Dom Nolan: From Filmmaking Dreams to Novelist Realities

Ever wonder how detailed research can ignite a writer's imagination while crafting tales from the annals of history? Join our conversation with the gifted author Dom Nolan as he uncovers the magic behind writing historical fiction set against London's vivid past.  Listen in as Dom dispels myths about the rigidity of planning in storytelling, offering a fresh perspective on the intricate dance between creativity and historical accuracy and insights behind his new novel, White City.

Through Dom’s story, we explore the unpredictable nature of creative careers and the resilience needed to navigate them, showing how each hurdle, including writing unpublishable novels, became a stepping stone toward eventual success. We also lift the veil on the evolving and often perplexing landscape of the publishing industry, where trust and timing can elevate a book's journey. 

White City

It's 1952, and London is victorious but broken, a city of war ruins and rationing, run by gangsters and black-market spivs.
An elaborate midnight heist, the biggest robbery in British history, sends newspapers into a frenzy. Politicians are furious, the police red-faced. They have suspicions but no leads. Hunches but no proof.

For two families, it is more than just a sensational headline, as their fathers fail to return home on the day of the robbery.

Young Addie Rowe, daughter of a missing Jamaican postman and drunk ex-club hostess mother, struggles to care for her little sister in a dilapidated Brixton rooming house. 

Claire Martin, increasingly resentful of roads not taken, strives to make the rent and keep her teenage son Ray from falling under unsavoury influences in Notting Dale. 

She finds herself caught between the interests of dangerous men who may know the truth behind her husband's disappearance: Dave Lander, whose reserved nature she finds difficult to reconcile with his reputation as a violent gang enforcer, and Teddy 'Mother' Nunn, a sociopathic, evangelising outlaw and top lieutenant in Billy Hill's underworld.

Drawn together through the years in the city's invisible web of crime and p

Chapters

• 0:00 Exploring the Rabbit Hole of Research
• 10:12 Transformative Moments in Creative Careers
• 17:44 Writing Process Reflections
• 30:23 Challenges in Today's Publishing Industry
• 43:44 Navigating Publishing Relationships and Challenges
• 53:17 Film Adaptation Challenges in Prose

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

It's funny, isn't it? Because you can look back and recognise the moments where you made a choice that made the difference. But I wonder whether we can look back and recognise the moments where we didn't make a choice that could have made a difference. Like I wonder whether we recognise that as much, or whether there are sort of lost moments out there that could have turned things a different way.

Speaker 2: 0:18

Hello and welcome to the Conversation with Nadine Matheson. As always, I hope that you're well and I hope that you've had a good week, and I would like to welcome you to the podcast, where authors share their stories and talk about writing, books and everything in between. Did you like that? That's my new tagline. That is my new tagline for the podcast, and I feel that it sums up this podcast really well, because that is exactly what I do every week with my guests. I have a conversation where we not only just talk about their books, but we do talk about writing what brought them to this career as a writer. And I always say to my guests before we start recording it's OK if we go off on a tangent, because we always do and I always find the tangents is where the really interesting stories are. So I love having my conversations every week and I know that you enjoy them too, and I've had a busy week. I can always say to you I hope you had a good week. I had a good week last week.

Speaker 2: 1:19

Last week, I appeared on a panel which was part of Dorothy Coombson's Frillfest 2025, and Frillfest 2025 was not only to celebrate the launch of Dorothy Coombson's new book Give Him To Me, but it was also to celebrate women crime writers. The panels included myself, kia Abdullah, louise Hare, simon Mair, araminta Hall, lisa Jewell and, of course, dorothy Coombson, and it was just fantastic just to be talking about our books and answering audience questions, and I hope that we have more of these sort of events in the future. Now let's get on with the show. This week, I'm in conversation with the author of the highly praised novels Vine Street and White City, dom Nolan, and in our conversation we talk about living permanently in the rabbit hole of research, taking 10 years to sell a novel, and what surprised Dom about the publishing industry. Now, as always, sit back or go for a walk and enjoy the conversation.

Speaker 2: 2:21

Dominic Nolan, welcome to the Conversation. Thank you for having me. Nadine, right, my very first question for you is right with your new novels, so with White City and Vine Street, so now you're doing historical fiction, yeah? So my question is how far down the rabbit hole do you go with your research?

Speaker 1: 2:42

Because it can get dangerous do you go with your research, because it can get dangerous. Yeah, I mean, the research is almost a perpetual project at this point, I think. Um, so I don't necessarily research specifically for bits in the books. Um, I'm just like, london fascinates me anyway in that period fascinates me, so the books have kind of sprung out of that. So I'm always on the lookout for books about London. I'm always reading something about the city and I think that a lot of stuff from the books comes from that. So, rather than writing and then researching to make sure I've got everything right, I think the wider I can research, the broader I can go with that before I write. That frees me up, I find, because then you can swim around anywhere in the period when you're writing the book. You're not sort of just beholden to the narrow path that you've thought up for the novel. So yeah, I live in the rabbit hole, I guess.

Speaker 2: 3:38

I like that, but I suppose it doesn't feel forced in that way when it's like a natural part of you and your day.

Speaker 1: 3:48

Yeah, yeah, I hope so. I mean, I'm never good at researching afterwards because I just forget to do it Like. I tried doing that with the Boone novels, which obviously more contemporary, so it was a different kind of research. But you know that thing where you're like oh, I'll write down what I think and then I'll go back and check it later. I can't leave that alone. So like 12 seconds later I'll be like no, no, no, actually I can't move on from that at all until I know absolutely everything about that particular subject, even if it's only going to be a sentence in the book.

Speaker 1: 4:15

So I found it works better if I just do all the reading beforehand, like all the reading any book I can get my hands on Because I enjoy it. A anyway, so it'll be something I might be doing anyway. And B, like I said it just, I mean I'm a planner, I'm a big planner of incident and of character, and I think it actually helps me be spontaneous. The more I know and the more I've planned, because, although that sort of seems like it doesn't make sense, but the more I know and the more I've planned, because although that sort of seems like it doesn't make sense, but the more I know, the freer I am to move away from the path I thought I was going to go on um.

Speaker 2: 4:53

I think that makes sense because I think that most people, when they think of planning, they think that any writer who plans, that they're then stuck to the plan that is rigid and that it doesn't move. Yeah, it's crazy and that. And I always feel that's not the case at all because I'm a planner, but I always describe my plan as I always call it, a safety net, so somewhere I can go to if I get lost somewhere yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1: 5:16

Yeah, it's just psychological as much as anything else.

Speaker 1: 5:17

Yeah yeah, definitely, but I'm not stuck with it, I'm not like, I can't deviate from the path, for me, the the spontaneity that is of value is in the writing, it's in the prose, it's in the tone of the piece, not plot like spontaneity of plot. I don't even know how that would come across to a reader really, to be honest with you, but I think it's in in the writing. So in the same way I'm going to compare us to like caravaggio or something here. But the renaissance masters, you know, we know they sketched, not only in sketchbooks but they sketched on the canvas that they then painted on right, and the spontaneity comes from the brush strokes. And I think we're writing. It's the same thing.

Speaker 1: 5:54

I think what, what readers tend to remember is character and voice, and the voice is the bit where I think spontaneity can come out in the most valuable way, for me at least. So if I, if I have a path, like you said, it's a safe net Psychologically. I'm not worrying about that. I can change it any time, but I'm not worrying about it. I can just worry, concentrate on the writing, and I find it helps. It would be weird for me to write a novel where I didn't know where I was heading. It would be weird for me to write a novel where I didn't know where I was heading. Like, I like having that holistic chain to move through because I think then, at every point, all the different beats of your book are connected in an organic fashion. They don't feel like you, they just, you know, were pulled out of your ass as you were going along and I think that makes the book, uh, cohere in a far better way yeah, I was thinking I was talking about the artist sketching on the canvas and it.

Speaker 2: 6:46

Whenever you look at those art history documentaries and you'll see and they show like the x-rays yeah, exactly yeah, and you'll see the sketched initial sketch on there yeah.

Speaker 2: 6:54

So you know, if it weren't for the renaissance masters, it's good enough for me you know what I'm going to ask you before I go on to my other question, because I was thinking, when I was thinking about Vine Street and White City, automatically, and obviously thinking about how much you plan, I started thinking of James Earl Roy. A lot of people know like I love James Earl Roy, an American tabloid, and that whole LA quartet um of books that he has. But also and I and now I think I've made I might have made it up, but I'm sure I didn't, I'm sure I've listened I watched a documentary where he said that he wrote like 700 page outlines, like he's crazy outlines.

Speaker 1: 7:32

Yeah, yeah, I think he calls them, like his bible, for the book um which? Is basically he has. He has like a team of researchers that go through like newspapers of the period, just pulling out anything that looks weird or interesting, like oh, elroy, I like that. Or look at this, a head was found here. We'll have that story up, um, and and he puts all of that together and I mean that my plan, I would say, is almost a first draft. It's just not in manuscript form so.

Speaker 1: 8:00

I do it, um, on the computer, I do it in one note and I just have a page for each chapter as I see it any time. Obviously that changes as you go along. But it is just chunks of prose, it's chunks of dialogue and conversation, it's newspaper clippings, it's maps, it's photographs, it's just everything bunged into one that I think is going to be relevant for that chapter. And then that becomes the book I use when I'm actually drafting the manuscript. But I mean, I guess the the plans are probably conservatively 25 or 30 000 words. They're not quite as crazy as elroy's, but it's still a lot though yeah, it's almost the first draft.

Speaker 1: 8:38

It's a sort of proto draft, if you like, um, and that's where I work out a lot of the, the plot stuff or how I'm going to turn plot into story with the characters, whatever. But I mean obviously that that changes, man, as we said. You you know you didn't get your plan in stone tablets off the top of a mountain, so you're perfectly free to change that whenever you like, um. So but yeah, psychologically for me, that, that having that document, having created that bible for the book um, is important for me to to sort of keep me it's not even about being on rails into where you're going, it's like psychologically being in the vibe, like the tone, the voice of the book is the most important thing to me. So it's like I have to channel the feeling of it every time I sit down to write in it, and having that resource I've already created helps me every morning get into that mood but you know, you mentioned, like you know, the stone tablets and the bible.

Speaker 2: 9:33

But the way my brain works, even if they, even if my plan was written on stone tablets and I'm very funny, like I'm very particular, like I always do my outlines on yellow legal page of pencil, that's just, that's just my thing but even if they were stone tablets, my brain would be like, well, I'm just going to throw them off the mountain, let them break, and then move them around, because that's how I see the plan in my head and on paper there are these sections that I can move yeah, we're the same there what were you doing before this?

Speaker 2: 10:04

have you always been a writer?

Speaker 1: 10:06

I want to know who don was I think all writers were always writers, weren't they in? Some way um, I mean, I wasn't I when I left school. I didn't go to uni. I worked um, which 18 is funny because you suddenly have a hilarious amount of money.

Speaker 1: 10:22

Um, even though you haven't, you could be on minimum wage, but it feels like a lot, yeah, and I worked for a finance company in my local town for years because they were like the big employer and sort of did various things there for years and I thought I was going to be a film director. That's what I wanted to be. Cinema was my first love and I was going to be fucking Stanley Kubrick and I worked towards that, like I did film courses. I went to New York for a bit, went to the film Academy there and made some short films and this was I mean, I'm going to betray my age here, but this was pre-digital, so it was eight millimeter, 16 millimeter. You know, hacking the literal celleroid apart on a steam deck machine and sellotaping it together and writing.

Speaker 1: 11:07

I think fiction felt scary at that point, like the idea that I would have to write 300 or 400 pages of something just felt so monolithic a task that I couldn't wrap my head around it. Where a film felt sort of even though logistically in many ways it's a much more complicated process it made more sense in my head in that time. But you have to work nicely with others I'm not always big on that and you're not in complete control. You're restricted by reality in many ways, whereas if you're a novelist, it's the perfect job for a megalomaniac, because you can put anything on the page, you're in 100% control of it, and that's where I wanted to be with my stories. But it took. Actually, I was made redundant. I was a fraud investigator at the time. They made me redundant, which was very helpful, because suddenly I had a chunk of money and a load of time and all I needed to find was the willpower to write, because motivation was the problem, I think, at that point. So I went back to uni at that point, not really to learn how to write, because I think you've got to teach yourself that, but to get deadlines, because I'm way too British not to be mortified by. You know the idea of missing a deadline. So if somebody said you've got to hand this in by that date, you know I've done it a week early twice and that was it. So you start writing short stories. At that point they get longer and longer. You end up doing your final, like dissertation or whatever, which is 15,000 words or something, and at that point I thought, okay, now writing a novel is no longer scary, it's a thing I can do.

Speaker 1: 12:48

So I guess that was 2006, 2007, and I wrote my first novel then, which was, I think, the best learning experience, that was the apprenticeship of being a writer. I think you never learn more than you do in your first novel. Yeah, you learn what processes work for you, what sort of uh habits you need to get into to facilitate your voice and the kind of storytelling you want to do. Um, and obviously it took a lot longer than any of my other books. It took over a year, but I I had the fortune of meeting my agent at the university so I never had to query.

Speaker 1: 13:26

You know, I just sort of sent her this book. Um, I, in much the way that a cat brings you a dead bird like it was like 700 it was, it was bigger than vine street, um, and it was this 19th century state of the nation novel about the swing riots in wellington, had about nine different narrative strands. Um, I mean, it was a calamity in many ways, um, but she saw in it what she needed to and we set about hacking bits out of it and and going on submission with it and um, and that began the scenic routes to, uh, to publication, I guess, because I guess it was 10 years from then until we sold Past Life.

Speaker 2: 14:07

Oh, really, 10 years. Yeah, what did you tell yourself during those 10 years? Because that's a long period. I mean, I say it's not unusual. There's going to be similar stories from authors between signing and actually getting their first book deal. But what was going through your head at those moments? What did you tell yourself?

Speaker 1: 14:26

well, I'm a great compartmentalizer and plus the idea of publication felt like an abstraction at that point, like I love writing. So I was kind of happy enough writing these apparently unpublishable novels, giving, giving them to Nick. And then she'd be like, yeah, we'll go out again on this one. And I don't know she was a lot more disappointed than I was, I think, when they didn't sell. I can't just be like, oh well, better do another one. And I mean it's always weird the way it works out.

Speaker 1: 15:00

I mean, past Life was really the first straight up crime novel or thriller that I'd written when I wrote it, um, and that's the one that publishes. So it kind of seemed weird. Later, I guess, when I did vine street sort of moved into these sort of socio-historical crime novels. But that's what I'd been writing prior to past Life. That was the kind of stuff I was writing A lot of. It was period sort of sprawling messes, and Past Life was the one straight up you know chronological, straight line thriller that I'd written and somehow that's the one that publishing jumped on.

Speaker 2: 15:40

Yeah, it's interesting, like, just going back to the whole redundancy thing, I always say there always seems to be a moment for a lot of writers actually not even just writers, I think, anyone who's doing anything creative, different to their, their normal life there always seems to be some kind of pivotal moment where they're able to, yeah, in a sense, make the jump. And we have that similarity in that. When they offered me redundancy at work because I was always thinking I want to work for myself, I want to work even as a lawyer, like I want to work for myself. I want to work even as a lawyer, like I want to work for myself. I hate working for people. And they offered me redundancy. I just hate it. I don't like answering to anybody or asking why are you asking me silly questions? Just leave me be.

Speaker 2: 16:18

But they offered me redundancy in 2013, I think it was, and I was always I. I mean, I was always being you're always a writer, so you're always writing on and off, on and off. But it was that moment when they offered me redundancy and I took it and again, okay, now I've got. It wasn't loads of money, but I've got money. And also, and now I've got time and I'm in control of my time, as opposed to I've got a boss being in control of how I, what I, how I deal with my time, and it was. And I would say, if it wasn't for that moment of taking a redundancy and then having the time to focus on other things and you said you have that it's a different tool of motivation then I don't think the books, stuff that's happened now I don't. It probably would have happened, but maybe would have happened a lot later.

Speaker 1: 17:02

It's funny, isn't it? Because you can look back and recognize the moments where you made a choice that made the difference. But I wonder whether we can look back and recognize the moments where we didn't make a choice that could have made a difference. Like I wonder whether we recognize that as much, or whether there are sort of lost moments out there that could have turned things a different way. I mean, that's why I don't think looking back and having regrets about stuff, particularly in a writing career, is is valuable, like just keep on playing forward and take what you've got already, and but that, yeah, that was definitely the moment where I thought, you know, I can either go out and get another day job and just be day job Dom and nobody wants to be him or I can use this moment, this bit of time, this chunk of money, and sort of invest it in my own future.

Speaker 1: 17:44

What I want to do, um, and in many ways you know, I mean I love writing, I love being a writer, but I also just didn't want to work for a living. Like work is like the moral corruption of the soul or something like it's just, it's work is hard, it's the cancer of humanity, it's what's wrong with everything. Um, so anything I could do to avoid working for a living at that point seemed like a much better choice. Um, and writing, I mean writing is one of those things that's hard, but it's not because you love it, yeah. So I guess, in the same way, professional athletes don't mind, you know, doing the cardio or whatever, I don't mind whatever's supposed to be difficult about writing. I'm not one of those writers that ever complains about it going. This is so hard. I love all of it. The stuff I don't love, I just don't do so. Rewriting, for instance, don't like that, don't do it.

Speaker 1: 18:29

Don't do it at all. I write slowly, so if I do a thousand words in a day, there's champagne that evening.

Speaker 2: 18:41

Celebrations all round for Dom. Yeah, because I can't.

Speaker 1: 18:45

I don't do that thing where you do a messy draft like I don't like mess, so I won't leave a sentence alone until I'm happy with it, and then I won't leave that paragraph alone until I'm happy with it, that chapter alone until I'm happy with it. So what I end up with at the end of that manuscript drafting process is pretty close to what gets published. I mean, obviously there's always changes and you speak to your editor and whatever. But I've never had major, major changes to anything because I always take the time and because I plan so holistically, I know what I'm doing. But, um, I mean I don't really get.

Speaker 1: 19:20

I'm fortunate in that my editor has completely bought into me, so I don't get like extensive line edits or stuff like that, because he's just like you know what you're doing with your voice, that's, that's fine, you know, unless I had some really crazy shit in there. But most of the time I don't get extensive edits on that level and we'll have a discussion on the phone rather than sort of a long editorial letter about stuff, and we're almost always on the same page with anything that needs to change. So the whole thing about like writing is rewriting, not for you but I suppose when you're writing like 30 000 word outlines, yeah, it's baked into the process.

Speaker 1: 19:56

Okay, yeah, it's baked into the process.

Speaker 2: 19:58

I've always pre-edited it, yeah yeah, whereas me, you know, I I happily call mine a messy first draft, but for me I'm happy with that.

Speaker 1: 20:09

That's the point, though, isn't it? You need to find the process that works for you. There's no wrong process. Whatever process results in the book being the best version of itself it can be is 100% right. So I'd say there's as many ways of doing it as there are writers published, because everybody has their own little foibles things they like things, they don't like things the way they do it. Whether you leave a gap, big gap, in between sort of the first draft and then going back to it, or, like me, you're just like, okay, I don't want to read it again. So, yeah, whatever works, is it? It's purely a sort of ends justifies the means process.

Speaker 2: 20:41

In that regard, yeah, and ends justifies the means process in that regard.

Speaker 2: 20:43

Yeah, and I suppose is that you learn with each book, like you know, you're talking, like you was talking about your editorial notes, and basically you don't have much. And I found which I think is like a good thing for me I'm like, okay, I'm doing, I'm editing book four, like I was saying to you before we started recording, and when I compare my editing notes with book four in comparison to book one, I can see that they're getting shorter because, in a sense, I'm learning how to self-edit when I'm doing my rewrite for myself. And, yeah, and I've listened to a podcast I think I was listening to it yesterday and, um, it was about writing and I can't remember who was talking now but basically saying, no, there's no right, there's no wrong way to write, because I think a lot of new writers can get bought into that idea. I have to do it this way, I have to plan that way, I have to use this piece of software before I can sit down and write chapter one.

Speaker 1: 21:36

That's why I said when I wrote my first novel, that was the best learning experience. Yeah, yeah, here it took me to do that one. I think, um, like just drafting the manuscript, um, and also because I was an idiot, um, I used to handwrite at that point, which which in some ways I kind of wish I still did, but it it takes so much time and I've gone through my whole not liking rewriting stuff and say, you know, you, you handwrite it and then you have to type in the draft, which is an interesting because that becomes part of the editorial process itself. You never just type it in exactly. I'm always like, oh, actually this would be better that way.

Speaker 1: 22:15

But then what I found the payoff was when I changed stuff.

Speaker 1: 22:19

You lose stuff from the written manuscript, and so when I, when I type a manuscript now, I have a different file for each day, so I don't like save the same file.

Speaker 1: 22:31

So at the end of the end of the process, the book will be like, whatever it is, 150 or 200 files or something, so that I've always got everything I've typed so I can go back and search for something, because sometimes you'll change something and then when you read it back as I'm going along. I'm like, actually the first time I did that was a lot better. But if you're working on or I mean I don't use scrivener so I guess that has different ways of doing this but I just type into word so I can go back and check previous drafts. And I'd found that was something I'd lost with the handwritten thing, because you can't search like digitally, search a handwritten manuscript. So I'll be sitting there searching through like a thousand handwritten pages, looking for some sentence or some obscure reference I've made to something that I was happy with but I'd somehow not typed in. Um, so that was when I decided to make the jump fully to digital.

Speaker 2: 23:16

But I still do miss something of the tactile nature of doing that yeah, I can't do fully digital, like I'll do the first draft and well, I suppose it goes in. It goes up and down, so I'll start my outline. That's by hand on my notepad, because that's just my thing. I write my first draft, I use Scrivener for the first draft and then after that I switch to Word, but all my edits I have to print out the manuscript and physically do my edits and I don't. I don't know if it kind of goes back to me being a lawyer. So when I'm preparing for trials I've always got the hard copies of witness statements and I'm going through it, because when I'm writing I'm work. It's a process, so I'm working through it.

Speaker 1: 23:58

Weirdly I'd. Only I only did that for the first time on on White City. So the first three I completely edited just on the word documents that came back to me. And then for White City, when I got the manuscript back I wasn't going to be at home a lot that month so I printed it out and I was just carrying around like a handful of chapters with me every day, sitting around wherever I was writing on it, and actually I'm going to do that going forward. I found that better because I think you read it differently on paper, so you do on the screen.

Speaker 1: 24:32

Um, that's why I I always prefer reading on paper to like a kindle or something I kind of mind reading a kindle, but it's literally not the same experience you know, what I mean.

Speaker 1: 24:43

Like people say, oh, ebooks and books are the same thing. I don't. It's not. There's something about the way your brain works. Looking at a digital image is different to paper. Um, and I've I've always found it a much pleasanter experience on paper. So, yeah, so I don't know why I've never edited before in that fashion laziness, I suspect, as that's the core of anything I never find myself doing. Um, uh, yeah, doing doing that this time was a was an interesting experience. It's just the cadence of the language, I think, like I found myself just changing sentences, tweaking them a lot more than I normally do, like I actually reading that now in my hand, sitting here as a, an object in the world, it sounds different to it did on the screen.

Speaker 2: 25:23

Um, but I suppose it's like anything you know, it's like you adapt and you learn as as you move along. And and also you said, it can be a bit of stubbornness, like stubbornness on my part with the whole paper thing, because I remember even being in court and they were moving from, you know, paper to digital. All the files are now going to be digital. How you fill out your court forms is all going to be digital, but I'm always like no anything I need to rely on if I'm going to be questioning.

Speaker 1: 25:49

I want a hard copy yeah, I want.

Speaker 2: 25:51

I want a hard copy if I'm making an application to the judge based on a mental health report which is like 70 pages long. I want a hard copy because I feel like if I'm just reading it on the screen and I have the same way you feel about the kindle reading it on an ebook yeah, it's the same way I feel about paper. I'm like I can't, it doesn't absorb in my brain. If I'm just reading it on the screen, I literally I feel like I need to feel the pages, do the highlight and then it, and then it sinks in.

Speaker 2: 26:22

When did you? It just sounds a bit strange, but you know so. We've always. You've always been a writer. But when did you realize that you were good? Because I think there's a difference between knowing you can write and then knowing what you're writing is actually any good.

Speaker 1: 26:34

I knew that I was more interested in language and words than people I knew. I guess when I first started working I'd be the guy whose emails were like overly elaborate in a sort of humorous fashion or whatever that guy, the annoying guy. And I read more than most people I knew and I didn't really write in any organized fashion, like I didn't write short stories or fiction or anything, but I was always just sort of I don't know like the writing equivalent of doodling or something maybe. And then I guess, because I worked in the film thing, there was obviously an element of writing in that, just writing short scripts and whatever. But in terms of knowing I was good those things that happens in like liminal stages, I think. I mean, you know, once an editor says they want to represent you, you sort of think, oh okay, and I mean I've been at university, so I guess you you hand in stories and you read stories by other people at the university and you're like Thank God.

Speaker 1: 27:32

I always thought so you know where you stand with your peers in that regard. But then it becomes a level of sort of professional transition, I guess. So your editor, when they first buy your book, you know that's another stage. You're like, okay, I'm good enough to be published. So then how good am I in the realm of published authors, who knows? And I think the last, it's really only the last couple of books where I've thought this is interesting. This is interesting because not only am I doing what I want to do, I'm pretty good at it, like I'm okay. Wine Street's a pretty good book, white City's a pretty good book, I'm happy with them. There's not much I would change about them looking back. So it's a becoming, I think, the feeling of being satisfied with your own work and realising that, yeah, you're okay at this.

Speaker 2: 28:25

Were you surprised when Past Lives came out, like the reaction you got to it, especially when you said that wasn't your first book either?

Speaker 1: 28:34

No, no. So that made it weird because it was the first publication. So it was the first real level of collaboration, or two, I guess, working on it Like I'd never. My agent had always read my books but nobody else ever had. I didn't have a writer's group, I didn't have beta readers, so that was the first time that a wide group of people, I guess, had read anything I'd written.

Speaker 1: 28:58

I mean, your publisher is always going to tell you you're brilliant. They're not going to say I bought your book, it's a bit naff. So I mean, mean, it came out and it was. I don't know you get. There was a couple of reviews for past life, I guess.

Speaker 1: 29:14

Um, it didn't sell anything really. I mean it there's the expression it sank like a stone, but it sank like an arrow, like it didn't even make a splash, it just disappeared. Um and after um, when after dark came out, it was COVID. So everything shut down. Um, there were no events for it. So it was, I don't know, even when I was published. At that stage it almost felt like it was happening completely under the radar. Um, and the only feedback you were getting was, like other writers who maybe had read it and liked it, um. So I guess vine street was the first time there was a slightly broader reaction to anything. And then it's reviewed in the times and all of a sudden it's on a slightly different level, um, I mean, we still can't sell copies of any of them, but, um, but the reaction has been been pleasant in terms of the press, um, and other writers yeah, what surprised you about the industry?

Speaker 2: 30:12

you know, once with the, once the first book was published past lives and you're going through that experience of you saying it's not a stone, it's just an arrow and it's barely making a splash. But what surprised you most about the publishing industry?

Speaker 1: 30:30

I think I'm not sure publishing knows a lot about publishing, like. I mean, we're in a weird transitional period now, I think, because, you know, over the last, certainly in like our lifetime, you've had the end of the netbook agreement, you've had the rise of supermarkets in book selling, you've had Amazon detonate like a nuclear weapon in the middle of the industry and and Amazon is fully vertically integrated. They commission books, they edit books, they publish books, they sell. But they've got like a completely separate model to the rest of us and I don't think publishing now outside of the massive names that sell huge numbers. I don't really think they know how their own economic model works and, like you know, if the sale is something going with Waterstones, it's not like they're running around. So unless the book, you book the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, literally physically. One shop, um, who sold thousands of copies of it, um, and that amounts for the lion's share of the sales on it. So it's, it's an odd thing. You can, you can sell books and you just look at the raw numbers and you go, okay, it's not a bestseller, but we've sold a few. And then you you realize it's. It's like one shop that's done you a massive solid because they love the book and hand sold it to their customers and it got out of control in one place. So that's really like nothing to do with your publisher in many ways, like the book's done that itself. So I guess it's just the complete wild west nature of existing as a what they call a mid list writer. I mean they're really mid percent. I mean they're really mid-percent in the rest, just the.

Speaker 1: 32:31

I guess the blindness of it in many ways, I think has surprised me the fact that there isn't, because I tell you, I was published in France this year for the first time, so I've been overdoing events in France and they're less conglomerated in terms of their publishing. So a lot of the publishers, if they have been bought up, they've been bought up by other sort of mid-sized publishers. There's not like the big five. I mean Hachette are obviously there, but it's not the same where everybody's owned by just a handful of companies and the guys, their head of sales, will also have events, oh really. So if you've got a festival in france. Yeah, yeah, it's not. Events aren't seen as being publicity, they're seen as being marketing opportunities so if you go to a festival in france, it's not like you do.

Speaker 1: 33:15

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but, but, yeah, but we don't like selling books. Like if you go to a festival here there'll be like a waterstones in the corner, or if it's capital right, david's got something going on. But it's almost like, maybe run your power stamp, maybe some of you, that side industry and all of the writers all day will sit at the tables with their books and the public come in and you interact with them and talk to them and it's like you're selling your own book. It's crazy. You sit there for days doing it, um, and that's why the marketing and sales guys are there to make sure the stock's there, to make sure when they're there they'll visit all the indie shops, because they're they don't really have a waterstones like.

Speaker 1: 33:56

They have 3 000 independent bookstores in france, um, which is sort of over twice as many as we do, um, given that our populations are pretty much the same. Um, so they still work on a model book selling kind of still feels over there like it feels like it should have been here in the 60s or 70s before everything got bought up, before publishing sort of consumed itself. I think publishing here is like the snake that swallowed its own tail and it can't quite believe it's digesting itself as it's watching itself do it like it can't quite realize that it's killing itself. But but that's, that's what's happened. Now we've we've entered this odd phase where there's no integration between the corporations that own the publishers and the people who sell books other than on another corporate level, via, like waterstones, whatever, um, and I just I don't know. I think there needs to be more, some kind of cohesion that's missing these days in the selling of it.

Speaker 2: 34:51

I always say publishing, that was a ramble, but yeah, it was a good ramble. But I mean, I always say publishing. They like to say that they have rules, but there really are no rules. That's just the way I see it. You know, I came from a professional.

Speaker 1: 35:07

There are rules for five minutes, I mean they change their rules immediately.

Speaker 2: 35:10

Yes. So I always say as well. I said the rules are always. The rules that are there are always in flux, and I've come from a profession where rules are firmly, they are literally set in stone and it takes a lot to to make they're not flexible at all. It takes a lot to to make they're not flexible at all. It takes a lot to move them to or just to amend them slightly. So I've always found that like a challenge for me moving from law to publishing and I'm like this doesn't, it doesn't make any sense. I have a very linear brain.

Speaker 1: 35:42

Things need to go from a to z and things aren't going from a to Z, they're going up and down and all over the place yeah, well, I think it's also because and this is probably a good thing for us at the moment but editorial is still run by the book people. Yeah, the finances are run by the sort of corporate people. So these days, although it's great, it means when you're working with your editor you're always just talking book stuff or whatever. But it means when books are being acquired, the tail is wagging the dock because marketing and sales no longer exist to serve editorial vision. You know, editorial is just there to provide content for marketing and sales.

Speaker 1: 36:21

So the purse strings are controlled by marketing, are controlled by marketing, which means that you can. So, for instance, with White City, we went out on submission with White City because I don't work under contract, I'm basically just always doing my own thing out of contract. So when we sent White City out, only my existing publisher wanted to publish it, only the editor that I've always worked with, because he was just like yeah, sure, let's go and do it. But when we try to test the market, all other editors, even people who said they loved Vine Street and whatever, they wouldn't touch it.

Speaker 1: 36:57

We were told by more than one person, it was impossible to publish. Yeah, it was either too bleak or too nihilistic, or the market won't allow it. As if the market's like a troll that runs around telling you what you can and can't do. I'm like you're literally the supply part of the market. Like you control it. What are you? What are you talking about?

Speaker 1: 37:16

Like demand in in publishing and reading books, demand doesn't drive the market because people have to see the books. Like, you need visibility, and that's entirely a supply side issue. So, because people have to see the books, you need visibility, and that's entirely a supply-side issue. So, again, this is just indicative of the fact that publishing isn't in control of that part. Nobody's really in control of it. I don't think Waterstones care whether they sell a back catalogue or a front catalogue book. As long as they're selling books, they don't care.

Speaker 1: 37:40

So, again, that cohesion between how we build people's careers going forward just doesn't exist in the same way it used to and I don't think anybody's got a solution to it. I mean it's kind of going the same way. Hollywood has gone in many ways. If you think of the movies that Hollywood used to make that catered for grownups in the 60s and 70s, and now you think of the movies Hollywood makes that cater for, I guess, 12-year-olds I mean, I don't really know this there's. There's no big budget or even mid-budget grown-up films are there, and in the same way, publishers aren't willing to spend money on books that they don't think are going to end up being sold through Asda or Tesco or you know, selling tens of thousands of hardbacks or whatever they're. You're just not going to get paid a substantial amount of money for that because they're not willing to put the groundwork in listeners.

Speaker 2: 38:29

It's time for a very short break. If you're enjoying this conversation with Nadine Matheson, I want to help keep the podcast going. Why not buy me a cup of coffee? Your support goes such a long way in keeping these conversations flowing. Just check out the link in the show notes. But I was just thinking it's like publishing. Yeah, publishing is not very I'm not talking about risk averse in terms of business and finance, but they don't seem to be very risk averse in terms of creativity, because I don't understand why you would say yes to find to vine street but suddenly right city seems.

Speaker 1: 39:04

Yeah well, I mean, like I said, nobody, nobody has ever said yes other than headline. So after vine street came out, people said they loved it, like other editors said they liked it. And then when we sent white city out. But I think there's a difference in the way people read books. Like if you're reading a book you didn't publish and you weren't responsible for and you didn't have to explain why it's not contributing to, you know, quarterly dividends being paid to the shareholders, then you can read it just for pleasure, whereas if you're going to be held accountable for it, I think that's a different situation.

Speaker 1: 39:38

I think fear comes into it. At that point Fear is a major motivator, I think, in the acquiring of books, either the fear of I'm not going to be able to make any money for this and I'm going to be held responsible for it, or fear of missing out. So somebody sees something else work and then you're like, oh, I better buy five of them, because that appears to be this week's thing and that's the way publishing often restructures itself in many ways. There's going to be a whole bunch of a kind of romanticist imprints that are set up over the next couple of years to take advantage of those sales and five years from now, all those people are going to get sacked because it's going to. You know, the trend's going to have gone down again because there's no permanent infrastructure put in place, with just editorial. They're always chasing something um or running away from it.

Speaker 2: 40:23

One of the two I was going was going to say is that you can already see the imprints that are coming up, which are just focusing on romanticism. It's already started, do you think, because you have that ability to compartmentalise and you were able to do that from early on, that that's made you quite pragmatic about the industry, because I can see so many writers, whether they're new or whether they've been doing it for 10 years, just feeling getting so like broken down by by it all, by the journey of it all, the under and the unpredictability.

Speaker 1: 40:59

I've also made sure. I haven't made sure, but I'm not financially. I couldn't be financially dependent on it because they've never paid me enough, so they also don't pay me enough to care about their concerns. It always works for me. What decisions am I making that are going to help the kind of writing I want to do? And because I don't work under contract, it means so.

Speaker 1: 41:25

I mean, even when I first started thinking about Vine Street, I pitched it to my current editor and he said no, because he was concerned that I was moving from two contemporary thrillers to this big socio historical thing and, like I said, for me that was going home because it was the kind of stuff I used. They were worried about it. They were like you know, how is that going to work in terms of bringing your readers with you? I didn't have readers. It wasn't really a concern to me that the first two books hadn't been a big enough success and they weren't going to pay me enough for the third one for me to worry about. So I just went away and wrote it and made sure it was the best version of itself it could be, and then they bought it anyway.

Speaker 1: 42:13

Um, and editorially, headliner, completely, completely on board with me, like, um, you know my editor would, would support me in any decision I make creatively. Um, they're just not going to pay me. You know enough to pay the gas bill for it, really, um, so you've either got to make money in other ways, or in writing in different ways, or whatever. But but that, rather than that's allowed me to compartmentalize in terms of not caring about the consequences of that. I can just concentrate on the book. What's the book going to be? Um, and that's really the only way I know how to move forward. There probably are more professional ways I can do it, but I've always had a slight disdain for professionalism, so that's never, never, really worried me.

Speaker 2: 42:51

I would never have gathered that from you, from talking to you today. What if you, if you were sitting down with a I hate the word aspiring, because I just feel like you're a writer anyway. We just need to see how far you go. But if you were sitting down with a new writer, what would be one of your tips to them? What advice would you give them?

Speaker 1: 43:15

I don't know. I mean I think you've got to do it your own way. And I think I mean you have to write, you have to have the material. I mean I think a lot of people think you can become a writer not really doing that much writing and that's really the only thing you're in control of at any point. Your voice, how you capture the dream in your head and pin it to the page, is the only thing that you're in 100% control of, at least at the point of writing.

Speaker 1: 43:44

So if you concentrate on that, and then it's a matter of who you choose to trust. So I was fortunate that I met my editor and my agent and we got on and I was like this is somebody I have no problem trusting with my career, like I trust their editorial judgment, I trust their professional judgment. So cultivating those relationships, particularly with the editor, because the editor is going to be the person that can steer you through those early days and if you have a problem with your publisher, they're going to be the person that can help you with that. So as long as that relationship is sturdy, that will see you through a lot. And then, basically, my biggest advice to any writer is don't be a lot.

Speaker 1: 44:26

And then basically, my biggest advice to any writer is don't be a dick.

Speaker 1: 44:29

Like everybody's there to make your book as good as it can be, like nobody wants you to fail. Even if you know, even if you don't think you're being given financial support or marketing support or whatever, at least at an editorial level, everybody who's working on the book from the editorial assistants to the copy editors, to the proofreaders, to the art department, everybody to the production team everybody wants the book to be as good as it can be. So you know, work with these people. Don't be a knob, and I think that becomes reciprocal. At that point you know you don't want to be the difficult guy at a publishing house. You don't want to be the person that causes trouble or asks the wrong questions. I think just work with the people that you've got and cultivate those relationships, and that will come back, and then your career is just a matter of accumulation. I think you just keep on writing another book and everything gets a little bit bigger and a little bit brighter as you go along, hopefully.

Speaker 2: 45:28

No, I think that's the great bit. Of advice is always just to move on to the next thing as soon as you're done with that one book. You need to move on because could you imagine if you just spent 10 years just trying to pitch that very first book that you wrote?

Speaker 1: 45:41

you can't. That's why I said don't have regrets about it. If something doesn't work, you can always take stuff from whatever doesn't work, do you know? I mean like when, when I had books that just went out and and nobody bought them, you, I mean, you got, we got feedback. We didn't get sort of stock rejections. We've got quite thoughtful engagements with some stuff and some of it's just so much of publishing is timing, it's just chance. It's when you've sent a book to somebody what mood they're in when they read it.

Speaker 1: 46:08

So I mean when, when we found my editor, that was past life was the first book he ever bought. So he he'd been head of, uh, publicity a different publishing house that come into headline as editorial director, and he didn't move particularly quickly like he. He spent time, you know, putting his feet under the desk and and what he wanted to do he brought in with a remit of establishing a crime list. Um, and then that was the first book he bought. So out like three months earlier or three months later it may have been, even, you know, he may have bought something else or he wouldn't have been in the position yet. So it's, it's crazy. As I said, he's still the only person in London who's ever said yes to publishing one of my books. So the margin between between a book like White City that gets the reviews that that got, and just not being published at all are so thin that it's laughable to think about. And yet it means everything in terms of having a career.

Speaker 2: 47:11

And it's crazy because anyone you know, I say from this side of defence, looking at you and looking at the reviews for White City, which have been amazing, no one will be thinking of the journey that you've had to go through in order to get to this position now yeah, but I don't again.

Speaker 1: 47:31

Is there a thing between the nature of corporate publishing and the editorial philosophy? So you do the book stuff well and you get the sort of book credit. You know, the reviews, the people saying nice things about it. None of that really matters to the corporate side of publishing. Like, in many ways they've already decided what level I exist at. But you, you kind of get boxed, don't't you, at your publisher and I think it can be very tricky to change that without moving publisher because they've got expectations.

Speaker 1: 48:06

There's a plan, there's a plan in place for you and anything that happens outside of the plan is a problem, even if it's good. So I mean, when Vine Street first came out and we got the review in the Times for that and it was book of the month out, and we got the review in the times for that and it was book of the month it the entire print run had gone out. Um, because amazon upped their sub, because obviously the algorithm kicked in when people pre-ordered it after the review. So we there were none of the books in the warehouse on publication day. So if you went into waterstones that week and asked them if they had the book, if they didn't have it in stock, they couldn't actually order it because we didn't have a reprint date yet. Like it took like until the next week to get a reprint date. So I it wasn't part of the plan. So, even though it feels good, it sort of became a problem that people were texting me were like hey, I tried to get your book and like waterstones are saying they can't order it yet or something, so I'm gonna have to get it from amazon. So, like me, it didn't make any difference where you get it from. I get the 10% anyway.

Speaker 1: 49:01

But, um, you kind of want it to be on the high street. You want booksellers to know that people want the book. But if you can't get it to them, where there's a slight delay in it on publication, which is, like you know, the one week when you can sell books really in a shop, then that becomes a problem. But somebody had just sent the entire lot when Amazon made the request. You know there was no strategic thinking at my level about what was going to happen with that book. But you know nobody was thinking, oh, maybe we'll keep a couple of hundred back, or even a hundred back in case Waterstones have some requests for it. They just press the button. All of the books went out.

Speaker 1: 49:37

So that's that difference between the corporate side of it and the editorial side of it. When you exist at the level I exist at, you know when, when the advances and whether they pay me are at that amount is like they're not. I know I think my editor tells me that about 50 of his books lose money. Like, even if they pay very low advances they can lose money because you can sell like no copies of a book really If you don't get a review, if people don't get to see it, if it doesn't sort of have any kind of visibility on social media or in the press or anything, you can sell nothing which, if you've made a hardback print run, the costs can outweigh the revenue.

Speaker 1: 50:15

I don't cost anybody money, like all of my books have earned out for me and obviously earned out for the publisher way before that. But it's not a great deal of money on any level and again, that's the nature of it. I mean I tell you what I did some I did ghostwriting and I got paid more for one book than I've been paid for all of my books put together.

Speaker 2: 50:40

Really, actually, I don't even think I'm surprised by that actually, especially now with the amount of people, amount of books that are ghost written that we know about yeah, yeah, but, but the economies are crazy.

Speaker 1: 50:53

even I did, um, I did a bit of uncredited rewriting for the same people, which was about three, three and a half weeks work, and I got paid more for that than my first three books put together just for one month's work. So the money that floats around at the top is just vastly bigger than the money that floats about where I exist at the bottom.

Speaker 2: 51:18

So what are you working on next? What's next for you? Because I said, well, after Vine Street and White City, I said no one else, I was talking about James Elroy in the LA Quartet, and that's what I was thinking of with you and your books. So how many do you think moving forward? Yeah, yeah moving forward.

Speaker 1: 51:35

Yeah, I don't know that. I mean, the natural move would be to go into the 60s, but the 60s are incredibly oversaturated and you know, you've got the Kray brothers. I don't think there's anything interesting left to say about those two idiots. Or you've got the swinging 60s vibe which is like oversold I think I was thinking about. Maybe there's some things about profumo, that whole situation that don't make sense to me.

Speaker 1: 52:05

That's something I'd like to dig around in a lot, because I think the official narrative that's settled is not close to what really happened. Um, and peter rackman is in white city. He's sort of a natural jump into Profumo because of his, his involvement in the early stages of that. Um, but I may go back to the what I mean, I literally don't know what I'm doing. I haven't started working on anything yet. Um, I like waiting until the current one gets out the way. Um, I'm always knocking stuff around, like I'm always reading about London and writing stuff down, but I don't have a specific book that I'm working on right now. I like the war period, I like the reconstruction period, so it'll probably be in the same area, which is what I do when the ideas are just sloshing around.

Speaker 1: 52:57

It looks like doing nothing really from a editorial point of view, but you're working. I'm brewing nebulously, that's what I'm doing all right yeah, or at least doing a decent impression of it yeah, you did a very good impression of it.

Speaker 2: 53:12

We're working here, right, dom? I'm going to ask you your last four questions. So first one are you an introvert or extrovert, or a hybrid of the two?

Speaker 1: 53:24

I'm an introvert in that I don't take my energy from being around other people, so I like to decompress after sort of big social scenes. And I'm also an introvert in terms of my writing, in that I write from a position of introversion rather than extroversion. So I like the, the story and the drama to come from the characters, rather to be imposed on the characters. Um, so yeah, an introvert in both senses.

Speaker 2: 53:52

I like the way I've never had it described about that way, in that, being an introvert in relation to characters, that's a really good way of looking at it. Okay, so what challenge or experience in your life shaped you the most?

Speaker 1: 54:12

Christ? I don't know.

Speaker 2: 54:14

It can be a good one.

Speaker 1: 54:15

Sometimes. I mean, I think failing at being a filmmaker was a big thing because it led me to writing fiction, you know, just writing, doing my own thing. So in many ways, that failure became my success and allowed me to follow a path that felt more mental for what I wanted to do. Um, and I was probably. I was probably a little young when I did it, like when I went to New York I was 19, which is too young to be making films, but probably just the right age to be in New York.

Speaker 2: 54:56

Um, so, yeah, I would say making a, making a mess of my first dream was a was my future success so if you could go back to when you were 25 years old and give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?

Speaker 1: 55:13

oh man, I just wouldn't. I just wouldn't at all. You don't know what the hell you'd change if you went back and told them something like at the moment, as I'm sitting here, I'm writing the books I want to write, somebody's publishing them and it's all going all right, like if I went back, there's a much bigger chance that I would fuck all of that up and make it better. I think so. Um, I'd, I'd hide from myself or tell myself to ignore myself.

Speaker 2: 55:38

It's a whole butterfly effect, isn't it that sliding doors thing? If you go? Back and say Dom go left, don't go right, and that's it. Everything changes.

Speaker 1: 55:49

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, I've come back to the future and we'd all be talking Chinese or something.

Speaker 2: 55:55

I love that. Oh, you know, do you have? I'll never say a favourite movie, because I think it's very hard to say this is my number one favorite movie or book. But what's?

Speaker 1: 56:09

in your top. What's the book, what's the film that you'd always go back to? I would say I tell you, I mean, I love 30 cinema and I love 70s cinema in terms of Hollywood. So I love the screwball comedies and my favourite one is probably Holiday, which is Cary Grant and Catherine Hepburn, and it's a sort of oddly Marxist Hollywood comedy in that the guy wants to retire from his job at middle age because he doesn't want to retire when he's old and he's just accumulating enough money to do it and woo Catherine Hepburn whilst he's doing it. That's a very good film.

Speaker 1: 56:47

And in the 70s I love the neo-noirs, like the sort of revisionist noir films. Chinatown. I love the Chandler adaption of the Long Goodbye, the Altman one, which I think if you're a Chandler purist you probably hate, but I love it. When somebody makes an adaption that just turns the book upside down, I don't want to see the book on the screen. I've read the book. I don't need to see a film that's a carbon copy of it. That doesn't do me any favors. So I like somebody making an interpretation of the book and the way he took Chandler's kind of quintessential hero figure of Marlowe and brought him into a world where heroes are worthless.

Speaker 1: 57:27

70s America, where the idea of heroism had died. It was a sort of a Cervantes-esque remodeling of Marlowe and I thought that was brilliant. And the one I always go on about I sort of drone on to the fact that my agent gets bored to death of me is Night Moves, the Gene Hackman film in the 70s which was written by Alan Sharp, who was a Scottish novelist, and it's a pastiche in many ways. It's a straightforward noir, but it was perfect for its time. That kind of paranoid era in America, sort of post-Vietnam, post vietnam, post watergate, tapped into all of that. Um, and I, I, just I love that period. Any of the films in that period clutes, like the alan packer pictures, uh, parallax view, any of that stuff. I love that period.

Speaker 2: 58:12

I would just just plug that into me all day long do you do you think vine street and white city are filmable? Because I always you know, when I look back I'm always talking about james allroy, like I think la confidential, I think was a more straightforward book to turn into a film, to adapt, but I don't know if they could do it with american tabloid because I just find it's, I say, dense, it's a dense book, but in a good way.

Speaker 1: 58:39

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 58:40

But I mean even LA Confidential. They probably removed half of it. I mean there's about seven different storylines going through the book. Like the whole serial killer thing didn't do the film at all. They just removed that. Exley's father isn't in the film, like they combined so many characters. They did it well In that respect. It's a masterclass of adapting a complex book into a film. I wonder whether it loses some of its elderliness to Dudley Smith. He's such a figure over the quartet and is sort of the dark soul of it and by having victory over him at the end of the film. I don't know. I mean I enjoyed the film but that made me wonder. But certainly on a logistical level I think they did well with it.

Speaker 1: 59:33

The thing with Vine Street is I specifically remember watching the Lee Marvin picture Point Blank, just as I was starting to write Vine Street, and I love the editing of it. It's almost like John Borman made an Alan Resnay film as film noir. In a scene, within a minute he moves back and forward in time and he doesn't explain any of it. There are no signposts. He just does it in such a visual way. Trust the reader to follow him so you know what is real, what is happening and what is just in Marvin's head and what has happened previously. And all of that can happen. It's such a small and I was like you can't do that writing, like within a paragraph. It's very difficult to move in time and space without the reader along with you. Like, sometimes you have to signpost stuff because you haven't got those visual cues where you can just do a jump cut to a completely different time and place, just like smash those things together. It's tricky in prose. So I started thinking what can you do in prose that you can't do in film? And there's I'm not going to explain it now if people don't know, but there is a narrative strain that runs through Vine Street where something's happening that isn't what you think is happening.

Speaker 1: 1:00:46

And the only way I could you couldn't hide it on film. There's no way you could film and disguise it in the same way I disguised it. So you'd either have to not film those bits or film them in a completely different way. So I had helpfully specifically thought, thought, how could you not film it? Um, but I think the main logistical problem of filming something like vice I mean the, the period detail needing to get cars, needing to get costumes, needing to get streets that look like somebody would have to put vast amounts of money into it that they're probably not going to see back. So, um, white city may work better because it's probably more politically, culturally apropos at the moment, with having had the riots in the summer and this kind of popularist politicians at the moment, and all of that feeds into white city a lot. So somebody may be interested in it. But again, you've still got the problem of needing to portray 1950s London, which is infinitely more expensive than portraying 2020s London.

Speaker 2: 1:01:48

Yeah, no, it's one thing I learned and I didn't think about so much before. I did a TV screenwriting course and then I think we were talking to producers and then they were talking about costs, but not the costs in terms of, you know, paying for talent and things like that, but the costs that are incurred when you're dealing with different time periods and then for a lot of people on the course that affects that affected. What they chose to write about, you're like well, are they going to want?

Speaker 2: 1:02:15

are they going to want to pay for it, and I'd never thought about that before.

Speaker 1: 1:02:18

No, because when you're a novelist, it doesn't matter because you're your own production budget and they're going to want to pay for it, and I'd never thought about that before. No, because when you're a novelist, it doesn't matter because you're your own production budget. So you can spend hundreds of millions of dollars in your head, it doesn't make any difference, you do. So yeah, there are more practical concerns, I guess, with writing a script than there are with writing a novel.

Speaker 2: 1:02:35

Yeah, there are. So finally, Dominic Nolanolan, just my last question for you is where can listeners of the conversation find you online.

Speaker 1: 1:02:47

Are you an online person? I'm still, I'm on. I don't have a website, um, because we've discussed my professionalism. Um, yes, I'm still on twitter. I'm sitting at the of the bin fire on twitter, um, and I have jumped a little bit. I've half jumped to Blue Sky. I tried threads but I found it strange and weird. So, yeah, I'm on Blue Sky and I'm on Twitter.

Speaker 2: 1:03:11

So come to Blue Sky. I'm on Blue Sky. It's nicer there.

Speaker 1: 1:03:19

The water's warm I think that is the one I'm leaning towards.

Speaker 2: 1:03:24

Yeah definitely well, dominic nolan. That just leads me to say finally, but not finally. That sounds so bad, but just to say, dominic nolan, thank you very much for being part of the conversation. It's been a great chat. Cheers, nadeem, thanks. Thank you so much for being part of the conversation. It's been a great chat. Cheers, nadine, thanks. Thank you so much for listening to today's conversation with Nadine Matheson. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Be sure to tune in every Tuesday for a brand new episode featuring more amazing guests. Don't forget to like, subscribe and leave a review. It really helps the podcast grow and if you'd like to support the show, you can buy me a cup of coffee or sign up on patreon. The links are in the show notes and if you'd love to join the conversation as a guest, feel free to send an email to theconversation at nadiemaffersoncom. Thanks again for your support and I'll catch you next time.