You try to write something blandly commercial, you invent a hero who should be merely preposterous, and what comes out is spookily serious. In a comic way. But why go back to the formula 30 years on?
It was 1983 and I was unpublished in Italy. I'd been there for three years. I'd written six novels. Each rejected a dozen times. "Literary" novels, a comic novel, two thrillers. We were down to last throws of the dice. I'd read Patricia Highsmith's Ripley books. I thought it might be fun to try a kind of parody, one that was more aware of Italy, with a rather bungling hero who thinks he's understood the place but hasn't at all. I called him Morris Duckworth, which didn't seem like a name anyone could take seriously, and since I was a frustrated English teacher I made him an extremely frustrated English teacher. Authenticity guaranteed. He would run off with one of his young students, Massimina. These were pre-mobile-phone days, pre-email, pre-everything. So it was just feasible that as Massimina had not posted the letter in which she explains her flight to her family, Morris could substitute it with a ransom note. Lying under a parasol on the beach in Rimini, Massimina doesn't realise she is actually being kidnapped. But what will Morris do when he gets the cash?
I called the story Cara Massimina, and when I'd finished it I reckoned I was bound to be published this time; I even remember feeling slightly irritated that I would make my breakthrough with a crime novel when I had wanted to be a literary figure. I needn't have worried: the typescript came back from a good 20 publishers. It wasn't until I'd already published four novels that the book came up in conversation with a real crime writer who insisted on taking a look. "Publish it!" he said. "Morris is truly horrible!"
Then I made a classic mistake. Fearing that a book so different from the others might damage my reputation (how pompous we are when young!), I sent it out to a new publisher, under a pseudonym, John MacDowell. It was accepted at once, and it was pretty damn infuriating when the Los Angeles Times thought that John MacDowell and not Tim Parks had written a novel that was "better than Silence of the Lambs". In fact, it was just the kind of defeat in victory that happened to a klutz like Morris Duckworth.
In the meantime, while preparing the novel for publication, I'd realised that it wasn't so different from the other books at all. My first published novel, Tongues of Flame, had been straight autobiography, an adolescent narrator caught between the oppressive fervour of his evangelical parents and the libertarian cruelty of his artistic older brother; a boy who had to be good so as not to hurt Mother, but who was desperately envious of his brother's debauchery. And who was Morris Duckworth but a man trying to see himself as virtuous despite the most atrocious crimes? Why was he in Italy if not for the mental freedom it gave him from his strict Protestant upbringing? Even the pseudonym, I realised, John (my brother's name) MacDowell (my mother's maiden name) combined the conflicting impulses.
It seems that it is exactly when an author believes he is escaping into fantasy that his characteristic anxieties are most revealed. "Shall I never be able to lie on any subject but myself?" asks Samuel Beckett's narrator Malone. It wasn't that I was Morris Duckworth, just that Morris was the kind of guy who someone like me invents when he wants to make fun of his own conflicts.
Fun? In 1993 Dennis Potter bought the film rights to Cara Massimina. Let's take a break from serious fiction and write a sequel, I thought. Massimina had been the youngest of three sisters, one dumb, one shrewd, one pious. Why not marry Morris to one of the others in the second book? I got the first novel republished under my name and wrote the much more bizarre Mimi's Ghost, with Morris now imagining he is in contact with Massimina (Mimi), who has forgiven him from beyond the grave and is advising him on how to run the family wine business and who to kill.
"Tarantino meets Peter Mayle," thought the Independent on Sunday. I wasn't happy with either of those names, but perhaps the collision was right.
Then Potter's script arrived and he'd changed the plot in such a way that there could be no film sequel. Damn. Then Potter died and the film didn't get made. Again this seemed the kind of thing that happened to Morris. His punishment maybe. I decided to forget about him. Perhaps he brought bad luck.
But people kept asking: "And that third sister?" And critics said: "Where's Morris gone? Who's he killing?" Suddenly, 20 years after Mimi's Ghost the time was ripe. I was now an Honorary Citizen of Verona. I had curated a posh art exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. Let Morris be an Honorary Citizen. Let Morris curate an art exhibition. On? Paintings depicting murder! Cain and Abel, Judith and Holofernes, Julius Caesar going under the knives, Thomas à Becket. What better way of stopping yourself doing the things you shouldn't than turning them into art? And who better to curate such a show than a murderer who has finally decided to stop killing. Morris. Except there are just so many things getting in his way. Not least his adolescent children who don't want to know about the cultured, virtuous way of life he's trying to instil in them.
To write Painting Death I had to go back and reread the previous books. Each book an author writes means a bit more in the context of what's come before, not just prequels and sequels but all the books. The more context you have, the denser the meaning. This is one of the consolations of age: there may be a little less intensity, but there's such a wealth of cross reference, such a throng, in Morris's case, of skeletons in the cupboard. It's overwhelming. And in fact, Morris is overwhelmed by how much living and killing he has done. I don't think we will be seeing him again.
• Painting Death by Tim Parks is published by Harvill Secker (£16.99).
