In pursuit of a ripper yarn

Tom Rob Smith. Photo / Supplied

Just as James Lever's mock autobiography, Me Cheeta, is the wild card on this year's Man Booker long-list, Tom Rob Smith's debut Child 44 was last year's surprise selection. In fact, it generated even more controversy than the Hollywood ape, with Canongate publisher Jamie Lyng criticising the judges for picking "a fairly well-written and well-paced thriller that is no more than that" over more worthy candidates such as his own author Helen Garner's The Spare Room.

"I didn't mind entering the debate but when it comes to personal mudslinging it becomes a little less interesting," recalls Smith when I meet him on London's South Bank. "From a publishing point of view, it's frustrating if your whole campaign is geared up to use those prizes and then you don't get that. It is very difficult selling books and championing your book is one thing but to attack another is not so good. I wouldn't want my book sold through negative campaigning."

Even though Child 44 did not make the final six, the nomination was a huge boost for the half-English/half-Swedish author, who went on to win the Crime Writer's Association Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for Best Thriller of the Year. A big-budget feature film directed by Ridley Scott is also in the works.

"It's always nice and useful to be up for any prize," says Smith with a smile. "It was particularly useful in this case to show that there is this sort of genre prejudice, which is entrenched in books even more than it is in film or TV. I was surprised by the strength of the dividing lines. It hadn't crossed my mind because personally I would read anything."

According to Smith, categorising a book under a certain kind of genre simply confirms to readers that they can expect to find a specific type of story within its covers. "It's like a covenant that says it's going to be funny or it's going to be a love story," he says. "There are some stories that don't fit into that. You could have something that is really funny for the first 100 pages and is then very sad so it's not a comedy. It's something else and sometimes you feel that way when you watch a movie. Comedies in particular have to be funny all the way through."

Smith prefers action-packed adventure stories to traditional crime fiction. "I like big yarns," he laughs. "Intense thrillers are a good medium for telling big stories whereas comedy isn't. Whenever I've seen a movie that has a mix of comedy and plot, you're always juggling between the two."

Child 44 harks back to the classic stories of Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad and Charles Dickens, who melded engaging storylines with relevant social issues.

"There's this kind of late 20th century hangover where you have to be difficult to be good and the reader really has to struggle through the book," says Smith. "But what has fashioned my books is that I love stories and if you're telling these big stories you have to make the prose as simple as possible. The authors that were publishing at the end of the 19th century had an acute sense of their reader."

Which is something that the 30-year-old picked up from the years he spent working as an assistant story editor on television series like Bad Girls. "You have to think about the audience and their reactions," says Smith, who has also penned a couple of screenplays.

"It's very useful from that point of view to think about how you're going to hook people and get them to come back after the adverts."

Set in the Soviet Union during Stalin's brutal rule, Child 44 centres on lowly police officer Leo Demidov, who attempts to capture a notorious serial killer. It was inspired by the real-life case of Andrei Chikatilo, the so-called Ripper of Rostov who terrorised the Soviet Union for more than a decade, killing and eating an estimated 55 people from 1978 until his capture in 1990.

"He was the springboard," says Smith. "I decided to move the story back because it struck me that this was an investigation about a society so it made sense to set it during the most extreme point in that society, which is the 1950s rather than the 80s. Having made that decision, that was when the research came about with a huge chunk of reading, rather than saying I'd always been interested in that period and had read a lot about it. But I have always been interested in 20th century politics."

The totalitarian milieu of Child 44, where crime did not officially exist, has drawn comparisons with speculative dystopias like George Orwell's 1984. "When a lot of the film adaptation writers were pitching to do it, they were seeing it as sci-fi," says Smith. "But I wanted to avoid making it feel like that as science fiction can seem very stylised, where the world it presents is like a construct built out of an idea. The idea of the crime would then become the reason for building this world and suddenly it would feel like the idea is primary and the society is serving the idea.

"Whereas in fact this was a real society that had this idea superimposed on top of it. I hope it feels very realistic and naturalistic in that this was a time that people actually went through."

A follow-up to Child 44, The Secret Speech, was released earlier this year. Set three years after the death of Stalin in 1953 during the reign of his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, the novel finds the Soviet Union in a state of violent flux.

"I was gifted this bit of history," says Smith. "It fitted well in that a sequel could review what happened in the first book without actually repeating it. I could never have written another book which documented the fear and that sense of pressure because it was already in the first book."

Smith intends to bring the story to a close with the next volume, which will take place during the 1960s.

"That's the last one, partly because of the age of the characters," he says. "It also needs a huge event historically to hang it off. When I sat down to write the first book, I knew what the second book was about and I knew that the third book would be about this regime coming to an end."

And unlike seasoned crime scribes such as Ian Rankin and Mark Billingham, Smith has no desire to base a long-running series around Demidov. "It was not set up like that and I'm not really sure if I'd be any good at doing that," he admits. "It would take a different set of skills and I'm not sure if I have that."

* Tom Rob Smith will discuss his books at Takapuna Library, North Shore, on Thursday August 27 at 6.30pm; bookings are essential (09) 486 8469.