When people ask me why I’ve set most of my books in America, I explain that I’ve always been influenced more by American culture. When the inevitable follow-up question – Why? – is levelled at me, I point them to my childhood. London in the 1980s was a bleak place in many ways, and the way Britain was portrayed on TV reflected this. Think about Thatcher-era Coronation Street or Eastenders. This was a country telling itself its own stories, of people struggling to get by in rundown houses, with never enough to go around. It was in tune with the council estate where I grew up.
Then contrast that with the TV shows coming out of the US at the time. The opening to the A-Team had palm trees, androids, fast cars. Knight Rider could’ve been set on another planet! Dynasty, Dallas – these weren’t people struggling to get by, these were masters of the universe. This was a world of colour and power and excitement, and as a kid, I lapped it up.
As I grew older, books took centre stage. One of the first ‘grown-up’ novels I read was The Firm by John Grisham. While Tom Cruise’s salary as a junior lawyer wasn’t the most important element of the plot(!), I remember it leaving me wide-eyed, a sum that seemed impossible to imagine. American movies had a similar impact – from the wide-open landscapes of films like Unforgiven and Dances with Wolves to the anti-hero patrolled urban jungles of Heat and Carlito’s Way, I was drawn to the dark stories and dark characters found in the best American fiction.
Here are five of my top influences as a writer:
1. The Big Nowhere, by James Ellroy
This wasn’t the first Ellroy novel I read, and it’s certainly not his best known or widely acknowledged, but it’s undoubtedly the one that has had the biggest influence on my writing. The Big Nowhere introduced me to the idea of police as bad guys, killers as good guys and morality existing only in different shades of grey. The mix of real-life events, characters and places is intoxicating, grounding the book in a brutal realism that makes it all the more impactful. And most of all, it’s the moments where Ellroy thumbs his nose at the idea of crime as some kind of ‘lesser’ genre and drops a line or passage as heartfelt and affecting as anything you’ll read. I can recite the last lines from memory: ‘When the noise died, he was climbing into the foothills, Los Angeles just a neon smear in his rear-view mirror. He touched his future there on the seat: sawed-off, heroin, a hundred and fifty grand. It didn’t feel right, so he turned on the radio and found a hillbilly station. The music was too soft and too sad, like a lament for a time when it all came cheap.’
2. Heat
Michael Mann’s masterpiece is probably my most enduring single influence, which is somewhat surprising when I confess this one small detail: the first time I watched it, I hated it.
That’s because when it first came out, I was looking for a twisty thriller of the kind I was accustomed to – cops chasing an unknown villain, lots of surprises, a big ‘whodunnit’ reveal at the end. Heat wants nothing to do with that kind of story.
Rewatching it a few years later, my understanding had matured enough to realise that the power of this film lies not in the complexity of its plot but in the complexity of its characters. Despite being on opposite sides of the law, Pacino’s Hanna and De Niro’s McCauley slowly realise that they are two sides of the same coin, creating a grudging respect between the two. The diner scene where these two icons are face to face is the most famous, but it is the ending, again, that stays with me the most – De Niro’s quiet acceptance of his fate, Pacino’s thousand-yard-stare as he comes to terms with what he’s been forced to do. It only works because of the film’s depth of characterisation, and that’s a lesson I’ve tried to bring to all of my books.
3. The Wire
The Wire is the opposite of everything I loved about American TV as a kid (yes, all writers are hypocrites!), but this is an object lesson in storytelling. Characters rise and fall over the course of five series. Seemingly unbreakable bonds are made – and shattered. Honour among police is shown to be as illusory as among thieves. Time and again, The Wire rejects established storytelling tropes and easy plot arcs to instead create something so detailed and real, some fans didn’t believe the stars were actors.
In part, that’s because the story goes out of its way to ensure there are no heroes here. Any time the viewer is tempted to start rooting for a character, they let themselves down – and us, in the process. And the reverse is true; we begin to understand the motivations of even the worst villains, often shaped by such bleak life experiences that it’s impossible not to feel at least a degree of empathy. These are people made by the world they inhabit, and both are so richly drawn that the result is – improbably – Dickensian.
4. John Grisham
A confession: when I said The Firm was one of the first ‘grown-up’ novels I read, what I neglected to mention was that I stole it from my sister and read it under the covers – I was still supposed to be reading The Famous Five.At the time, The Firm and then The Pelican Brief were the most tense and suspenseful things I’d ever laid eyes on – surpassing even Five Go Off to Mystery Moor. Grisham is a master at deploying Chandler’s old adage of showing the audience the bomb under the table, ratcheting up the tension with every paragraph with a pace that never lets up. Time and again, I’d feel sure there was no way out for the hero – only for Grisham to send them even higher up into the tree and throw bigger rocks at them. Creating such a potent atmosphere of dread is hard – sustaining it is even harder.
5. The Red Riding Quartet, by David PeacePeace wears his Ellroy influences on his sleeve in this series of novels spanning the late 70s and early 80s, but it’s not the similarity in style that makes me such a fan but the way that Peace somehow creates the same sense of claustrophobic and labyrinthine darkness in Yorkshire as Ellroy does in LA. Until I read these books, I’d come to believe that what Ellroy had created was unique, a combination of his mastery and a very specific place and time. But the Red Riding quartet recalibrated my tastes somewhat, reminding me that the UK can be just as engrossing and enticing a place for crime stories. The characters are as compelling as anything set in the US, the darkness as horrifying – and the redemption just as uplifting.
Rod Reynolds is the author of Shatter Creek, sequel to the bestselling Black Reed Bay, published by Orenda Books.
