Ray Banks's audacious and volatile second novel, "Saturday's Child" (Harcourt, $25), set in the north of England, is the first in a series that will follow Cal Innes, a private investigator whose past links him to local gangster Morris Tiernan. When Cal agrees to track down some stolen casino money, he becomes the unwitting target of Tiernan's psycho son, Mo. Here the shabby Manchester/Newcastle world of drugs, booze, and violence is wonderfully described in a vibrant, often hilarious slang. Banks was born in Scotland, dropped out of university, worked as a double-glazing salesman and a croupier, spent time on the dole, and still has a day job. He spoke from his home in Newcastle upon Tyne, England.
Q: What attracted you to the private-eye novel?
A: I started out writing plays and had a couple put on at university but they were pretty awful . . . you know, cartoon working-class people talking to the audience, saying "Eh, it's grim oop north. All we do is [expletive] and drink." I wrote some screenplays, thinking I would be the next [Martin] Scorsese, that I was going to be an auteur. [Laughs] So I always wanted to write down and dirty stuff, and that suits this genre.
Q: What distinguishes Cal from other fictional gumshoes?
A: He's younger and he's had his early adult years taken away from him in prison. So his moral compass is skewed and he hasn't matured properly. He's damaged goods, and that's more interesting than a pristine character. A hero like Robert Parker's Spenser, he's going to make the right decision, whereas Cal might make understandable decisions, but he will make mistakes and be punished for them. Unlike other heroes, Cal always faces consequences.
Q: Does prison also make him look critically at a changing Britain?
A: Yes, with real cynicism too. He's suspicious by nature. . . . But I got bored with that pretty quickly.
Q: With the social commentary?
A: Yeah, because who cares about my politics? I want readers to care about the character. Other writers do the political thing much better. The social commentary is still there, of course, but it's mostly having a go at [boy band] fans or [tanning parlor devotees].
Q: Might the series go more in that direction?
A: No, I just finished the first draft of the fourth novel in this series, and I can see a very definite ending. I always said it was going to be just four or five books.
Q: Why did you divide the narration between Cal and Mo?
A: I didn't want Mo to be the token psycho. OK, his speech is idiosyncratic, but once you get into the rhythm, I think it's easy enough to read. I read [Anthony Burgess's] "A Clockwork Orange" when I was 12, and that's hardly easy. But it's still English.
Q: Bill James's novels are wonderfully inventive that way, don't you think?
A: Yes, they're so arch, almost Jacobean. And the shock of having police officers act in these awful ways, sort of like [Reginald Hill's Yorkshire detectives] Dalziel and Pascoe if they had severe mental and moral damage. They're wonderfully unpleasant.
Q: Like your police officers?
A: I knew I had to have a copper in the series and I wanted him properly involved. The police procedural has a tendency to keep a distance between the crime and the reader, and I didn't want that. I want you rolling about in the muck. So Detective Sergeant Donkin is that kind of copper. Mucky.
Q: You expose us to some pretty harsh violence too.
A: When Allan Guthrie's "Hard Man" came out last year, one reviewer called it "torture porn." I despise that phrase, because it's entirely inaccurate. With his books, the violence is squarely from the victim's point of view - it's never sadistic. It's painful, as is the violence in my books: painful and shown to have lasting effects. When Cal is hit by a car in this first novel, the injuries last for the entire series. Of course there's a limit to how much punishment Cal can take and maintain a sense of realism, which raises interesting problems later on. He's barely functional by book four.
Q: Some slang words I didn't know: "scally"?
A: It's "scally" in Manchester, "charva" in Newcastle, "ned" in Glasgow, "schemie" in Edinburgh, "chav" elsewhere. A ragamuffin, a petty criminal.
Q: "Scratchings"?
A: Pork scratchings. A pub snack. Pig skin and fat. If you're lucky, you might get a hair.
Q: I thought it was yet another drug.
A: Well, it kind of is.
Anna Mundow is a correspondent for the Irish Times. She can be reached via e-mail at ama1668@hotmail.com.
