CANADIAN author and former newspaper columnist Linwood Barclay tells us about the 10 things that changed his life ...
1. Soundtracks I WAS a weird kid in the 1960s. Everyone I knew was listening to The Beatles or The Rolling Stones or the Mamas & The Papas. I had little interest in those musical talents (at least, at the time) and was more hooked on movie and TV soundtracks. I knew who did the opening themes and background music for my favourites. Lalo Schifrin wrote the music for Mannix and Mission: Impossible (a theme that survives to this day in the movies). John Barry did the iconic music for the James Bond movies. Morton Stevens composed that great opening to Hawaii Five-O. And the brilliant Jerry Goldsmith who did the theme of the show I will write about next. I was always writing stories in my head, and these scores accompanied them.
2. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. THIS classic TV spy show debuted in 1964, when I was nine, and I was instantly mesmerised by it. Obsessed might be a better word. Every week, agents Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin had to thwart THRUSH’s latest plan for world domination. The thing was, an episode a week wasn’t enough for me, so I started writing my own adventures – what we would call fanfiction today – with these characters. I credit this show, more than anything else, with kickstarting my imagination and turning me, eventually, into a writer. By the time I was 12, I was typing out novellas that were 30 to 40 pages. My parents sent one of them to the show’s producers, and while they wasted no time sending it back, they did include autographed 8x10s of the two stars. (I still have them.)
3. Old Royal Manual Typewriter IT took too long to write my U.N.C.L.E. novels in longhand, so one day I asked my father to teach me to type. We had this old, black Royal manual that weighed about the same as a Volkswagen. It was a brief lesson. Dad showed me where to rest my fingers, and which ones hit which keys. Practised for a few minutes, and that was it. From that moment on, I could crank out stories like nobody’s business. The bad habits I learned at age 10 I still have, and I still can’t hit any of the number keys without looking.
4. Ross Macdonald novels I READ pretty voraciously as a kid. First comics, then The Hardy Boys, then Agatha Christie and the Nero Wolfe novels by Rex Stout. When I was 15, I was at my local bookstore, which was the squeaky metal-turning paperback rack at our local Canadian grocery store. A copy of The Goodbye Look, a Lew Archer novel by Ross Macdonald, caught my eye. There was a blurb on the cover calling this one of “the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American”. It was a revelation. Here was someone using the conventions of the crime novel to explore issues like family dysfunction and environmentalism. I read every Macdonald book I could find, and my admiration for the author culminated in a private dinner with him when I was just 21. He wrote, in my copy of Sleeping Beauty, “For Linwood, who will, I hope, someday outwrite me.”
5. My father’s passing MY life’s pivotal moment came in 1971, when my father died. He’d had a cancerous lung removed in April of that year, but the disease spread to other parts of his body, and we lost him that November. I was 16, and had to grow up overnight. While my mother managed it, I essentially took over running our family business; a cottage resort and caravan park about 90 miles northeast of Toronto. I did all the chores, from cutting 10 acres of grass, to looking after our rental boats, to burying fish guts left behind after our guests cleaned up what they’d caught. I was also a chauffeur, as my mom didn’t drive. On top of that, I was often interceding on behalf of my 11-years-older brother, who was dealing with schizophrenia. I didn’t have those years of wild abandon most teens have. I had too much on my plate.
6. 1970 Dodge Charger WHEN my father died, I essentially got his car, a sleek Charger not unlike the one Steve McQueen chases in Bullitt. Even though for years he was an automotive illustrator working in the advertising world, Dad had never owned a cool car. Boring sedans, a couple of station wagons. But we’d spotted this burnt orange beauty on the lot and I persuaded him to upgrade his ride. He only had about 10 months to enjoy it before becoming too ill to get behind the wheel. I’d have been fine never to have inherited a car this way. But when I wasn’t using it for our business or driving my mother around, I was racing down back roads, taking curves on two wheels, looking for hills to fly over. I’d always loved cars, but this really cemented my obsession for me. And I only banged it up twice.
7. Neetha ONE of the times I met Stephen King, who professed to be an admirer of my novels, as he was autographing a book for me and my wife, Neetha, I offered to tell him how to spell her name. He waved me off. “I can spell Neetha. You dedicate every book to her.” It’s really the least an author can do for a spouse, especially one as wonderful and supportive as Neetha, considering what the partners of writers must put up with. Our relentless insecurity, our never-ending doubt, and on the flip side, our occasional insufferable egos. I met her at Trent University and there was never any doubt this was the woman I wanted to spend my life with. I fell instantly in love with her, and I’d be nothing without her.
8. Our kids NEETHA and I made two people. Spencer and Paige, all grown up, out of the nest for years with lives of their own and partners that they love. When I had a column in the Toronto Star, from 1993 to 2006, I often wrote about amusing events on the home front, and so they were more than just kids, they were material. They never complained about it. People would often ask me if they minded being written about in Canada’s largest newspaper. I would say, “If they ever read it, maybe they would be.”
9. No Time for Goodbye ONE 2006 June morning just before dawn, I woke up with an idea for a thriller. What if a 14-year-old girl woke up one day and her entire family was gone, vanished in the night? Were they all murdered, and somehow the killers missed her? Or did her family decide to leave and not take her with them? And which would be worse? To find out your loved ones were dead, or that they were alive and didn’t want you? I turned that into a thriller called No Time For Goodbye, and that book changed my life. My four previous novels racked up modest sales, but No Time became a massive bestseller. A Richard & Judy pick, it finished out 2008 as the top-selling novel in the UK. I quit my day job – a newspaper columnist – and turned to writing books fulltime.
10 Our Grandson ELLIS, now two-and-a-half years old, has not changed my life. He has upended it. Nothing quite prepares you for having kids, and I’m not sure anything prepares you for grandkids. I should have decided to become a grandfather sooner, but that’s the sort of thing that’s out of your hands. A grandchild seems, somehow, even more miraculous than a child. You were part of creating someone who then went on and created someone else. We’re lucky that Ellis gets to spend a lot of time with us, and he’s doubly fortunate that he has a grandfather who never grew up, who still has his Dinky toys from sixty-five years ago and has model trains in his basement. He manages to completely exhaust us and somehow make us younger at the same time.
Linwood Barclay will be appearing at the programme launch for Bloody Scotland in Stirling at 1pm on June 12. Tickets are available here. His latest book, Whistle, is published by HarperCollins.
