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Paul’s streets of inspiration
Writer Paul Charles just walks around the mean streets when he needs inspiration, writes Sunita Rappai
PAUL Charles has a simple remedy for writers’ block – he takes a walk around Camden Town.
“You reach that point in a story and you’re not sure what’s going to happen next,” the genial 57-year-old Irishman, who is also a successful music promoter, says. “I always go out and walk the story, walk the crime. They wouldn’t do this but they would do this and this.
“That’s what I love about Camden – the realness of it. The scenes and locations are real.”
Charles’ passion for Camden is reflected in his books – a total of eight Inspector Kennedy detective novels so far, including his latest book, Sweetwater – all set in a Camden Town that is a disarming mix of fact and fiction.
So the pasta in Charles’ favourite restaurant, Trattoria Lucca in Parkway gets a mention – it also happens to be Inspector Kennedy’s favourite haunt – as does the doughnut stall “next to Dingwalls dance hall” in Camden Market.
Even the New Journal gets a thinly disguised mention – with a walk-on part for feisty investigative reporter ann rea (sic), who works on the Camden News Journal (sic) and is Kennedy’s on-again, off-again love interest.
Writing crime novels in Camden is a far cry from Charles’s roots in rural Ireland. The young Charles grew up in a tiny village called Magherafelt in County Durham and left for London aged 17, ostensibly to train as a civil engineer.
But his passion for music got in the way – he still remembers hearing the Beatles in his kitchen in Ireland as a child and being “physically stopped in his tracks”. So when friends who’d formed a band asked him to act as their tour manager, he happily obliged.
“I ended up becoming their manager and agent and roadie and lyricist and general dogsbody,” he says. “I was probably just turning 21 and it was great. It got me all around Europe and around all the concert venues.”
He also met many of the concert promoters that he continues to work with today, representing the likes of Van Morrison, Tom Waits, the Waterboys and Nancy Griffiths, all from his company Asgard Promotions based in Parkway, Camden Town.
And it was one of the acts he was representing in the 1980s, in fact – the singer, songwriter Tanita Tikaram – who inadvertently got him into writing detective fiction.
“She was a major book fan,” he says. “We were good mates – we’d hang out together and all that stuff. And at the weekends, we’d go to book shops and she’s go and look at Virginia Woolf and I’d go over to the British detective fiction and be picking up Ian Rankin and Agatha Christie and PD James and Arthur Conan Doyle and Colin Dexter and would read them.”
Which is how his second career, as a writer of quirky crime novels, began. What’s most impressive about Charles’ Kennedy novels is how he’s managed to carve out a niche in what has become a very crowded market place, creating in DI Christy Kennedy, a laconic, sweetly philosophical hero without a cop cliché in sight. Kennedy, in fact, is neither a world-weary cynic nor an alcoholic with manic-depressive tendencies – but something of a romantic. A little bit like Charles himself.
“Crime novels notoriously don’t deal with the romantic side of the detective’s life,” he says. “It’s usually someone divorced. A lot of the time with detective stuff it’s dark all the time. It’s all going on under a cloud of whisky or something like that and that doesn’t really strike real to me.
“There’s this thing in all our lives where whether we’re having a hard day, there are things our mates will make us feel better about. We all kind of try to and look at the funnier side of things and the lighter side of things. And all of us spend so much of our time dealing with and considering romance and our romantic partners and I wanted Kennedy to do that.”
“There’s this whole thing with detective fiction that it’s either hard boiled or soft-boiled,” he adds, in his gentle Irish brogue. “What I’m trying to do is make it as real as possible without offending people or being too graphic.
“Sometimes the terror that’s off the page is a lot more scary than the terror that’s being painted for you on the page.”
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