Andrew Taylor - The American Boy

ANDREW TAYLOR WRITES his chilling crime novels in a converted outbuilding near the cosy, straggling Victorian cottage that he shares with his wife and two children. He lives in a small town in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire. 'I've lived in the Forest longer than I've lived anywhere else,' says Andrew, 'and I love it. I think that if we'd stayed in London, or any other big city, our social lives and our work lives would revolve solely around literature and publishing. But here we've got friends from all walks of life.' A self-confessed writing and word 'addict', he is the author of 'twenty plus books, at a conservative estimate' and the recipient of two Ellis Peters Historical Daggers (for The Office of the Dead and The American Boy) and a John Creasey Memorial Award for his debut novel Caroline Minuscule). 'My children make jokes about my unhealthy relationship with the Oxford English Dictionary. One of the pleasures of writing The American Boy was the need to check words and phrases to see if they could reasonably be used, and in the sense I wanted, in 1819-20.'

Andrew was born in 1951 and grew up in Ely, the cathedral city in the Fens, a version of which (Rosington) is the setting for several of his novels, and appears briefly in The American Boy as the town where Tom Shield grew up. 'The Fens are so incredibly monotonous, but that landscape is part of me, as is Ely and the cathedral. These things go very, very deep. I've not dared to go back for twenty years because it won't be the same, everything will have changed. It's safer in the memory.'

At his Suffolk boarding school he escaped into books. 'I binged on reading. In one school report my house-master said that the sooner I grew out of inventing stories and acting them out with my friends, the better.' He adds: 'If you go to a boarding school, especially an old-fashioned one, it can have unexpected effects. I think it's a climate that made fantasy and story flourish because you had to have some sort of outlet from the repression.' With Andrew's natural inclination for melodrama there was 'usually the odd corpse, the odd murder' even in his schoolboy plays, and he places the blame firmly on Enid Blyton's Noddy, the first 'crime' book he can remember reading. 'Hurrah for Little Noddy was Enid Blyton's groundbreaking expose of police incompetence and gang culture among goblins in the fast set. It has red herrings, a wrongful arrest and a thrilling car chase. Big Ears puts in some solid detective work too.' According to Andrew, at some point in the near future someone will publish a PhD thesis on the influence of Enid Blyton on crime writing in the UK. 'I'm sure a lot of us in my age group had our psyches warped at a very early age.'

Andrew read English at Cambridge. 'I enjoyed discovering authors like Dryden, writers I wouldn't have normally read. I suppose it must have expanded my awareness of what language can do, where literature can go. That said, I don't know if it's of any value to a novelist to have studied English. Somerset Maugham reckoned that the time he spent walking the wards as a doctor taught him more about human nature than any amount of reading could do.' After Cambridge, Andrew had a five-year 'limbo' – travelling and doing all sorts of odd jobs, including those of wages clerk and boat builder, before settling into being a librarian in north-west London. 'Libraries aren't just about books, they're places where people come – there's a great ebb and flow of the public coursing through the doors, often with very real dramas they want to tell you about, or want advice about. I've done all sorts of things from trying to help rape victims to sorting out treatment for sick cats.'

He resigned from the library on the strength of his first writing contract. 'For many years I failed to get to grips with the fact that in order to be a writer you actually have to write. I finally started my first novel, Caroline Minuscule, in a spirit of sheer panic, feeling it was now or never. I resigned from my sensible job and became a full-time writer.' It was a decision that initially made his stomach lurch. 'But the great thing that made the lurch worthwhile was the sense that I was doing what I should be doing. A square peg had found a square hole.' He's been writing ever since, but due to severe RSI (repetitive strain injury) he rarely puts pen to paper or fingertip to keyboard. 'I dictate the story into a tape recorder. You have to keep going in a very linear way. If I'm lucky and it's going well I feel like I'm roaring along on the crest of a wave.' He adds: 'If I'm not lucky, it's like falling into the trough between the waves.' It is a brilliant way to create dialogue. 'I read it out in a very actorly, melodramatic way. I think if you write fiction you need a protean ability to slide into characters that you don't necessarily want to be. You just pretend for a moment to be a maidservant… or a murderer.'

The American Boy saw Andrew 'immersing' himself in the literature of the nineteenth century: he read memoirs, diaries, letters and novels to recreate how people spoke and thought and acted in late-Regency England. But for his next book Andrew is leaving behind all that 'utterly absorbing' Regency research for the delights of the twenty-first century. 'For the time being, I'm back to the future,' he explains. 'I'm working on something set in the present for the first time in years. Mobile phones and emails will abound.' The new novel is about missing children, 'a deliberately ambiguous phrase', and its narrator is testing the acting and research skills of this most meticulous writer. 'He's an architectural engineer, which is proving quite a challenge. Being a maidservant was much more straightforward.'

THE ONLY THING reviewers of The American Boy could not seem to agree on is whether the novel is a better piece of historically precise fiction or satisfyingly menacing crime writing. Andrew Rosenheim of The Times was impressed by Taylor's ability to balance historical accuracy with superb plotting: 'The 1820s London both of high society and cesspit is vividly portrayed… The attention to period detail is both loving and minute, yet it never overwhelms the story.' Philip Oakes of the Literary Review agreed, noting that the novel had 'a plot stuffed with incident and character, with period details impeccably rendered'.

Critics were also won over by the complexity of Taylor's engagement with his nineteenth-century literary predecessors. 'Taylor has produced a novel that recalls Wilkie Collins, a book that sounds like an original but contains all the candour and purpose of a contemporary thriller,' wrote Will Cohu of the Daily Telegraph, as he praised Taylor's skill at blending the conventions of nineteenth-century fiction with the tropes of modern crime writing. Patricia Craig in the Times Literary Supplement concurred, borrowing Charles Palliser's phrase 'ironic reconstruction' to describe Taylor's work as 'being both an elaboration of the primary genre (in this case, the Charles Dickens/Wilkie Collins school of intrigue) and a commentary on it'.

Many reviewers applauded the novel as a worthy addition to the legacy of Edgar Allan Poe, the American boy of the title. Jane Jakeman of the Independent wrote, 'Taylor's deeply absorbing and beautifully written book is a fitting tribute to the founding father of crime fiction', while Michael Carlson of the Spectator said that 'It is as if Taylor had used the great master of the bizarre as both the starting- and finishing-point, but in between created a period piece with its own unique voice. The result should satisfy those drawn to the fictions of the nineteenth century, or Poe, or indeed to crime writing at its most creative.' In the end, everybody agreed that The American Boy is a most successful and unusual crime novel, a 'hugely entertaining… beguiling mystery' ( Observer ) that is sure to become a modern classic.