crimeculture

Steve Mosby interviews Sean Cregan

"The explosive debut novel from the brilliant Sean Cregan - The Levels is a dark, urban gothic thriller guaranteed to appeal fans of Child, Coben, Billingham and Kernick…Sean writes full time, and published four novels under his real name, before changing style, content, publisher and identity to something much more fun. He's a single dad and lives on the south coast with his little boy." (Amazon)

For Crimeculture's review of The Levels, see The “subterranean night beneath the world”: a review of Sean Cregan’s The Levels and Steve Mosby’s Still Bleeding in our 21st-Century Crime section.

Steve Mosby:
How are you this fine evening?

Sean Cregan:
I'm just dandy. Slept through this morning and achieved a modest amount this afternoon to go some way to filling the 20k hole in the middle of the book. And I did laundry. I'm like a writing version of Nigella Lawson, only sexier.

Steve Mosby:
That’s a lovely image. For those people who might be unfamiliar with you, you published four books as John Rickards. Now you have a new book out – THE LEVELS – which seems to be somewhat of a break with your past. You have a new name, and kind of a new style. Is this a 'second career' for you as a writer?

Sean Cregan:
Very much so. I took - at completely the wrong time to take it - a leap to write the kind of thing I'd been itching to do for ages (I kept pestering my editor at Penguin to agree to a rather more off the wall standalone, and she kept saying "next book"). It's much more my kind of thing, the sort of stuff I like to read, even though it's a bastard to find in the shops, and in professional terms it's certainly a do-over.

By "wrong time", incidentally, I mean I started work on it knowing that I was going to/wanted to change publishers because things hadn't gone well at Penguin, that the book itself was, in classical commercial terms, poison since it was hard to pigeonhole, that I had a month-old child to support (and later on, a disintegrating relationship to deal with as well), and as we hit the final "for sale" draft, the world's economy had imploded.

Short of being diagnosed with leprosy, I'm not sure what else could have gone against it.

Steve Mosby:
So - out of curiosity - were you out of contract when you started it? It was a shot in the dark?

Sean Cregan:
Yep, completely. Bev was in the process of leaving Penguin, my last deal was done and dusted and I had nothing coming in the future.

Steve Mosby:
Well, it’s a great book, and one of the main reasons I enjoyed it was the setting. We talked a little bit about inventing locations, and you’ve clearly done that – and the Levels themselves are remarkable. Where did they come from?

Sean Cregan:
It's partly a hodge-podge of various real world slums (he says, from his comfy flat in Eastbourne, the global fucking traveler), and partly an invention to fit what I needed. I needed a place where shit could happen without having to worry about what outside authorities could or would do about it, which immediately imposed certain conditions. A lot of the rest was common sense.

So, if you accept there's going to be no help or interference (depending on your POV) from regular society, what does that do to you as a community? How does it change the rules by which you live, interact with one another, etc.? What might come in to fill the vacuum - because something always does?

Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, sadly torn down in the mid-90s, is the closest real inspiration. Because of a jurisdictional issue (Kowloon Fort was kept Chinese in the original lease treaty between the UK and China that gave us HK, so anything on the site was technically in Chinese jurisdiction), it sprung up largely without licensing, regulation, or policing.

Until the Chinese and the Brits came up with an arrangement in the mid 60s, it was like the Wild West. Even after, it missed most of the usual regulation. For instance, IIRC there were 120+ dentists there because they could set up shop without paying HK registration or licensing fees. Some of them good, some bad, but all making a living without legal restraint.

The water supply was controlled by (and stolen by) the Triads - there were just 3 public taps for 40,000 people. One boss, I read, once got into a shouting match in the middle of the street, threatening to behead anyone who switch to another supplier. Eat it, N-Power.

Steve Mosby:
Ha ha!

Sean Cregan:
It's a bit like writing SF and wondering, if x was true, or x was invented, what would it do to society? The nitty gritty of x might not be relevant, but how it affects people is fascinating. Hence, the Levels.

Steve Mosby:
You see, that's interesting - especially the first bit: that you invented a location to fit what you needed. The Levels are so rich that I’d imagined the location came first. Not that the story isn't important, but the city you've created feels vibrant and alive. There's a mythical element to it - a fantasy one, almost - and this particular story just feels like one of many the area could tell.

Sean Cregan:
That was the idea, yeah. Urban mythology is a big part of cyberpunk-type SF, a little love of mine, and to be honest, it's a part of anyone's life - we all have urban myths, after all, right? Everything has a story to tell. Even Eastbourne manages a few. The idea's not to describe everything in minute (or even consistent) detail, but to make it *feel* like a real place, with real history, even if half of that history's bollocks.

Steve Mosby:
There are a lot of influences in there, but I thought CANDYMAN was quite a strong one? In terms of the failed housing estate, and the mythology.

Sean Cregan:
No, you're right on the money with CANDYMAN. If there's a better example of urban myth cultism in pop culture, I don't know it. The whole Cabrini Green thing was a big influence on the Tower and Sorrow. That project's also sadly gone. There were a bunch of brilliant photos of half-demolished lone towers standing, surrounded by wasteland, released a few years ago. Awesome stuff.

Steve Mosby:
I'll have to look them up. I love early Barker, incidentally, and CANDYMAN is - I think - one of the few adaptations of his stuff that mostly works. Got signed Books of Blood at home. I digress.

Sean Cregan:
I didn't know for sure if it was a book first; I only know it as the movie. Love it.

Steve Mosby:
You’ve also got a very strong set of characters in there. I came away finding Ghost the most fascinating. How did you develop her?

Sean Cregan:
Would you believe me if I told you she was a spur of the moment creation? Most of the story was; there was no planning in there at all. I had the idea for having the girl there, unconscious, in the shower (which, if you've not read the book, sounds a lot pervier than it actually is), and then had to figure out why and who and what made her interesting.

Then the planning kicked in. I don't like terribly unrealistic younger characters (personality wise, anyway; I dig them being able to kung fu the shit out of you and have psychic powers and guns that come out of their arms and everything else), and she was intended to be a bit of a fuck-up. A girl socially stuck at 12-14 because she'd been effectively kidnapped, but in terms of experience, properly adult.

It meant her and Turner had a surrogate father/daughter dynamic. Like you were someone with no family at all who suddenly had a teenage daughter show up on your doorstep and say, "Hi dad." And you wanted to do it right, but didn't have a clue, and she'd been through shite you could only imagine. Basically, they could sort of bimble through together, and she still got to knock the crap out of people when the time came.

I also didn't want *any* undercurrent of sexy sexy teenager stuff in there, which is an easy trap.

Steve Mosby:
There’s certainly none of that at all.

Sean Cregan:
But it’s very common, and creepy, in mainstream media. My favourite scene in the book is one where Turner's fucked, been stabbed up good and proper and Ghost has been looking after him, and he's wearing only a towel (the inference being that she's ditched his bloody clothes) and she's telling him about the Levels and there's no element of anything else going on at all. It really is just a slightly oddball familial thing.

Like THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR, if you've ever seen that. Surprisingly touching movie. Well worth a watch, even if you do have to see Jeff Bridges ambling around naked for large chunks of it.

Steve Mosby:
Ghost is a Fury – and the whole book is full of cool invention like them. When I read it, it was like a series of set pieces, only not always plot-based so much as idea-based or location-based. Lots of writers might have based entire stories round some of the elements. The 'Death Book' is inspired. Sorrow, of course. And The Bitterness Club. I really liked that.

Sean Cregan:
I love the Club. Never likely to develop any of the ideas there, but it was nice having a pot to throw a load of weirdness into for no other reason than I fancied it.

The 'Death Book' was another one of those "what would come to fill the gap" things. People always want some way of policing themselves, even if it's a bit... brutal. And, y'know, run by a lunatic in a tower full of scary freaks.

Steve Mosby:
I want to ask you a little about your previous series character: Alex Rourke. You said in a much earlier interview that you had an ending for the series planned. Whereas BURIAL GROUND (the 4th in the series) seems more like a standalone (to an extent) and a step towards the more 'outre' elements of THE LEVELS. Is that fair?

Sean Cregan:
Uh, I dunno about that. I wanted with the 3rd and 4th books to do something different with each. So the 3rd was my "commercial thriller". The 4th was, more maybe in its original draft than in the final version, my survival horror novel. I just didn't want to get stuck repeating the same shite time after time.

The planned ending was just that, when I finally ran out of ways to take the series, I was going to kill him. In, IIRC, one of those classic hostage situations where the hero remonstrates with the villain, who has a gun to his head, and you'd normally expect him to escape. Instead, the series would end with "BANG" and fade to black, since it was all written in 1st person.

The final draft of the 4th book was very different, though. In large part because my first drafts are unremitting shit. What're yours like? You compared fixing them the other day to sweeping up broken crockery and hoping it makes a vase. I know of writers whose books are effectively one-draft deals (Alan Moore, famously), so are we just at the other end of the spectrum?

Steve Mosby:
I think maybe we are. For BURIAL GROUND, I suppose I just saw Alex as not necessarily *needing* to be the main character, and although it was realistic there was also that slight element of oddball creeping in. The axe murders; the MacBrides; and so on. It was sort of a survival horror update of Agatha Christie, and it felt like you were starting to work in a world that was slightly removed from this one...

Sean Cregan:
Yeah, I guess so. I just figured I couldn't make every story personal, y'know? Not without turning the whole thing to balls. So in that respect, I guess it was a standalone. Also, I was desperate to shake the "PI" thing I'd foolishly started with. And yeah, it was a locked room story.

Was anyone killed with an axe in that book? If so, well done, me. I haven't seen a proper axe murder in ages … there *was* an axe, wasn't there? Hillbilly bloke menacing people on a bridge at the start. I'd forgotten that.

Steve Mosby:
And the MacBrides?

Sean Cregan:
That was a trade with Stuart, of course. I liked the idea of making them *obviously* inbred cannibal hicks, drooling, bloodthirsty, horrible... and then turn out to be entirely pleasant people who just didn't get on at all with the ones at the other end of the valley. Turn expectation on its head, all that.

Steve Mosby:
He wasn’t quite as nice to you.

Sean Cregan:
I have no complaints at all about "Spanky". He was awesome. I was expecting to die at the end of BROKEN SKIN; genuinely surprised I was allowed to live and/or keep my testicles.

Steve Mosby:
It's all any of us can hope for.

Sean Cregan:
He actually sent me a questionaire with what kind of bondage wear I'd prefer - PVC or rubber, stuff like that.

Steve Mosby:
Typical attention to detail …

Sean Cregan:
And I had to sign a "no suing" thing for Harper Collins.

Steve Mosby:
So – your next book is THE RAZOR GATE, is that right? Is it a sequel to THE LEVELS?

Sean Cregan:
THE RAZOR GATE is a sequel of sorts to THE LEVELS, in so much as it's set in the same city a couple of years in the future, has some of the same minor characters, and mentions the Levels in passing. It's a kind of universe type series, I suppose. Not to say that characters that appear in THE LEVELS might not pop up again, just that I don't want to tie myself to doing that. I bore very easily, so I only want to when I want to, y'know?

THE RAZOR GATE is about "the Curse of Willow Heights", and people who are effectively snatched off the streets, have *something* done to them, and wake up with a note on them saying, "You're going to die on x date, a year from now, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Sorry." Some of them party hard and spend a year drunk, some try to achieve as much good as they possibly can, and some go bad, because there's no consequences.

And, of course, people want to know how the Curse works and get the technology/technique behind it for themselves. And mayhem ensues!

Steve Mosby:
That sounds really cool.

Sean Cregan:
And it's set largely in another unusual place, a sort of floating refugee city in Newport's harbour. Bit like the Tonka boat people of years gone by in Hong Kong (again).

Steve Mosby:
So you’re almost going for a series setting rather than a series character?

Sean Cregan:
Yeah, exactly so. I learned my lesson on that score from the earlier books; series characters get either silly or dull to write too fast for me. And there's never, for my money, a genuine sense of risk involved. They're never going to die, and even if it's only at the back of your head, you know it. Takes all the suspense out of the "thrills" side of things for me.

 

For more on Sean Cregan, see his website. "Sean, like a tabloid columnist or a spirit medium, makes shit up for a living. He was born the last of fourteen children to a former Albanian Olympic gymnast and the last professional bear-throttler in Scotland. After he left full-time education at the age of 7 he moved into the biosciences and was the creator of the first chimaera species of alpaca using tropical fruit DNA (the ‘Bananallama’), tragically overshadowed by the whole ‘Dolly the Sheep’ business. In later years he accidentally became Pope for three days, flattened a mountain in China with a single punch in order to clear the way for the world’s largest musical birthday card factory, and sang backing vocals for Nickelback, where he was tragically unable to prevent them recording a string of terrible, terrible albums. In 2008 he became the first man to set foot on Jupiter, but lost his consequent Nobel Prize when he was caught enjoying carnal relations with an endangered species of marmoset in the Royal Box at Ascot. See, easy this making stuff up business, isn't it?"