Remember me
Crime writer, and also well known music promoter, Paul Charles spoke to David Hennessy about his latest book Hi Love, You Just Dropped Your Glove ahead of its London launch at the Irish Cultural Centre.
From Magherafelt in Co. Derry, Paul Charles went on to become one of the most influential music figures ever to come out of Ireland.
He has worked with some of the biggest names in music, at different times managing the careers of Van Morrison, Ray Davies of The Kinks, Gerry Rafferty, The Waterboys and Dexy’s Midnight Runners, and launching Tanita Tikaram whose debut album sold almost 5 million copies.
He has also been agent and confidante along the way to The Kinks, Robert Plant, Tom Waits, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Don McLean, Lonnie Donegan, Rory Gallagher, Marianne Faithfull, John Prine, Carly Simon, Jackson Browne, Hothouse Flowers, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Christy Moore, Taj Mahal, Buzzcocks, The Undertones, The Blue Nile, Shakespear’s Sister, Ronnie Spector – and dozens more of modern music’s brightest stars.
But Paul is also a successful crime writer.
He has just released his 26th book Hi Love, You Just Dropped Your Glove and is about to launch it at The Irish Cultural Centre in London.
The story of the new novel finds Brendy McCusker being sent to Portrush to investigate a possible murder. When he gets back there, he finds the deceased was a friend of his youth, Thomas Barry.
The events of the book take place against the backdrop of Portrush hosting the UK Golf Open.
This is McCusker’s third outing. Paul’s other series involve Inspector Christy Kennedy and Inspector Starrett.
Hi Love, You Just Dropped Your Glove a homage to Rory McIlroy, it is also a love letter to Portrush and the title is inspired by one of Paul’s favourite musicians, Van Morrison.
- Advertisement -
Paul Charles took time to chat to The Irish World about the new story.
How did the idea for the new book come to you?
“Well it was two things really.
“I had this new character McCusker and I liked him and I liked writing him.
“I had a couple of ideas for this story.
“I like to make the story as real as possible.
“My biggest nightmare would be somebody reading your work and going, ‘Oh come on, for heaven’s sake, that just wouldn’t happen’, or, ‘They wouldn’t have said that’.
“There’s also a line in Madame George where Van (Morrison) sings, ‘Hey love, you forgot your glove’.
“I heard that in 1968 and the lyric just stuck in my mind as being a great wee story mainly because it allowed you to go off and put your own interpretation on it.
“My interpretation was it was this guy, an Ulster man, in London. He’s very shy. He’s very quiet. He’s at this party in Ladbroke Grove.
“He sees this girl, the most wonderful being he’s ever seen in his life and he’s just not equipped on how to approach her, how to introduce himself, how to give her a line, none of those things.
“He’s trying to will himself into it and then she gets up and is about to leave the party and he sees the opening because she left her glove on the chair, ‘Hi love, you forgot your glove’.
“I kind of transposed that.
“This guy Thomas Barry is out on the street with his mates, having a walk around and all of a sudden they bump into these three girls and Isabella Scott has the same impact and again, she gives him the perfect opening because she drops her glove and he says, ‘Hi love, you just dropped your glove’.
“Then he gets tongue tied, doesn’t know what to say next so he just turns on his heel and runs away and then he regrets it to the degree that he spends the rest of that weekend wandering around the streets of Portrush looking for this girl and she actually bumps into him.
“Because he was so focused on trying to see her, he couldn’t actually see that it was her.
“Another thing I’ve always been intrigued about is that fairy tale moment when the prince and princess meet and live happily ever after.
“What does happily ever after actually mean in two people’s lives?
“Then the book jumps from there to 2019 in Portrush and the same Thomas Barry is found dead on the Pilgrim Steps in the harbour and one of the mates from back then, McCusker, is called into Portrush because they’re overstretched with Rory and Tiger being in town and an extra 200,000 people so the local police force can’t deal with it.
“He’s not advised that he’s coming to investigate the mysterious death of his longtime school buddy, they’ve kind of grown apart as well.
“I was there that (Royal Open) weekend in Portrush and it was like a massive communal wake.
“The entire village were all, ‘Poor Rory, poor Rory’.
“But the big thing about it for me was the fact that he was man enough to not scarper off and hide and ignore his media duties, he took it all on the chin and I think consequently because of his approach, he won more fans than maybe he would have won if he had won the competition.
“And it was good to do in another way because I used to go to Portrush every year.
“Me and my parents would always go down and we’d be in the caravan for a week, two weeks.
“The second you walk into Barry’s (Amusements): The smell of it, the noise of it, it’s an injection, connects you directly into the mains, so it was good to kind of relive all of that again.
“I still find myself drawn back to Portrush.
“Even when I get back home in the winter months, I’d always
“McCusker gets to click back into life in Portrush and goes back to see what happened to Thomas Barry.
“Thomas and Isobella married and then they couldn’t find a way to stay together. They split up and then they come back together.
“He’s going through all of this again trying to find out.”
How would you describe the character of McCusker perhaps to someone who hasn’t read any of the stories?
“When it gets down to it, he’s an innocent.
“He married this girl Anna Stringer not because he was in love with her, because he thought that was the right thing to do. He didn’t know any other way and he stayed married to her because he didn’t know another way to do it.
“He’s not naïve, it’s nice.
“He sees the best side of everybody.
“When Isobel is trying to tempt him he just says, not angrily and not aggressively, ‘I don’t cheat’.
“He goes, ‘No, I don’t cheat’.
“That would be his backbone.
“I think that whenever you have a detective and they’re a wasteland: They’re drunk all the time, they’re doing drugs, they’re slapping their wives, they don’t see their kids, my logic has always been well, how does somebody like that put their brain to solving the complicated puzzle of a crime if they’re so wasted?
“One of his motivations is not as much punishing the guilty as protecting the innocent.
“That’s what he’s motivated by.
“He’s got no time for revenge.
“He’ll do his bit and leave all the other stuff to the courts and whatever.
“The other thing I deal with as well, which is not dealt with in a lot of crime books, is the romantic side of the detective’s life.
“It’s just crash, bang, wallop, whatever but we all think about this stuff.
“It’s a big part of each day in our lives and yet it rarely seems to come into the frame in crime books.
“But my logic is in Starritt’s life and Kennedy’s life, they’re dealing with this stuff and also it’s kind of fun to deal with it.
“You put two people together and then see what happens, see how it happens.”
Of course you are well known as a music promoter but the writing is your other passion, isn’t it?
“I always thought, ‘I’d really like to write’.
“I got into detective fiction: Colin Dexter (Inspector Morse), Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle and then you kind of go, ‘Okay, I have a framework to work to’.
“I go to the book each day when I’m working on the first draft really like the reader and the detective to find out what happened next.
“That’s who did it, why they did it and how they did it.
“I’ve always loved it.
“I did lyrics.
“I did sleeve notes.
“I did biographies for different groups and stuff like that.
“I always got a good buzz out of it.
“And then, as I say, with particularly the Morse stories- They’re beautiful books, flawless books, very clean, very pure, incredible character development, beautiful stories.
“He makes you fond of Morse.
“Maybe he’s a bit of a troubled soul or he likes his beer too much but he’s still got a big heart and because of that, the stories all work.”
It’s perhaps unavoidable in a write what you know kind of way that music comes into the story in the form of Ryan Shannon, a character who came to prominence in the showband scene..
“It’s not that you kind of think, ‘Well, I’ll put something in here about the showbands’.
“It’s just you’re going through the characters you need and then you go, ‘Well, what would he do? How would he be? How would he be well off? How could he be living in that house?’
“The showband boys were all making great folding money back in the day when money was money.
“They had the softest mattresses in Ireland.
“When I’m kind of working on something I don’t like to just have a name, I like to actually go and find out who they are and what they are so I feel I actually know them and, again, trying to make it real, trying to make sure the reader feels they know this guy.
“The showband scene obviously ran out of steam and then he had a little side thing that kind of made even more money with his- I was going to say stage name but it is his off stage name as a writer because he was told, ‘If I take this song to any serious artist and I say it’s from this showband writer, everybody would run away from it’ because it’s not cool.”
People can deride the showbands but they forget how massive they were..
“Totally.
“I went to quite a few showband gigs in my life.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard as good a singer anywhere else than Billy Brown the guy that was in The Freshmen.
“With a different set of circumstances, a different manager- There was nothing wrong with the manager they had because it was great for the showbands, but he could have been as big as Van or Elton John or anybody you want to pick.
“He was a great songwriter and incredible musician.
“I remember I saw him, in Portrush in fact, back in the Arcadia ballroom.
“He did Smoke Gets in your Eyes.
“There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
“Such a beautiful, beautiful singer.
“And in my book a lot of Van’s early influences were the show band sound: The big brass section, the beautiful melodic riffs going on all the time.
“His album His Band and the Street Choir to me sounds like an Irish showband album that was never made.
“You’re right, 100% right.
“I know a couple of our Irish musicians and stars have rousted them but it was a breeding ground for young musicians as well.
“And they packed out the ballrooms- more than they would be allowed to be packed today.”
Since you first published your first book in 2002, the Irish crime writing scene has exploded..
“Ireland has always had the great writers and so why wouldn’t they be great crime writers as well?
“(John) Connolly has got that series Charlie set in Boston and it’s like he grew up there all his life.
“You’re right, there’s a wealth of great writers there.”
What is unusual and very refreshing is that even though this crime story is set in Northern Ireland, there is not one single mention of the Troubles or even its hangover.
“It’s good point.
“But if you go into Belfast now today, it is a warm city.
“It’s a fun city again.
“People don’t look around the corner to see who’s walking behind them anymore.
“Belfast was always an amazing city.
“There was a warmth.
“There’s a fun about the streets that was missing for a while.
“The other thing really is I am obsessed with music.
“I’m obsessed with music, musicians and with obsessed all of that stuff.
“I would not have been preoccupied about anything else.
“I remember getting Astral Weeks, went back to Wimbledon and played it all for the entire weekend and I couldn’t believe what it was doing to me.
“I couldn’t believe the sound of it because it was such a monumental achievement, because everything before them was three minute pop songs.
“Everything before them was, ‘You have to do this. you have to have a chorus, you have to have a middle eight’.
“There was no singles on that album, it was all the better for it.
“My preoccupation was the music.
“And that’s why all the books have some music in them to varying degrees.”
Have you ever thought about which actors you would like to see playing your fictional detectives?
“When I was writing the Kennedy stories, I had in my mind’s eye Martin Sheen.
“He did a docu drama and he played the part of President Kennedy and a lot of the Kennedy stuff would come from President Kennedy.
“President Kennedy didn’t need to know everything but he needed to have people who knew the things he didn’t know and Detective Inspector Christy Kennedy is exactly the same.
“He relies on this team.
“They’re a great team.
“They’re vital to the whole process so in my mind’s eye, I saw Martin Sheen.
“Starritt: A Liam Neeson kind of approach maybe.
“And for McCusker, Adrian Dunbar.”
The other exciting thing is that your other books are also being republished as part of this new relationship with Level Best Books..
“They’re putting them all out over the next couple of years which is good.
“The thing about writing a crime series is, and it’s not a secret, that if people like your book then they’ll want to get your next book in that series and so what happens, usually, is each book does better than the book before because it’s a word of mouth.
“It’s the same in the music business, you cannot beat word of mouth.
“Music companies spend millions to market music and if someone says to their mate, ‘You’ve got to get the new album by Taylor Swift’, that’s really how it works.
“It’s the same with this.”
You have worked with Van Morrison, have you let him know this book is inspired by his lyric? What do you think he would make of that?
“I had stopped working with him in ’88.
“I’ve seen him a couple of times since then.
“I don’t know really what he would think.
“I’d hope he would take it as a compliment because it is.
“That work is certainly, in my opinion, the best album ever made and quite possibly that ever will be made.
“It’s just stunning, so it’s respectful.
“I’ve kind of gone out of my way to declare to people where the title came from.
“Obviously it’s got my slant on it.
“It’s got my McCusker slant on it, but that’s where the imagery came from, this Ulster man trying to make a connection and blanching it up.
“In the first instance, in Van’s instance, when I thought about what it was so then the girl she goes back, picks up her glove, walks out of the club and walked out of the wee lad’s life and that was it.
“But then again, in another way, when you look at it, that was maybe the purest love story ever told if that did happen because there was no morning after, there was no ‘he doesn’t comb his hair’, or ‘he doesn’t shave often enough’ or, ‘You leave the dishes around for us’.
“There’s no flaws.
“It’s just purity so the love is pure, you know?”
Paul Charles launches Hi Love, You Just Dropped Your Glove at The Irish Cultural Centre on Thursday 16 April when he will be in conversation with crime writer Mark Billingham. For tickets and more information, click here.
Hi Love, You Just Dropped Your Glove is out now.
For more information about Paul, click here.
- Advertisement -
Comments (0)