Best-selling author DAVID MARK lays bare the bleak origins of his latest novel, DARKNESS FALLS. Many years ago, in the midst of one of my bleaker depressive bouts, I took myself off on a walk to the Humber Bridge. I lived a couple of miles away and the forested area nearby was a favourite haunt Read more
The psychiatrists have all been clear. I need peace, serenity and room to let my thoughts unspool. But what do they know, eh? Four kids, a dog, a newborn baby and a publishing deal makes for a far more interesting life…
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Depression’s quite funny, when you think about it. There you are, bumbling merrily along like a daddy-longlegs on a skirting board and then ‘wham’ – the fleece-lined slipper of utter despair turns you into an ink-blot.
Too much? Too colourful an analogy. Sorry. I do that. I have a very visual imagination. In my teens the psychologists called them hallucinations…
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A couple of years back, the rights to my first novel were snapped up by a major TV company and I enjoyed lots of lovely lunches with the sort of people who would ignore a telephone call from Kenneth Branagh so as not to be distracted from one of my rambling anecdotes. It was all rather jolly. The adaptation never happened, of course. I don’t think the guy in charge had even read the book. But it was quite exciting while it lasted. Since then, lots of people have asked me who I would cast, if given free rein, in a small-screen version of the McAvoy books. This is the kind of thing that stops me sleeping, I hope you understand.
During the research process, I’m pretty much a sponge. I absorb and soak up until I am saturated. Sitting at a bar in Little Italy, earwigging as the wiseguys spoke about ‘some bum’ who needed ‘a talking to’ it occurred to me I probably had the best job in the world but probably shouldn’t be seen taking notes. Drinking rum-filled hot chocolates in an Irish bar, I had a vision of McAvoy’s boss, Trish Pharaoh, getting insanely excited at the selection of whiskies and realised that I needed to get her into the story…
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Invariably (until recently) my books have been set in Hull. Why? Well, I know the city. I’ve lived around the area for 17 years and I was a journalist in the city for an age. I know that if you drive down Southcoates Lane with your windows down you will smell the cocoa from the chocolate factory. I know if you head for Wincolmlee to avoid the traffic on Beverley Road, the stink from the tannery will make your eyes water. I know that the car park at…
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The lock gates look as though they are simply staying up out of bloody-mindedness. The timbers are rotten: sinking, inch by inch, into a sucking chocolatey sludge. The rusty metal struts are half hidden behind hanging tapestries of green slime. Anybody wanting to test the path must first wriggle past lethal-looking metal security railings and a tattered curl of barbed wire.
This is St Andrew’s Dock in Hull.
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