Nicholas Searle Meet the Author

Now on BBC News it's time for Meet The Author with Nick

Higham.

Nicholas Searle - not his real name -

used to be a civil servant, working for much of his time

on what he calls security matters.

When he left, he signed up to an online creative-writing

course, run by one of Britain's leading literary agencies,

Curtis Brown.

The result is The Good Liar, a book about an ageing conman

targeting an octogenarian widow, neither of whom turn out to be quite

what they seem.

Nicholas Searle, let's talk about the situation at the beginning

of this book.

You have a conman, called Roy, you have his mark, who is a lady

called Betty, and they are both in their 80s.

Yes, that's right.

An unusual situation, in a way.

Lots of people who have read the book have found it slightly

unbelievable that there is internet dating when people are in their 80s,

but, actually, through online research, I've found it's quite

a normal situation, quite a prevalent thing.

And this is partly based on an experience that a relative

of yours had?

Absolutely, yes.

One of my distant relatives was in the position where she met

a chap, who was entirely believable on the surface,

and they struck up a very strong relationship.

He moved in with her, and that went sour after a while,

mainly because he was an inveterate liar, a compulsive liar.

At every turn, and at every opportunity, he would lie.

This does happen, though, quite a lot.

I mean, there was a case in the Times at the beginning

of December of an older woman who was conned out of ?140,000

by a conman.

The thing that struck me about that, reading the story online,

was how unsympathetic the comments were.

Yes, well, that is odd, isn't it?

Why are we - apparently, so many people - unsympathetic

about women who get caught in a sting like this?

I think, in the digital world, that it's all too believable,

it's all too easy to fall for something like this.

I think it asks questions of all of us, when we meet someone

new, and it plays to one of our, I suppose, a primal fear,

almost, is this person who I'm meeting, who is presenting very

well, is this person actually who they say they are?

And I wouldn't feel at all critical or unsympathetic towards anyone

who has fallen for a con of this kind.

The way this book works is that, progressively through it,

we learn more and more about Roy.

You go back, sort of decade by decade, chapter by chapter,

revealing what he has got up to, and it is clear from the very start,

we know from the very beginning, that he is a wrong 'un,

but we don't quite know how.

When did you come up with that structure for the book?

Well, I think my starting point was the character of Roy himself,

who is based on the real individual in question.

And so the first chapter, I wrote that first of all based very

strongly on him, and then I paused, then, for thought, and thought,

well, where do we go from here?

That is an OK bit of writing, but actually how do we take this

in a direction that would be of interest to me,

if I were reading the book?

And I thought, yes, there is interest in the forward

trajectory of the relationship, but there is probably even more

interest in finding out what it was that made this chap,

Roy, as what he is.

And, at the same time, I became more and more interested

in the character that I had more or less invented,

Betty, who is the elderly lady who he tries to take in,

who is nothing like the relative I had, but actually I became more

interested in this imaginary character.

And it's odd, writers say this a lot, but I wanted to get

into her head, as things went on.

And she gained a life of her own in my mind.

And so the book is about Roy, Roy appears most of the time,

but I feel, to me, that it's equally about Betty,

even though she doesn't feature in as many words,

as many chapters, as Roy does.

We should say that you wrote this book, I think, you started it just

before you went on an online creative-writing course,

run by a leading literary agency, called Curtis Brown.

Yes.

And you used to be a civil servant, you had recently retired,

so this was something you were going to take up.

But what was the process that took you from thinking,

I might write a book, to getting onto Curtis Brown

and deciding on this particular approach?

Well, I guess I had always wanted to write a book,

and I had never exactly found either the situation or the words

to actually put it on a page.

When I stopped my civil-service career, I decided then that

I actually wanted to give it a good shot.

It has been very well received, it has been likened

to Patricia Highsmith, John Le Carre.

Le Carre, of course, was famously - before he became a novelist -

an intelligence officer, and you worked in the civil

service in security.

That's right, yes.

Well, there are a whole range of jobs in security

in the civil service.

So we'll all think you're a spy, were you a spy?

Well, that is a possible conclusion, but there are all kinds of jobs

in public service which are related to security.

There's an awful lot of work that needs to be done in Government

to keep the security policy up-to-date, administering security,

keeping the structures in place, and so it is not just the spies that

work in security.

Was there anything in your professional life that you found

useful when writing the book?

I guess every writer draws on all of their life experiences,

including career experiences, and I think there were several

things.

My career enabled me to meet a huge and rich diversity of people,

that was one thing, so I've met a lot of people in my life.

I think I'm naturally a good observer of people,

take stuff in, so that is one side.

I think - this may sound very strange -

but the disciplines of the civil service, in terms of drafting

and writing, being able to write concisely and precisely,

because, in my world, you absolutely needed to be entirely

right, and to convey things with absolute exactness,

that was a bonus.

I think what I had to learn on leaving was to inject the passion

and the expression, which you, as a civil servant,

you are absolutely required to omit.

Is there another Nicholas Searle novel on the way?

There absolutely is, but I think it is way too early

to begin talking about that.

I mean, I'm working on it, but I'm really concentrating

on The Good Liar at the moment, that is completely dominating my

consciousness at the moment, for obvious reasons.

I am absolutely delighted that it is being published at all.

I was delighted when one reader - my own wife - read it,

and really liked it.

I was delighted when the next reader read it, and so each individual

reader that reads it afresh, I am absolutely over the moon.

So it is absolutely on The Good Liar that I'm focused at the moment,

but there will be another novel, I very much hope.

Nicholas Searle, thank you very much indeed.

Thank you very much.