novel. Well, The Golden Orphans wasn’t really the difficult second novel, because the difficult second novel was too difficult to finish. For a few years I had been working on a story about a man lured into some witchery in north Wales, finding himself caught between loyalty to an old friend and the threat of being ritualistically buried alive on a full moon. The novel, again, was a wild development of a short story I had written. The problem with it was not where it started — that it started as all first drafts tend to do: with some promise. No, the problem was that with every new draft, it got worse.
They don’t tell you about the possibility of that happening in novel-writing school. It came as something of an existential crisis. What if I was unlearning how to write a novel?
The upshot was after a conversation over a beer with my publisher, I was set onto the idea of writing a Graham Greene-esque short snappy thriller based upon my experiences in 2008 living and working in Cyprus, pulling pints at my cousin’s beach bar a couple of miles up the stretch from Aya Napa. I wrote The Golden Orphans in a couple of months and the first draft — apart from a request to give the ending a bit more oomph — is the draft you read if you open the book.
This, at least, is the legend, and I’m in no position to spoil it.
Here’s the nice endorsement quote that Booker-nominated novelist, poet, and memoirist Patrick McGuinness gave for the cover.
‘A sharp, pacy novel that has all the best hallmarks of the literary thriller...’
And here’s the blurb…
Within the dark heart of an abandoned city, on an island once torn by betrayal and war, lies a terrible secret…
Francis Benthem is a successful artist; he’s created a new life on an island in the sun. He works all night, painting the dreams of his mysterious Russian benefactor, Illy Prostakov. He writes letters to old friends and students back in cold, far away London. But now Francis Benthem is found dead. The funeral is planned and his old friend from art school arrives to finish what Benthem had started. The painting of dreams on a faraway island. But you can also paint nightmares and Illy has secrets of his own that are not ready for the light. Of promises made and broken, betrayal and murder…
The Golden Orphans offers a new twist on the literary thriller.
The Golden Orphans was a real success, at one point sitting above the likes of Margaret Atwood and Stephen King on the WH Smith’s bestseller chart (as they slid down the chart, I hasten to add - but still it was great to see the book up there).
The Bookseller made it a pick of the week, and The Spectator chose it alongside a new novel from Nobel Laureate Maria Vargas Llosa as a thriller of the week (I believe his was for The Neighbourhood, and I hear he still tells at dinner tables of the elites up and down Peru that he was once on a list of two with Gary Raymond).
You can purchase The Golden Orphans straight from the publisher’s website, or from all the usual places.
