British novelist Tim Stevens is described in reviews as “one of the best writers of thrillers working today” and “the new master of the genre.” Even though he began publishing only about four years ago, Tim already is the author of eleven action and espionage novels, including RATCATCHER, SEVERANCE KILL, OMEGA DOG, and the forthcoming CRONOS RISING. Incredibly, he’s managed to do this while being a fulltime practicing physician. Tim is also a family man who lives near London with his wife and daughters.
Somehow, I managed to catch this busy man’s attention recently and invited him to participate in an interview, to which he graciously agreed. I don’t know how he found the time, but here’s our recent email exchange. You thriller fans and aspiring authors are going to love this.
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THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR: Congratulations on your success, Tim. Your books have attracted a lot of fans and great reviews. Why don’t you tell us a bit about them.
TIM STEVENS: Thanks, Robert, and first of all may I say what a privilege it is to be interviewed on your site. I’m an enormous fan of your thriller HUNTER.
My books can broadly be classed in the action thriller genre, though most of them have elements of espionage. I have ten novels currently published in three series, with the eleventh book due for release in early November.
THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR: That’s impressive. Looks like I have a lot of catching up to do, both in reading your work and in my own writing. So, give us some details about these series.
TIM STEVENS: The flagship series chronicles the exploits of John Purkiss, a former MI6 operative who now works as the so-called RATCATCHER, which is the title of the first in the series. Purkiss’s job is to track down and bring to justice rogue elements within MI6, whether outright traitors, abusers of power, or simply criminals.
My second series features Joe Venn, a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and former Chicago detective who finds himself in New York City, initially as a down-at-heel private eye, and in the subsequent three books (so far) as a reinstated detective lieutenant—this time with the NYPD, heading up a special unit dedicated to the investigation of politically sensitive crimes.
Finally, series three, which so far consists of two novels, belongs to Martin Calvary, a disgraced British Army rifleman turned assassin for a black-ops division of MI6, who’s had enough of the killing and goes on the run from his employers.
My newest book is SIGMA CURSE, in the Joe Venn series, and is about a serial killer stalking victims in New York in a seemingly random way. It’s a bit of a departure for me, being more of a police procedural than an outright action thriller, but it’s proving highly popular judging by its sales. Next month sees the release of the fifth John Purkiss novel, CRONOS RISING, in which the origins of the whole “Ratcatcher” program are explored. And in December, the Martin Calvary trilogy will be completed.
THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR: That’s incredibly ambitious, Tim, and my Indiana Jones hat is off to you. You say “action thrillers” with spy elements. Would you elaborate a bit?
TIM STEVENS: Rather than fitting into the categories of traditional espionage stories and police procedurals, my novels are first and foremost unashamed action thrillers. I love the slow-burn styles of John Le Carre and Charles McCarry, to name two classic spy authors, and also the intricate and clever plotting of mystery writers like P.D. James and Michael Connelly. But whenever I try to write something more sedately paced, all hell breaks loose and a chase or a fight scene erupts. I can’t help it. Most of my novels contain a whodunnit aspect, but in the setting of a breakneck-paced thriller. So I suppose my books can be summed up broadly as Agatha Christie with added firepower.
THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR: Now that sounds like a newly minted niche. So, you have these three series protagonists. What do you think is unique about these characters that distinguishes them from other thriller heroes? Where did John Purkiss, for example, come from? Drawn in part from real life? Totally your imagination?
TIM STEVENS: I’m nobody’s idea of an action hero, and I suppose my characters represent to some extent wish-fulfillment fantasies on my part, something I suspect is true for many authors even if they’re reluctant to admit it.
THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR: I plead guilty—as if those who know me couldn’t tell.
TIM STEVENS: So I write protagonists who embody a lot of the traits I’d like to have myself. Physical courage and prowess, unflappability, the ability to think quickly and creatively in a crisis. That said, there’s a ruthlessness about all three of my main characters—Purkiss, Venn, and Calvary—which I’m in many ways glad I don’t possess. It would make me damned hard to live with.
THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR: Most fictional heroes would be hard to live with in real life. I wonder if female readers fully realize that? But it’s still inspiring for us to create and for readers to contemplate larger-than-life heroes.
TIM STEVENS: I’ve always been drawn to larger-than-life, over-the-top characters, rather than Everymen who discover courage and resources within them they never suspected they had. Some of the negative comments about my heroes is that they come across as cartoonish at times, but I don’t mind that. I want my characters to be able to achieve things the average person can’t. Nonetheless, my protagonists are vulnerable: They don’t always win their fights; they bleed; they hurt.
THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR: Why don’t you tell us something of your background, Tim, and how you arrived where you are now.
TIM STEVENS: I was born in England but moved to South Africa with my parents in the mid-1970s when I was five years old. It was supposed to be a holiday of a few months, before my brother and I were old enough to start school, but for various reasons we ended up staying for almost twenty years. So although I regard myself as British, a big part of me is still South African.
At the age of twelve I decided I was going to be a doctor. I made my way through medical school in Johannesburg and spent my year as a junior intern at the largest hospital in the Southern Hemisphere in Soweto, the township outside Jo’burg. It was a formative experience, to say the least. This was at the beginning of the 1990s, and the apartheid system was on its way out, thankfully; but the country was in an unofficial state of civil war, with various factions including the ANC [African National Congress] and its rivals, the Inkatha Freedom Party and the Pan-Africanist Congress (or PAC), vying for political dominance. The violence I witnessed was extreme, and it’s affected my writing, in the sense that I tend to portray violence quite graphically in my novels, because it feels dishonest not to.
After returning to Britain in the mid-90s, I took an interest in psychiatry and did my postgraduate training in this field. For the past thirteen years I’ve worked as a hospital consultant—that’s “attending physician” in the U.S.—in the specialty of old age psychiatry, working mainly with people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias and neurodegenerative disorders.
The fiction writing, at least for publication, has been a recent development over the last three or four years. I still work full-time as a hospital doctor, fitting in the writing around work and family commitments.
THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR: All of this writing in just four years, while holding down a full-time position as a physician? You’re making me feel like a real slacker, you know. Anyway, what experiences or influences in your early life do you think drew you to writing action thrillers?
TIM STEVENS: Like so many writers, I was a bookish child, devouring everything I could get my hands on: adventures, murder mysteries, sci-fi, fantasy. And in all formats, including books, magazines, and comics. I wrote numerous “novels” at the age of eleven or twelve, and had it in my head that one day I’d be a published author. But that always seemed like something to do after I’d established myself in a “proper” career.
The father of one of my medical school friends, himself also a physician, said to me one day that he really thought I ought to write a novel. His words stayed with me. I hadn’t thought much about writing again up to that point. And I became that most clichéd of beings: a “writer” who didn’t actually . . . er . . . write. I kept telling people about the idea I had for a novel, but I managed to go almost ten years without ever putting anything down on paper—though I did a lot of blogging and contributing to online book review groups, so I suppose I wasn’t entirely slothful.
The event that spurred me on to knuckle down and actually write a book was the impending birth of my first child. It was September 2007, my wife was due in February, and I realized that if I didn’t commit myself then to completing a book, I’d never do it. So I wrote my first novel over the next three months. That novel is still unpublished, and will forever remain so.
THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR: In my case, the incentive was sudden unemployment at age sixty. It had the wonderful effect of focusing my mind and reordering my bucket list.
What authors influenced you most before you took the plunge?
TIM STEVENS: The two authors I remember most vividly from my childhood are Agatha Christie and Alistair MacLean. Both taught me how satisfying it could be to hoodwink and wrong-foot the reader with twists, red herrings, and surprises. MacLean was of course a writer of rip-roaring adventure tales full of action, which appealed to me as a ten- or eleven-year-old boy, but he always had a traitor among the ranks of his characters, and that element of mystery was something I always liked.
THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR: I devoured his thrillers in my youth, too. Alistair MacLean was a seminal influence on many thriller writers, including Lee Child. Any others?
TIM STEVENS: As a young adult, I loved the police procedurals of Ed McBain and John Sandford, who’s still going strong with his Lucas Davenport series of crime thrillers. The slick, whip-smart dialogue, the wisecracking banter between the ensemble cast, was something I always wanted to emulate, and something you really see far more in American than in British fiction. Those two authors have been a huge influence on my Joe Venn series, which is entirely U.S.-based.
But the single author who had the biggest influence not only on my choice of subject matter but also on my style was Adam Hall, the finest spy thriller novelist nobody’s ever heard of. Hall was one of the many pen-names of Elleston Trevor, a prolific British writer who achieved fame with The Flight of the Phoenix, which was successfully filmed. Under the Adam Hall alias, he produced a series of nineteen terrific novels featuring the iconic British agent code-named Quiller—his real name is never revealed.
Written in the first person, these books portray a man who is in many ways the antithesis of James Bond. He’s unglamorous, abstemious, neurotic, and sardonic, yet utterly skilled and competent—a little like a low-key Jack Bauer from 24. Most of the missions he undertakes are terrifyingly dangerous and claustrophobic forays into harsh Cold War arenas. The suspense the author succeeds in generating is almost unbearable and serves as a master class for any aspiring thriller writer. One of the cleverest things about the way the Quiller character is portrayed is that he’s an unreliable narrator, in the sense that he gives the impression he’s a nihilistic cynic, but demonstrates though his actions that he is in fact a profoundly moral and idealistic hero who doesn’t realize it himself.
THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR: You know, I think I may have read only one or two of the Hall novels, many years ago. I’m going to have to revisit them, based on your recommendation.
It seems absurd to ask this of a prolific author who is also a full-time doctor, but here goes: What kind of challenges and obstacles have you faced along the way, and what have you done about them?
TIM STEVENS: Finding the time to write has probably been the biggest obstacle, especially as most other people assume it’s a hobby of yours rather than a potential (and actual!) source of income. With a high-pressure day job and a young family, I have to carve the time out innovatively and steadfastly. It means getting out of bed an hour earlier than my body is willing to accept, and prioritizing my late evenings. Reading is something I’ve had to sacrifice to a large extent, which is not only a pity, but is also dangerous in the long run, because to write successfully you have to be a reader.
THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR: Do your stories have any overt political of philosophical point of view?
TIM STEVENS: Not overtly, but they all celebrate individual determination, moral agency, and downright cussedness. I think this appeals to something primal in every reader, if they’re honest with themselves, even those who profess themselves collectivists. Nobody wants to read a story where a serious conflict is resolved by committee, or by consensus decision. Everybody likes a bloody-minded iconoclast who triumphs against the odds, and against the weight of contrary opinion when that opinion is clearly wrong.
THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR: Where do you live now? And what’s your personal life like?
TIM STEVENS: I live in the suburbs in the county of Essex, just outside London. Essex is to London what New Jersey is to New York City, not least because a lot of mobsters have moved out here. My wife is also a doctor, and we have three daughters, aged two, four, and six years who keep us on our toes. Our eldest girl is already writing her own books, and it won’t be long before she asks me about self-publishing. No pets at the moment, but the girls are begging for a cat, so I dare say we’ll have an addition to the household before long.
THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR: Fans and aspiring novelists always want to know about an author’s writing methods. I’m a meticulous outliner and planner. Are you like that, or do you just write by the “seat of the pants”?
TIM STEVENS: Like most writers, I think, I’m a bit of both. I once got 30,000 words into a novel and realized I’d truly hit a brick wall, so I now always do a brief outline beforehand. I start off with an idea—in RATCATCHER it was an innovative method of assassination—or a setting: SEVERANCE KILL, the first Martin Calvary novel, takes place in Prague, because I love the city and it has so many locations which lend themselves to great scenes.
I come up with the villains next, develop an idea about what the grand conflict is going to be, and usually have a fair notion of how it’s all going to end. Then I outline the basic three-act structure, with turning points at the 25 percent and 75 percent mark and often another at midpoint. Sometimes I draw up a “beat sheet,” at least for the first few chapters until the story gets going in my head. But I’ve been known to throw out much of the outline along the way, as the developing story becomes clearer.
That said, I don’t buy the idea that my characters ought to take on a life of their own and pull hapless old me along in whatever direction they decide to go. I’m with Vladimir Nabokov on this: He said your characters should be treated as galley slaves, subject to your whip at all times.
THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR: Well, I’m with you and Nabokov on that. What are the hardest and easiest things for you about writing? What do you enjoy most? And what are you particularly proud of?
TIM STEVENS: Getting going—on a new book, on the day’s writing—has always been the hardest part, and I’ve learned to accept that this will probably always be the case. I’m a great procrastinator. I tend to work best under insane deadlines, which is out of necessity because I usually leave things too late. It’s not the cleverest approach, and I wish somebody would invent a motivation pill. Which is a lazy, cowardly thing to say, I know.
THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR: I can relate to all of that. But don’t tell anyone.
TIM STEVENS: One of my proudest achievements was being invited to the Spy Week event at Edinburgh University in April this year. I was privileged to take part in a public panel discussion about espionage fiction, alongside renowned fellow British spy novelists Charles Cumming and Jeremy Duns, and the guest of honor, former Director-General of MI5 Dame Stella Rimington.
THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR: That’s a great honor, indeed. It seems that you have arrived, my friend.
Now, you’ve self-published your work. What prompted you to pursue that path? And how has that experience worked out for you?
TIM STEVENS: I tried the traditional route with my first two novels, querying agents by the score, sitting and waiting for months for the rejection letters to come in. This was back in 2007-2008, when the opportunities for self-publishing weren’t there. I was fortunate enough to land an agent at a reputable London firm on two separate occasions, but although both were enthusiastic about my books, neither succeeded in selling them to publishers. But the fact that an agent thought my book was publishable was a real shot in the arm for me: It made me think that perhaps there were people out there who’d pay to read what I’d written. And it was my second agent who recommended I try the self-publishing route in 2012, for which I’ll always be enormously grateful to him.
THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR: So, what publishing path would you now recommend to aspiring writers today?
TIM STEVENS: Self-publishing, without a doubt. The control you have over the frequency with which your books are released, the contents, the covers. . . you really are your own boss. That’s not to say I’d turn down an offer from a traditional publisher if it was a good enough one, and if I could retain my ebook rights. In fact, my agent has subsequently sold RATCATCHER to a publisher in Estonia, which is where the novel’s set, and the translation appeared in bookstores last month, which I’m very proud of.
THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR: What traits of personality or character do you think are most critical for any would-be writer? And do you have any advice to offer them?
TIM STEVENS: Be as dogged, as persistent, as any hero in a novel or movie. Learn to ride out the rejection and the criticism, the terrible reviews. But be smart about it. Don’t delude yourself if specific things are being criticized by a lot of people. They may have a point. And I speak from experience here.
THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR: What lies in the future for author Tim Stevens?
TIM STEVENS: I’m taking a leaf out of the book of Russell Blake, the New York Times bestselling indie author who writes in a similar genre to me. Blake has been incredibly prolific, and I’m aiming to match his level of productivity. So I have plans to release ten novels a year for at least the next two years. I’ll continue the John Purkiss, Joe Venn, and Martin Calvary series, with a couple of spin-off ideas I have knocking around too.
THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR: I’m feeling even more humiliated, just hearing about you and Mr. Blake. Well, actually, you two inspire me.
Tim, please tell our readers where they can buy your books. And how may they contact you or learn more about you and your thrillers?
TIM STEVENS: At the moment, my books are exclusively for sale on Amazon, and they can be bought or borrowed from my Amazon author page. Readers also can visit my Facebook author page. And I’m on Twitter, too.
I welcome emails from readers and always reply to each one. They can contact me at timstevens@aol.com.
THE VIGILANTE AUTHOR: Tim, thanks so much for taking the time to do this. I know you’ve inspired a lot of writers, myself included, and won over a lot of new readers, too.
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Photo (c) by Debbie Scott
