Jackie McGlone

 

 

 

NAMEDROPS keep falling on my head while I talk to Tony Parsons. The award-winning journalist, professional provocateur and bestselling crime writer and I have only sat down in the Smithfield cafe where we meet before we are in celebrity la-la-land.

 

As he’s removing his jacket and flat cap, the likeable 63-year-old, whose career has taken him from gin factory worker and drug-fuelled, wild child music hack to contrarian tabloid columnist and lad-lit bestseller, is telling me about the time he was trapped in a lift with Elmore Leonard. That the restaurant around the corner where he got monumentally drunk interviewing George Michael [he co-authored Michael’s autobiography] over a nine-hour lunch has vanished. That he refused David Bowie’s offer to devote three years of his life to writing his life story. That Ian Rankin sent him a note saying, “God, not more bloody competition...” when his first thriller was published.

 

As for doing drugs with The Clash... More of that later.

 

Essex-born-and-raised, Parsons is still at it by the time our hugely enjoyable, late-breakfast interview is over in a cafe chosen because it’s on Parson’s fictional detective, DC Max Wolfe’s home turf. “Yeah, I was at Piers Morgan’s 50th birthday party...” he offers, generously insisting on paying the bill as we gather coats and bags. That information is imparted in an effortless segue from the fact that Morgan lives in Sussex, where Parsons’ first wife, Julie Burchill, also resides.

 

It’s 30 years since Burchill walked out of the marriage, after three years – they met in the late 1970s when the New Musical Express (NME) advertised for “hip, young gunslingers.” She left Parsons to raise their three-year-old son, Bobby, alone. The acrimonious split has been endlessly documented. It all happened long ago, so why go there, since Parsons has been “very happily” married to his Japanese wife, Yukiro, for 25 years? They met when she was studying at Heriot Watt University, have a 15-year-old daughter, Jasmine, and live in Hampstead.

 

In any case, we’re here to talk about Parsons’ reinvention as bestselling crime writer. Rankin was right to be worried about the new cop going down those mean streets. The first three books in the series, The Murder Bag, The Slaughter Man and The Hanging Club, stormed the bestseller lists and there is interest from Hollywood. “I believe it when I see it! I sold the rights of my book, Family Way, to Julia Roberts. I wrote the screenplay but she got pregnant with her third child so the film never happened.”

 

Die Last, the fourth and latest of his thrillers, a fast-paced, cunningly plotted story about human smuggling and sex trafficking, written with headline-ripping immediacy, again centres on Wolfe. A Savile Row, West End Central-based, homicide detective, he’s the single parent of a six-year-old daughter, Scout. With their Cavalier King Charles spaniel, Stan – Parsons is a passionate dog-lover, tweeting about his own Cavalier King Charles spaniel, Stan – they live in a Smithfield loft. Father and daughter often breakfast on pancakes in this cafe and so do we.

 

Wolfe is Parsons’ avowed attempt to create a character as iconic as James Bond and to write “page-turning thrillers with heart... but I don’t know whether I'm succeeding.” Already an international bestselling novelist, with books translated into 40 languages and the author of the prizewinning Man and Boy (that old sentimentalist Jeremy Paxman cried when he read the first book of the laddish trilogy), Parsons cashed in his pension to turn to crime.

 

“I went to a screening in 2010 organised by Sam Mendes – I don’t know him but he’d written to say how much he loved Man and Boy. He said he was making a James Bond movie. It was a big deal then: Oscar-winning, arthouse cinema and theatre director doing 007. He’d loved the books since he was a boy and told me he was going to try to capture their ‘gritty essence,’ which hadn’t been done before.”

 

Parsons was reminded of his adolescent passion for Bond. “I went home and, like Sam, started re-reading. Before I’d finished the first page of Casino Royale, I thought, ‘I’m going to try to do this, to create a series hero.’ It’s an incredible achievement to invent a Bond, a Rebus, a Sherlock Holmes. It’s unbelievable! I just wanted to have a crack. It takes some doing – you have to do at least three books. I did it without a contract because I knew my old publishers would indulge me. That would have been the kiss of death. It took two years. I was convinced I could do it. As John Le Carre said, it’s not authenticity that counts, it’s credibility. You have to believe in the story so that the reader can get lost in it.”

 

He always knew Wolfe would be based in the Savile Row station. After leaving NME, Parsons did time there – as a journalist – embedded with the Vice Squad. He was also determined that Wolfe would live in Smithfield. “I know this area really well but after the second book, I went on one of those tours they do. I looked at the lofts [across the street] and I thought, ‘Yeah, Max is up there.’ Although I love men alone, from Reacher to Marlowe, I knew I would do it differently.”

 

No lone Wolfe then? “Nah. In my mid-twenties I went from one family into another, then another and another. I’ve been in every family unit there could possibly be. Of course I’m drawing on my own experience but everything is a slave to the story. My daughter is 15 now. I love her so much, but I really miss her at five, six, seven, so maybe that’s the strongest impulse of all. My nostalgia for my daughter’s childhood. Anyway, I liked the idea of Max being a family man, but not domestic, being open to romantic and sexual adventures.”

 

But, he continues, it’s London itself that gives the books their credibility. “It’s a city that lends itself to mystery and crime. Read Oliver Twist, for instance, Bill Sykes drags the boy from one end of Smithfield to the other. So it’s all that, apart from the fact that there are live animals in the meatmarket! And then there’s the underworld – ‘celebrity’ gangs like the Krays and the Richardsons. In Die Last I have a rival, fictional family of gangsters – the Warboys.”

 

Born in Romford into “a nice, decent, working-class family,” Parsons was grammar-school educated. His war-hero father was a greengrocer, his mother a dinner lady. At 16, he went to work in a gin factory. He also wrote his first novel, The Kids, which sold 25,000 copies and made about £700. “I always knew I would write; it’s a blessing in life to find something you really want to do.”

 

So what about those druggy, punk years on NME?

 

“It was a short period, three years, but I was seriously into sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. I never injected heroin – I always felt there were golden years ahead. I’m lucky to be alive, however. I did [cocaine] in America with Thin Lizzy, in London with The Clash, in Glasgow with Lynyrd Skynyrd. And, yeah, with Iggy Pop. The chances I took were stupid. It was a sad, squalid time.”

 

Now, he boxes, working with a trainer. “I like to think I’m the fittest man on the bestseller lists,” he jokes.

 

Whatever became of the “hip, young gunslinger” of yore? The erstwhile “tribal” Labour supporter? Gone to UKIP, I’d read.

 

“Nah!” he exclaims. “I never supported UKIP. Basically, I’m Tory scum. I voted for Cameron in the last two elections, though I can’t stand the man. I do like Ruth Davidson – make her Queen of Scotland! Yeah, I voted for UKIP in the European Referendum,” he says sounding as curmudgeonly as any Brexiter on the cusp of a bus pass. “I am delighted with Brexit. I’m really happy to see the EU disintegrate. Bring it on!”

 

Die Last by Tony Parsons (Century, £12.99).