I am so pleased that Gordon agreed to do an interview with me- his book No More Games, is fantastic.
Detangling the plot: Glasgow, 1974 – a time of power cuts, strikes and the three-day week.
Twelve-year-old Ginger Bannerman is playing in the local woods when he stumbles across a gunman in hiding. The man has incriminating evidence of police corruption and forces Ginger to steal a tape recording from a major criminal’s flat.
But when Ginger discovers that his dad, a police constable, is mentioned on the tape, his world is turned upside down.
With both the gunman and the criminal in hot pursuit, he must prevent the tape falling into the wrong hands if he's going to save himself and his family. Things have suddenly got very serious.
The interview
This is such a gripping read Gordon, what drew you to Glasgow in the 1970s?
I was born and bred in Glasgow. No More Games is set at the same time as when I was a kid on Glasgow’s south side. I was ages with Ginger in 1974 and the memory of rolling black outs, the turmoil in the economy and the gangs that roamed the area around where I lived has always stuck with me. It seemed natural, at some point, to use this as the setting for a book. As a result it's my most personal book. Every street, every home, every shop, every bit of dirt or soil or grass - all are places that I knew intimately.
That definitely comes across on the page as you describe it so vividly. The chapters have in between speech conversations that leave the reader itching to know more, how did you come up with this idea?
As a writer I’m not a planner. I usually start with a single line. I then write myself into an idea. It might take a few pages for the rough idea to form, during which time I’m directionless. In the case of No More Games I rolled with the notion of two people talking. I liked the intrigue that came with not identifying them. Who are they? Where are they? How do they know each other? What are they talking about? In truth, once I knew the book would star two kids back in the 70’s, I was going to leave the chat part as it was, an opening. However I quickly realised that some of the action or the context to the story needed a more adult explanation. After all, kids are not that interested in the grown up stuff around them. And since the story is told in first person from twelve year old Ginger's point of view I used the two strangers to help explain the stuff that kids would ignore, peppering the novel with an adult view on what was happening at key points.
I loved it. Its rare to see a child’s perspective in a crime thriller, but it totally works. What made you want to tell it from that point of view?
I've always written in first person. I love the sense of immediacy that this gives my work. When I landed on the notion of setting the book in 1974 it was easy to delve into my own past and write from my own point of view back then. I could have made the protagonists adults but the story has coming of age at its centre. The two main kids start off by seeing it all as a ‘bit of a game’ only to discover that it’s deadly serious. They need to start making smart decisions - except kids rarely make smart decisions all the time. That’s what makes the story interesting for me. Kids do the strangest things. An adult in their situation might just have walked away - and that would make for a very boring, and short, novel.
Ginger and Milky are an intriguing double act- how important was it to you to have that brotherly bond throughout the novel?
It’s essential to the book. As a kid I had a best friend, most kids do. A real down in the dirt friend. When I was writing the book I knew I needed a foil to the main character and Milky is the friend who tells Ginger as it is, gets him into trouble and will always be there when Ginger needs him. A wing person through thick and thin.
I loved them both! Are you able to share what you are working on next?
Now that I’m part of the Kate Nash Literary Agency gang I’m quietly working away on a new trilogy, or maybe quadrilogy, about a retired Glasgow police constable returning to his home town of Fraserburgh (spoiler alert – that is where my father hailed from) some forty years after he left as a child.The idea behind the books is simple. In each novel, Blake Glover is asked to look into a minor crime in town, and each time it leads to him getting embroiled in helping to solve a major crime. I’ve actually written three of the books already, and I’m busy working on the fourth. Fingers crossed that a publisher likes them.
Ooh fingers crossed for sure, this sounds brilliant! Thanks so much for answering my questions.
No More Games is out now. No More Games: A crime thriller with heart and humour: Amazon.co.uk: Brown, Gordon J.: 9781915433084: Books
Comments