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Tell us about CHASING THE DEAD.
CHASING THE DEAD is a psychological thriller that introduces David Raker, a big, tough, intelligent, unflappable and highly skilled missing persons investigator - but one profoundly affected by the death of his wife. The book opens with Raker being visited by Mary Towne, who asks him to look into the disappearance and death of her son Alex. Initially, there doesn’t seem to be much of a case to investigate: after vanishing into thin air for five years, he eventually died in a horrific car crash. But then Mary tells Raker the real reason she came to see him: three months before, she’s convinced she passed Alex in the street.
How has the lead up to publication been?
It’s been incredibly busy, but I imagine my day job as a magazine editor, evening job as a thriller writer, and bits-in-between job as the father of a three-year-old has a lot to do with it. Despite the occasional brain-melt of strict monthly magazine deadlines and then trying to hit personal (and publisher-set) milestones in my other life as a writer, I can honestly say I wouldn’t trade the opportunities I’ve been given for anything. Right from the outset, the people I’ve been fortunate enough to work alongside on the book have been amazing, and it’s just been such a rewarding experience.
What one piece of advice would you give to new authors?
It’s difficult to narrow it down to one piece of advice, but I do think an important part of the process is distance. Sometimes you get so close to what you’re writing, become so intimate with the characters and the plot, that it becomes impossible to improve on what you’re doing. The best time I ever spent on CHASING THE DEAD – and basically the reason Darley Anderson took me on in the first place – was the six months I spent away from the manuscript after my daughter was born. Before then, I was caught in an endless cycle of rewrites, trying to improve the book while not really knowing why, or which bits, or the reason I was being rejected by agents. When I finally found the time to go back to CHASING THE DEAD after half a year away, it was a total epiphany: a brilliant moment where I could see every single problem clearly, and exactly how to fix them. And that’s what I did. I stripmined the book, threw away about 60% of it, and spent a year reworking it. Two months after that, I’d signed with Darley Anderson.
What books do you read when you’re not writing?
I’ve always been a massive fan of thrillers, and I find Michael Connelly and John Connolly are consistently, reliably, sickeningly brilliant, so they’re always top of my shopping list. Stephen King has penned some of my favourite novels (but maybe not the ones you’d expect... er, unless you expected Different Seasons, The Green Mile and Bag of Bones), while novels by Robert Harris, William Goldman, Richard Matheson, Thomas Harris and JM Coetzee would all make it into a Weaver Top Ten. But two of my favourite books, and the ones that had the biggest influence on CHASING THE DEAD, are A Simple Plan by Scott Smith - which is, quite simply, one of the best commercial thrillers ever written - and The Bang Bang Club by Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva, which sounds like something you’d find under your dad’s bed, but is actually a brutal, heart-wrenching and truly amazing non-fiction account of photojournalists working the South African townships in the run-up to the elections in 1994.
And finally, what can we expect next from Tim Weaver?
Next is THE DEAD TRACKS, once again featuring David Raker, which I’m in the process of editing at the moment. The reaction to it from agent and editor has been largely pretty good, so that’s a major hurdle out the way. Story-wise, it’s quite different to the first book - with Raker looking into the disappearance of a seventeen-year-old girl - but while it maintains the creepy, sinister feel of CHASING THE DEAD, it also introduces some brand new series characters, and sees David developing in some (hopefully) quite interesting ways.