Simon Mason is one of the most prolific authors around and can seemingly turn his hand to anything. The master of a string of children and young people’s books, he has turned his hand to crime fiction, namely the gripping, page turning and increasingly popular DI Ryan Wilkins series, an edgy and mismatched detective duo based in Oxford.
He also manages to find the time to launch a missing person series, The Finder Mysteries, which is equally as riveting. So you’d think that he had the writing side down to a T.
And yet Simon says the latest DI Ryan Wilkins instalment The Dangerous Stranger “was the hardest to write”, struggling to get it right, and spending four months rewriting it until he was finally happy.
“It just wasn’t working. For a long time I couldn’t work out why. Usually there’s one bit that doesn’t work but I couldn’t work out which bit it was. And then it turned out it was the whole second story-line, and to get it right involved rewriting the whole book which took me four months,” he says.
Having read The Dangerous Stranger in one go, we can confirm that the gripping plot and addictive characters keep you up late into the night and it’s as fluent and unputdownable as the rest of the series, praise and plaudits flowing in, Stephen Fry calling it ‘my latest addiction’.
‘Sometimes I think that people believe that writing books is effortless and that’s just not true’
Coming to Woodstock Bookshop Festival this weekend, he will be joining fellow Oxford crime writers Cara Hunter READ OUR INTERVIEW WITH HER HERE and Anna Beer, to discuss their approaches to writing, where he might air these challenges.
So why was The Dangerous Stranger so problematic? We are sitting in a cafe in Oxford as we talk, but despite his unruffled demeanour you can tell that Simon – who has taught creative writing, run a publishing company and written extensively – was rather shellshocked by the whole experience.
“Sometimes I think that people believe that writing books is effortless and that’s just not true. You have deadlines and it takes a long time to write book. Its a big effort. Rewriting also takes a long time, but I knew it was the right thing to do,” he explains.
“But then I went to see Ian Rankin (fellow crime writer) while I was in Scotland and he gave the audience a great piece of advice – that the reason his books weren’t selling well in America was because the corpse wasn’t introduced early enough. And I realised I needed to pick the body up from chapter 25 and pump it back to a much earlier scene, and it made a real difference. Before that it was more of a missing persons case until they find the body, but this way is much more exciting. So thank you Ian.
“Once Simon had solved the problem, The Dangerous Stranger came together, DIs Ryan and Ray Wilkins (no relation) leading an investigation into a young refugee who is set on fire outside a hotel of asylum seekers, darker subject matter than Simon’s usual murder mysteries then?
‘I knew I’d start with a burning, but it felt like a brave and foolish thing to do and a bit of a risk’
“I knew I’d start with a burning, but it felt like a brave and foolish thing to do and a bit of a risk,” he concedes,” but it’s important to keep engaging with different things and to keep being entertaining. And having watched the Stockport riots on TV, and across the UK around hostels, they were very dramatic and dangerous and pretty terrifying really, which is not my natural habitat.”
More dangerous than his usual murders then? He laughs: “I feel like it’s a bit of a darker place – more political and conflicted – but that’s where we are.
“Even though I don’t like far right politics or aggressive behaviour, the people who commit these things think they have a point, people who can’t get on the housing ladder, or get their children into schools, so I was at pains to imagine how they feel, to give them a voice, and more generally to write about the world we live in,” he says.
Throw the two Ryan’s into the equation, whose tetchy exchanges and questionable work practices explode as they battle to solve the crime, and havoc and mayhem is created wherever they go, or “results with chaos” as Simon likes to call it.
But you’d have thought that after five adventures, the two might have found a middle ground by now, Ryan‘s scruffy, confrontational, working-class bravado and Ray‘s suave, Oxford-educated, Nigerian-British, fast-tracker mentality, as at odds as ever.
‘I think of the Ryans as becoming closer. Their bickering has changed, they have good banter now’
“Do you think so?” Simon asks. “I think of the Ryans as becoming closer. Their bickering has changed, they have good banter now. But in a sense the characters are what I’m most interested in because crime drama in a sense is flippant. So I’m always trying to find a way to make it a more challenging and entertaining read, and that tension is the hard part of crime writing.”
But Simon still relishes the confusion and unpredictability of his subject matter: “Usually crime is messy and I like messy, spontaneous, intimidating crime, the result of emotion rather than meticulous planning.”
And with the buzz around the DI Ryans steadily building, TV and film studios sniffing around constantly, Simon is in a good place: “I’ve felt a shift and noticed The Dangerous Stranger gathering momentum,” he concedes.
“But then productivity is really important with crime writing. The question is how many you can write a year. So I’m writing the next one at the moment, and writing as fast as I can. The challenge is writing them in a sequence and starting where we left off.”
‘writing a novel is always about putting something down that’s wrong and then making it right over and over again’
“Luckily I always have a million ideas but writing a novel is always about putting something down that’s wrong and then making it right over and over again to get it into a better state. “
And with that Simon is off striding through Oxford, his mind presumably already full of what happens next to the DI Ryan’s, Oxford the perfect source of the inspiration, characters and town/gown mentality that Simon enjoys so much.
Simon Mason will be discussing The Dangerous Stranger and his work at Woodstock Bookshop Festival on May 2 at 7pm book here, Dorchester Literary Festival on May 3 at 6pm, and St Hilda’s Crime Fiction Weekend from Sept 4-6. book here
The Dangerous Stranger is published by Quercus and available from all good bookshops and online.
