Interview With Author Paul Phillips
Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a novelist.
As a somewhat-troubled youth in London in the early 80s, I wrote my first novel about somewhat-more-troubled youths in London. It nearly got published too.
Then in the 90s, discovering my South African roots, I wrote a couple of big historical sagas, one of which VERY nearly got published – before a change of personnel at the publisher.
Cut to the 20-teens and I’m mostly focused on my career in advertising, finding time only for short stories. But an idea is bubbling away under the surface: a final and more serious attempt at commercially-oriented long-form fiction; something that would pull together everything that had inspired me as a younger man and everything I’d learned as an older one… Because as you get older, the stakes get higher too. One shot really does become one shot.
So this is it. A series of espionage/action thrillers under the CHASING MERCURY umbrella. As we speak, the first is published, the second written and the third in progress.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
THE BORODINO SACRIFICE, which is Book One in the CHASING MERCURY series.
It’s hard to pin down the inspiration for writing these books. It’s a combination of fond memories of the stories that most thrilled me as a young man – from Bond to the likes of The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare – coupled to the more “realistic” intrigues of le Carré and Deighton, with a healthy dose of personal and family history thrown in.
However, the chief inspiration would have to be Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise stories – both the novels and the comic strips that I used to read every night in the Evening Standard (THE BORODINO SACRIFICE is dedicated to his memory).
In creating what Kingsley Amis called “one of the great partnerships in fiction, bearing comparisons with that of Holmes and Watson”, O’Donnell showed me the way to sidestep the whole “men shouldn’t write women” minefield: by writing two main characters, one male, one female. And because I first came to his stories as period pieces (the mid 60s is literally a lifetime away when you’re an 11-year-old in 1976), it seemed natural to set them in a historical context…
Which leads me to my other big influence. Being born 20 years after WWII, I grew up in its shadow. My best friend’s parents next door had escaped Hitler’s Götterdämmerung. My uncle had fought behind enemy lines. Another was a screenwriter who had worked on that classic British secret agent movie Carve Her Name With Pride alongside the Special Operations Executive advisers on the picture, including Vera Atkins and Odette Sansom.
To me, the war and immediate postwar period doesn’t feel “historical”, even though of course I’ve had to do exhaustive research. It feels pretty close and immediate.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
Having suggested that the 1940s feel contemporary to me, I suppose I should say that I write on an old manual typewriter. I don’t. Scrawled-in notebooks and my MacBook Air work just fine for me.
Although I do have an unusual writing talisman here, which is indeed an old typewriter. In fact it’s the Olympia SM3 portable that my uncle took to Naples to work with another “historical consultant”, on another movie he was writing: a certain Charlie “Lucky” Luciano…
What authors, or books have influenced you?
I mentioned several of these inspirations earlier, so I won’t go into detail again, but very definitely Peter O’Donnell, Ian Fleming, John le Carré, Len Deighton, Anthony Price, Helen MacInnes and many more…
…and moving out of the shadowy alleyways, plenty of others for their writing style(s), from Ian McEwan to Stephen King. What McEwan did in Atonement, planting the slightly jarring phrase “stalked by the leonine yellow of high summer” for call back later is nothing short of astonishing. What King does, sometimes, such as in the opening of From A Buick 8, where he sets the whole mileu with the italicisation of “hail” for “hell” (“…asked him what in hail he was doing there…”) is a lesson in economy for us all.
Oh, and Hemingway, always Hemingway. The opening of THE BORODINO SACRIFICE contains a veiled reference to the ending of For Whom The Bell Tolls.
What are you working on now?
Books Two and Three in the CHASING MERCURY series…
Book Two, THE HERRENHAUS FORFEIT, is written and edited and ready to be published later in the year.
Then there’s Book Three, THE SAFEHAVEN COMPLEX, which may or may not wrap up the story. I’m still researching and writing that.
Each novel is designed to work equally well as a standalone adventure or as a continuation, although I guess they’d be best read in order.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
I’m an absolute beginner here. I’m still experimenting and nothing I say will be reliable. Added to which I have no budget to try very much.
Having said that, “X” and Facebook have already generated some sales (THE BORODINO SACRIFICE has only been available for a month so far).
Do you have any advice for new authors?
It would be presumptuous in the extreme. However, I really don’t like prescriptive advice such as “Only write what you know”. Balls to that! Just look at things more broadly – you’ll be surprised what you know.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
There’s a mantra that plays in my head (thankfully it’s a catchy tune).
It’s from Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll by Ian Dury & The Blockheads:
“…what a jolly bad show
If all you ever do is business you don’t like.”
What are you reading now?
Two books on the go at the moment…
One is Mick Herron’s Spook Street, which I’ve just downloaded and got into.
The other is a further example of how WWII keeps coming alive for me.
To prepare for writing Book Three, I’m currently reading Hitler’s South African Spies by Dr. Evert Kleynhans, a non-fiction study which opens with a U-Boat silently observing an air raid drill in Cape Town in 1942 – and it blows my mind that my mother was there that night, as unaware as anyone else in the city of the threat lurking in the bay.
What’s next for you as a writer?
I have to develop and finish Book Three in the CHASING MERCURY series. I don’t know yet if that will leave the way open for a potential fourth book. It kind of depends on the degree of interest there is in seeing Mila and Bradley’s adventures continue (hint, hint).
I also have a short story collection coming together. A couple of those stories are set within the CHASING MERCURY universe and fill in some of the background to Book Two. So I’m looking at revisiting these with a view to offering them as (horrifying term!) reader magnets.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
Catch-22 (read it so many times and will always read it again).
The aforementioned For Whom The Bell Tolls (my go-to adventure story with literary pretensions/literary work with an adventure in it).
Probably my favourite Modesty Blaise novel: A Taste for Death, Sabre Tooth or I, Lucifer.
..and (although I love it) very definitely NOT Pincher Martin!
Author Websites and Profiles
Paul Phillips’s Social Media Links
Author Interview Series
To discover a new author, check out our Featured Authors page. We have some of the best authors around. They are just waiting for you to discover them. If you enjoyed this writer’s interview feel free to share it using the buttons below. Sharing is caring!
If you are an author and want to be interviewed just fill out out Author Interview page. After submitting we will send it out in our newsletters and social media channels that are filled with readers looking to discover new books to read.
If you are looking for a new book to read check out our Featured Books Page.