Readers Place

Patrick Woodrow answers questions about his book First Contact:

Your second novel, First Contact, is published on 17 December. How much can you tell us about it without spoiling the plot?

_ First Contact_ is what I would call an adventure thriller. It’s about a brother and sister who get lost in the world’s most deadly forest. As they attempt to find their way back to civilisation they encounter all manner of weird and wonderful things, including a mystery that threatens to kill them. There’s a crashed helicopter, a couple of bodies and a suspicious briefcase. And the jungle, of course, has many hidden eyes. As with my first novel (Double Cross) the emphasis is on action, riddles, and exotic locations. The heroes are ordinary people – rather than, say, cops or private detectives – and I hope this enables the reader to develop closer relationships with them.

‘Exotic’ was certainly one of the words that sprang to mind when I saw the cover. Where is the novel set?

The action oscillates between England and Papua New Guinea. It takes place in December so the cold weather at home is in stark contrast to the tropical heat of the jungle. I agree with you about the cover. The designer has done a brilliant job. Escapism is an important part of the brand identity that I’m trying to develop in my novels, and this cover takes you straight to the heart of the rainforest. Hopefully people will see it and treat themselves to a spot of armchair travel this Christmas.

How did you research the novel?

My wife and I went to Papua New Guinea on our honeymoon. We spent five weeks there: diving at the beginning and end of our trip and venturing inland during the middle. Once there, I knew that I had to write about it. The Australians have been visiting Papua New Guinea for sixty years but it still felt incredibly raw to us. Anthropologists and explorers have described it as the land that time forgot, and it’s not hard to see why. It has the richest birdlife on the planet, and new species of animals and plants are still being discovered there every year. It remains very tribal and has more languages than any other nation on earth. In some of the villages we visited, the kids hadn’t seen white skin before. These attributes helped inspire the story but – as any traveller will tell you – it’s the little idiosyncrasies that give you the most pleasure. Many of the streets in Port Moresby, for example, have no names because thieves have nicked the signs and sold the metal for scrap. When a flight is delayed by a couple of days, the news is often greeted by a roar of approval from the locals because they get to stay in a hotel at the airline’s expense and enjoy a quality of life far superior to anything they would experience at home. I love learning those sorts of details. That, to me, is what travelling is all about.

First Contact is an arresting title. Where did it come from?

Nowadays the term First Contact is used in sci-fi to describe contact with alien life forms but it originates from anthropology. One of the most famous television documentaries ever made is called First Contact. It follows the journey of three Australian gold-prospectors who walked into the highlands of Papua New Guinea in the 1930s and discovered almost a million people living in isolation with no concept of the outside world. The film has an incredibly eerie soundtrack that gives it a unique identity. My title is a nod to this documentary which helped me with my research, but it’s also highly appropriate for the story. And ‘contact’, of course, is a very dynamic word.

Did you have any hairy moments in the jungle?

Nothing life-threatening, I’m pleased to say. Our guides did a great job of keeping us out of trouble. In fact, my worst jungle experience came a few years ago on holiday in Malaysia. The Taman Negara is the oldest rainforest in the world. I was on a guided trek there and hadn’t quite realised what I’d signed up for. I suddenly found myself potholing through an underground cave, which was home to thousands of bats. I suffer from claustrophobia which made it bad enough, but then I discovered that we were crawling around among dozens of cave racers: albino snakes that preyed on the bats. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Somewhere in the back of my mind there’s an idea festering for a subterranean thriller so don’t be surprised if this experience features in a later book.

It sounds as though you’ve travelled a lot?

A fair bit, certainly. But I know plenty of people who have seen a lot more of the world than I have. My home life, in the meantime, couldn’t be more different to my novels. My wife and I live in a rural village in north Oxfordshire. Our house is the old post office and my study is the old bakery. We’ve just had the oven cleared out and the grain store is now a spare bedroom. There’s a roaring wood burner next to my desk and I look out onto a twelfth century church. It’s very English.

Speaking of English, that’s what you studied at Cambridge. Did this literary background play a part in you becoming a writer?

Possibly, although I wouldn’t want to claim that my novels are especially high-brow. I see myself as a storyteller rather than a writer. I hope I do enough to make my characters and plot compelling but in this particular genre there’s a train of thought that says you shouldn’t notice the writing. If you do, it’s probably slowing you down. Studying literature certainly turned me off reading the classics and turned me on to reading thrillers.

Your tutors can’t have been happy about that?

No. When I complained that some of the texts I was reading were boring, my Director of Studies demanded that I write a five-page essay on the meaning of the compound verb ‘to grow up’. I told him I’d oblige on condition that he delivered a one-hour lecture on the meaning of the compound verb ‘to fuck off’. At the time I thought I was being terribly clever. In retrospect, I fear it only added grist to his mill. But it wasn’t all bad. Macbeth, for example, is an out-and-out thriller. And the body count in Greek tragedy is enough to make Quentin Tarantino drool. I even wrote my dissertation on Jane Austen, and I’m pretty sure something happens about two thirds of the way through one of her novels.

What constitutes a typical day’s writing for you?

Erm – five mugs of coffee, two hours walking the dog, and seventeen games of online chess. Then there are the non-typical days when I actually get stuff done. Anyone can write a thousand words a day. It’s picking good ones and getting them in the right order that counts. I tend to work on a chapter a day, which could be anything from 1,500 to 2,500 words – roughly equivalent to five or six pages of a mass market paperback. It’s a highly iterative process. The first draft of any chapter is just a splurge of the stuff that I know needs to happen. It all leads up to the final sentence, which is the most important thing that I’ll write all day. Thereafter, it’s a constant revision process: fine-tuning the splurge until it flows as uninterrupted prose. I read it out loud as I go so that I can imagine how the words sound to someone else. If the rhythm isn’t right, I change the sentence.

And what are you working on at the moment?

I’m about two-thirds of the way through my third novel. I have two working titles, which I can’t choose between: Cold Blood and High Risk. Having written an underwater thriller and a jungle thriller, the new book is set in the mountains. It features an experienced alpinist with a short fuse and a thirst for revenge. The story starts in a sub-range of the Pakistani Himalayas but moves to a secret location, deep in the southern hemisphere. I won’t spoil it for you but I can tell you that I’m currently researching how many different ways you can kill someone with a rope, crampons and ice axe. It turns out there are quite a few.

Sounds great. Good luck.

Thank you very much.