“I am in favour of bringing back hanging in Britain, but I think it’s an academic question,” states author and journalist Tony Parsons. “I don’t think there’s even a remote possibility that it would ever return. But I also think there are some crimes that are just so far beyond the pale that you forsake any right you have to remain living. For example, the murderers of Lee Rigby; I would have cheerfully hung them myself.”
The villains in Parsons’ latest crime novel, The Hanging Club, share that sentiment (minus the cheer). His third instalment in the successful DC Max Wolfe series sees the beleaguered London detective chasing down a group of vigilante executioners who are abducting evil men they feel have escaped justice, and then hanging them live on the internet.
Parsons admits to having being slightly inspired by the horrifying online activities of the likes of ISIS.
“I was inspired by that to a degree,” he says. “I think it’s disrespectful to the likes of James Foley and the journalists and the aid workers who’ve been executed online to look at this stuff, but it’s very difficult to avoid because it’s so unregulated.  An old print guy like me still struggles to get his head around how unregulated it is, but I don’t think that anybody would have guessed that public executions would make a comeback. 
“It’s a very 21st century phenomena, the idea of public executions,” he adds. “And of course it fits absolutely perfectly with the technology.  So I thought that was interesting.  It’s the unlikeliest comeback since condoms.  Not trivialising it, but everyone thought they were a thing of the past and then suddenly in the ‘80s there was a huge condom comeback, so you just never know.  I imagine it would have sickened most enlightened souls at the time, but the public hangings at Newgate were more popular than the Stones in Hyde Park or the FA Cup final at Wembley.”
GET THE SACK
Born in Essex in 1953, Parsons has been writing professionally since his early twenties. An autodidact from a working-class background, he published his debut novel, The Kids, in 1976. It wasn’t especially successful, but it did lead to an extremely high-profile gig as a music writer with the NME.
It was during this period of his career that he got to know the late David Bowie. “I knew Bowie very well. He was really the person I was closest to over a period of years,” he recalls.  “I think people went in and out of Bowie’s life, but for a few years, even after I’d left the NME, I was close enough that I was going to restaurants and clubs with him, and he would phone me at home. 
“He was a great seducer, not in the sexual sense – well, that too! – but he was brilliant at getting people on his side. I mean one phone call from David Bowie at an airport just to touch base, just to see how you are, then you’re on his side for life – and beyond life. He was a lovely, curious man, and he had a wonderfully curious mind.”
After he left the NME, Parsons initially joined The Telegraph as a columnist before moving on to the Daily Mirror for almost two decades. He left in 2013 and currently writes a frequently controversial column for The Sun. He has also penned numerous non-fiction books and novels, including 1999’s multimillion-selling Man and Boy.
Does he ever find it difficult combining his heavy journalism workload with a literary career?
“They all make each other easier I think,” he says. “In creative terms, it’s good that tomorrow I have a column to file with my paper. Its 1,500 words and it’s got to be delivered at a certain time.  No matter what.  It doesn’t matter how you feel, it doesn’t matter if you’ve slept, if you’re hungover.  That’s when they are expecting that number of words, and they don’t want more and they don’t want less, and it will be the same next week. And I think that’s a great discipline.
“A great discipline not just for a journalist but for a novelist – because you treat it like a job. It’s a different thing.  I used to be quite into athletics when I was at school and it’s the difference between a 200m sprint and a marathon.  It’s a different discipline, and you have to keep a book in your head for a year at least, but they help each other. They also help each other in practical terms in that, if you get the sack from one place, at least you’ve still got a job somewhere else.” 
SELL OUR HOUSE
Given that his most successful novels tended to be what he himself once described as ‘Men Lit’ (as opposed to Chick Lit), often focussing on the trials and tribulations of middle-aged single fathers, the crime series is something of a serious departure.
“Before I embarked on a crime series, I thought really deeply about what works and what didn’t work,” he explains. “It’s worth remembering that the people who did it well – whether it’s James Ellroy or Raymond Chandler or even Arthur Conan Doyle – they have reflected their own society.  They were contemporary crime writers. They were trying to reflect the world outside their windows.” 
He wrote the first of the series, The Murder Bag, without a publishing deal. “I knew that I wanted a crack at it. Because I’m quite deep into my career, my publisher would have published a crime novel, but it would have been done half-heartedly, indulgently. The only way to do it was to prove to the industry, and myself, that I could do it. 
“It meant writing it without a contract, cashing in my pension, taking my life savings.  Investing in myself.  That’s what I did.  For a year I didn’t think about anything else but the world of Max Wolfe. I thought about it for a year and then wrote the book – which took me another year, which was quite scary.  My family wouldn’t have been on the street if it failed, but we would have had to sell our house. It would have been pretty devastating. I wouldn’t fancy doing it again.”
Given that he has just signed a deal to write a further three Max Wolfe titles, he probably won’t have to. But what advice would Tony Parsons offer to any literate young person trying to make a living with their pen today?
“My role model was Keith Waterhouse, who was a novelist, a newspaper columnist, a playwright,” he says. “He was a writer. So what I would say is be a writer.  Don’t just try to just be a journalist or a screenwriter or a poet or a novelist… do the lot. Do as much as you can. You know the world puts so many limitations on us, the world is so keen to tell us what we can do and can’t do, that we shouldn’t do it to ourselves. 
“I think a successful writing career is largely an act of will, but it’s also about managing your career and doing different things – and they don’t always work out. Sometimes you write a novel or you write a screenplay and it never gets made, or it gets made and it never gets seen – but keep going, and do as many things as you can.  Don’t rely on anyone to pave your way in
the world.”  
The Hanging Club is published Century