The Exile On May Street
Part One : The Writer Who Came in From the Cold
by
Simon Wady

Last year’s Black Rock saw the first book by Steve Harris in the stores for three years. The absence was due to a disagreement with his publisher that ended up with him left out in the cold.
This year, however, not only sees the publication of his sixth novel, The Devil On May Street, but also in November, a limited edition chapbook, Challenging the Wolf.
This issue, Steve discusses Black Rock’s difficult path into the shops...

Publishing is a very strange business. You’ve had four successful novels published and you’ve just delivered the manuscript of your fifth book. Everything’s looking rosy. Then your publisher faxes you with an offer that you don’t like. You fax them back saying you’saying you want more money up front. This is the way you've always negotiated.

‘That was my usual way of negotiating,’ Steve says, taking up the story of his three year absence from the bookshelves. ‘Because on previous occasions when I’ve negotiated contracts they would make an offer and I would tell them to up it. And they’d come back a couple of weeks later with a better offer. I thought that was still the way we were doing it.

‘But this was just after Headline had bought out Hodder. I didn’t know this made any difference. Evidently, a lot of things had changed. I sent them a snippy fax regarding their offer. I’I was expecting them to up the offer. I was rather taken aback when the following week, I got a letter saying: “we wish you the best of luck elsewhere” - which was a bit of a blow really.’

What Headline’s refusal meant was that Steve found himself unexpectedly back at the beginning of his career. ‘I was selling well. I hadn’t had any problems with the books. I thought I was fairly well-known and the new book was ready. I basically thought I was going to be able to walk out Headline into somewhere else for better money.

‘So I started sending the manuscript out to other publishers and getting it turned down. Which was a bit of a surprise to me because I thought, by then, people would’ve known who I was and that they weren’t going to lose money publishing me.

‘It turned out not to be the case. Some of them didn’t have the faintest idea who I was after four books, and those who did know who I was weren’t interested in publishing me at all.’

A couple of publishers did show an interest. One liked it but turned it down for being too sophisticated for the market. ‘ This guy thought that horror should be like Janet and John books - very simple stuff.’

Others would express their interest and then go cold for some reason. One publisher phoned to enthuse at length about the merits of Black Rock and all the things they were going to do for Steve. ‘He wanted to buy it,’ Steve recalls the phone call, ‘and do a simultaneous release with a US publisher. They were going to set aside an advertising budget for it. You name it; they were going to do it. This guy was excited beyond belief.

‘He was going to phone me back the following Friday with an offer. When he eventually phoned me back, not only was he not going to give me this large deal we’d spoken about it, he wasn’t going to give me a deal at all. He told me that the big cheese there had read the manuscript over the weekend and not liked it. This guy is famous for not being a big fan of horror. That’s probably what put paid to that!’

Events like this littered the coming year. Undaunted, Steve started work on a new novel, The Switch, that would hopefully appeal to the publisher’s preconceived ideas of a genre novel.

Richard Evans, who had taken Steve on at Headline, now worked at Victor Gollancz. Steve showed him the manuscript for Black Rock and Evans said he liked it and wanted to buy it.

‘But he went quiet and I didn’t hear from him for six or seven months. I spoke to him again, and he said he still wanted to do the book. It was just a matter of sorting the deal out. Then towards the end of the year, Richard fell ill and was hospitalised and someone else came in to cover for him.

‘At this time, I got an agent who was famous (at that point) for selling an “I Shagged Princess Di” book. This guy was on a roll. I’d known him for quite a well and he’d chased me about wanting to be my agent.

‘I showed him the manuscript for The Switch and he read it, and his partner read it, and they both thought it was the bee’s knees. They thought they were going to do a major deal with it because they thought it was something special.

‘I’d had previous bad reaction to The Switch and thought they’d have a little more trouble than they anticipated. But they were going for a multiple submission and did it. (You can read more about The Switch and the problems its publication faces next issue).

‘While this was happening, the covering editor rang up and said that Gollancz wanted to buy Black Rock, which my agent didn’t really want to handle because he didn’t like it. He asked me though if he could negotiate a deal for me and I said, “yes.” Then he dropped out of contact. I phoned him, faxed him - just couldn’t get hold of him at all.

‘I came home from walking the dogs one day and there was a message on my answering-machine from from the covering editor, saying: “Just phoning you to welcome you to Gollancz and we’re happy that you’ve decided to come to us and be published with Black Rock” - which was a bit strange for me because I hadn’t agreed to anything with anybody.

‘So I rang the agent to see if he’d accepted an offer from Gollancz that I hadn’t heard about. Which is a terrible thing for an agent to do. They’re not to do it. They just can not accept deals on your behalf without involving you in it. And I couldn’t get hold of him.

‘I’d spoken to the editor and said that I hadn’t heard anything about it. She said, “An offer had been made to my agent and he’d accepted it on my behalf and did I still want to play?” Yeah, I wanted to play - but it seemed a strange way of doing it.

‘The editor tried to get in contact with the agent. I tried again. Neither of us could get hold of him. I negotiated the deal myself, signed Black Rock to Gollancz and tried to get them to take The Switch. The editor read The Switch, came back and told me to put it on the top shelf. She said it was the most misogynistic thing she had ever read.’

Needless to say, this agent no longer represents Steve.

With such setbacks one would imagine that it could affect your confidence and make you begin to question your ability. But that’s not something that Steve necessarily agrees with. ‘It affected my ego,’ he admits; though jokingly. ‘It didn’t really affect my confidence in my writing - I’ve always been easy to please. I’ve always thought that I’ve written pretty well. I still do.

‘When I first started I spent a lot of years being rejected and through that you learn a kind of self-reliance, and you eventually get the message that it’s not that there’s anything wrong with your writing. It’s that there’s something wrong with the people doing the buying.

‘You also have to bear in mind that what turns them isn’t necessarily what people want to read. There’s just so much stuff out there. It’s about hitting the right person on the right day in the right room to get a deal.

‘What I have suffered with during this long period between books are financial problems - as in broke,’ he says with his customary smile. ‘So send me money - now!’

Problems that were not helped by Black Rock’s further delays. Originally scheduled for a release in October 1995, the date slipped back to November, then December, finally hitting the shelves in hardback during March 1996.

These kind of problems help explain his other annoyances. ‘You get this feeling of banging your head on the wall for no good reason. It’s been difficult to remain cheerful at times.

‘It just seems strange to me that the barrier that exists between a writer and an audience are the people that are able to get the material to the audience. And if they don’t like it, it doesn’t get to the audience.

‘Which is obviously the problem with The Switch because I can’t publish it - much as I’d like to. Many people who have read it in manuscript form think it’s the best thing I’ve written. But publishers don’t like it because it’s very nasty.’

With the difficulties experienced with Black Rock and The Switch, was there a temptation to go back and change Black Rock to conform with the publisher’s ideas of a genre novel just to see it in print? ‘No. I was happy with the story. Nobody said there was anything wrong with the story. It was just the general old publisher’s crap. “We’re very busy people here. We haven’t got the time.” You can read between the lines.

‘If someone had written to me and said: “I’m not going to publish it unless you do X.” I would probably have not done X and left it until somebody did want to publish it.

‘If you sent it to a publisher and they said: “I think you should do this and do that.” And you did this and that, the chances are by the time you send it back to them, they’ll find something else wrong with it. I mean, a lot of them have things to say about stuff. But it doesn’t mean they’re going to want the thing after you’ve spent six month’s rewriting.’

So Steve doesn’t have any troubles with the actual mechanics of writing. Most of his novels are incredibly complex. Does this require a copious amount of notes? ‘No. I never plot anything carefully beforehand. Before I write a novel, I kind of apprehend the general nature of it. I get a rough beginning, a rough middle, a rough end and a couple of rough turning points and let it simmer.

‘When I sit down to write it, I think the unconscious me - the bit where the stories come from - has been busy over that period of time picking up things and slotting them into place. I’m happy to just sit there and let the unconscious me take the reins and do it’s thing.

‘You have to have perfect trust in yourself to be able to do that. If you haven’t, you sit there pulling your hair out, not knowing what to do next. And I know people who do that.’

With a book like Black Rock then, what kind of rough idea did he start with? ‘I was thinking about telling lies. Whenever people ask me what I do for a living I always say I’m a professional liar and I like it so much I lie in my spare time too.

‘So I was thinking about the nature of lies and what they can achieve. I remembered reading an interview with Stephen King about how you could force your version of reality onto the world at large. II think he named the Ayatollah as his example.

‘And obviously there’s the God thing. When you sit down and create your universe for a novel you are basically the God of it - and that pleases me no end. It’s nice to sit down and play God over the lives of all these people that you made out nothing, and care about who you kill, or maim or set free. Sometimes you think how good it would be to be God - if such a thing exists - and to be a God who doesn’t sit back and watches. But be a God that does poke his nose in.

‘If the ability existed for you to do that; you couldn’t not do it. There would be no option for you not to because the idea is so seductive. And that’s one of the main themes of the book.

‘I did Wulf, which is a werewolf novel with no real werewolves in it. And I wanted to do a haunted house story with no real ghosts in it. There is a ghost in it but that was an afterthought.

‘And another thing: I also wanted to do something riddled with clichés. I’m a big fan of clichés. I love them to death. I wanted to do something that took a lot of old horror clichés and just tickle them and them laugh a bit, liven them up. Like the old horror movie cliché where you beat someone to death and they come back to life when you least expect it.

‘Then I was on an aeroplane, with all this bumping about my sub-conscious, and they showed Housesitter with Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn. I was completely enamoured with it because it fitted in with the things I’d been thinking about and it just developed from there.

‘And I’m not going to tell you anymore,’ he says. ‘It’s a bloody good read. Buy it!’