More Bangor For Your Book

“I keep falling between different stools,” Colin Bateman says, sipping a midday bottle of beer in the Merrion Hotel, Dublin. “I’m Irish but Northern Irish, crime but not crime, and the books have humour, so I’m always floating around between categories.”

The 45-year-old Bangor-born author’s latest bestseller Orpheus Rising, an eminently readable Carl Hiaasen-esque Irish-American murder mystery, is his 21st book, but he’s also found the time to hammer out various screenplays and television adaptations (Divorcing Jack, Wild About Harry, Rebus), plus the BBC series Murphy’s Law, which provided James Nesbitt with one of his meatier roles. For Bateman, writing might be many things, but most of all it’s a hard day’s work.
“It was crime fiction that got me started,” he says. “When I read Robert B. Parker and the Spenser books I realised this was what I could do. It was simple, straightforward and funny, no airs and graces about it. I grew up reading science fiction and the pulp writers, I grew up with the idea of doing lots of work. I don’t see a problem with that. It’s a bit of a punk attitude – just go out and do it.”
That DIY attitude served Bateman better in text than in drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Like many writers, he channeled stymied musical ambitions into literary ones.
“Even the three chords of punk were three too many for me,” he chuckles. “At one point I bought a synthesizer, but the only sound I could ever get out of it was like a car alarm. There’s no artistic background in my family at all, but I was lucky because I joined my local paper.”
Bateman’s internship with the County Down Spectator bore out the old maxim that journalism is the crack cocaine of literature. He couldn’t write enough.
“I’d just turned 17,” he recalls. “I was almost the last person who could do that. Nowadays you need a degree. The first article I ever wrote with my name underneath it was about the Sex Pistols, 1978 or ’79 maybe. About six months after the first album was banned, after the initial anger had died down, it suddenly began to appear in the shops. Somebody complained about it, and I wrote an article about Never Mind The Bollocks being on sale in Woolworths in Bangor. Except I wrote Never Mind the B******s, because I thought, ‘This is a small local paper, they’re not going to print “Bollocks”. And my editor was about the first woman editor in Ireland, a Sunday school teaching spinster woman, and she just looked at it and said, ‘What’s that word?’ And I, very red-faced, said, ‘Bollocks’. And she said, ‘If that’s what it’s called, that’s what we’ll use.’ And that started me off. Bangor was ten miles from Belfast, but it could’ve been a thousand miles away, not a lot happened so they’d acres of space to fill, and they allowed me to write whatever I wanted. If someone was to go through my first book they’d find a lot of one-liners appeared originally in columns. So that was my training.”
That first book, Divorcing Jack, was adapted for film, with David Thewlis in the lead role. The manuscript was famously rescued from the Harper Collins slush pile. Once published in 1994, Bateman went on to average a novel a year, sometimes more.
“If you’re a journalist, nobody says to you when you write a story or two stories a day, ‘Have a rest, you must be exhausted’,” he points out. “I went to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre about five or six years ago and lasted about two nights because it was just too arty for me. I got loads of work done, but the sort of social thing afterward, there’s no TV, no anything, it was all to do with having dinner with other artists, and that was fine up to a point, but it just wasn’t me.
“But one of my colleagues, a journalist at a local paper, went down to do an article on the Centre, a big house with a lake right in front of it, and she parked her car, and the guy who was running it at the time came charging out and said, ‘You can’t park there – the poets have to be able to see the lake!’ Which just sums up the wanky things I’m not, I hope. I hate all those high-faluting books that teach you how to write. I do film scripts and things, and I sometimes get producers who approach me and say things like, ‘I adhere to the (Robert) McKee story structure approach, we have to do this in arcs’. Just let me write the thing!”
Bateman’s insistence on doing things his own way recently led to his resignation from Murphy’s Law writing duties.
“There was a parting of the ways at the end of this second series,” he admits. “I had created a character who was quite dark but also had a good sense of humour, there was quite a lot of laughs in it, but with TV, once you sell the idea, it doesn’t belong to you anymore. They made a decision to go down a very serious road with it, so we parted company at that point.”
One suspects he won’t be lying awake at night worrying about it. Bateman has other fish to fry, including the forthcoming documentary, Belfast Confidential.
“I made one that went out in November called Bateman On Bangor, about my hometown growing up, and why I became the writer I am,” he explains. “It’s gone down really well with the BBC, so they came looking for me to do more. It may not seem death-defying to make a documentary, but for me that’s a big step forward, and I love doing it. These are the doors that have opened to me. This is the 21st book: I’m really at the stage now where I’m just writing whatever I feel like writing. The book I had out last year, I Predict A Riot, for no real reason had a graphic novel chapter in it about three-quarters of the way through. There shouldn’t be any reason you can’t do something like that. I spent the first 30 years of my life saying no to things, I wasn’t a confident person and I lived a very quiet life, but since the books have happened, I’ve said yes to everything. You only live once.”

Orpheus Rising is published by Headline