The good thriller is an extension of the fairy tale, Eric Ambler once noted. It is melodrama so embellished as to create the illusion that the story being told, however unlikely, could be true.
Times have changed since Ambler made that comment. Nowadays most thriller writers seem to have their thoughts more firmly fixed on the movie rights than the limits of possibility and so given Hollywood s preference for deus ex machina style gadgetry and overemphasis on technological wizardry and special effects intelligent plotting has, for the most part, gone out the window. Writers no longer feel required to cause their readers to willingly suspend their disbelief, with the result that the genre has become clichid, stereotypical and about as predictable as Californian weather. Thriller writing has lost the plot, in other words.
But not completely, thankfully. There are a few exceptions. Tom Foote is a thriller writer from the old school, a man with his car firmly parked in Ambler s garage. His recently-published debut novel Undertow is a story rather than a set-piece, a good old-fashioned yarn that actually deserves to have the phrase I couldn t put it down used in its reviews.
A fast-moving maritime thriller set in Ireland, Malta, Mexico and Libya, it tells the story of Jim Prendergast, a yachtsman who survives being rammed and sunk in an accident off the west coast of Ireland, only to find himself deeply involved in shadowy arms deals involving the IRA and MI6. It s a real page-turner, a believable and gripping story of an ordinary man caught up in extraordinary circumstances. I actually read it in one sitting. Normally I can t even manage that with menus!
Foote was born in Cork 62 years ago and has led the kind of varied and interesting life ideally suited to being summarised on the dust jacket of a thriller. In 1953, at the end of his formal education, he went to sea and served on a variety of ships as a radio officer. This service took him around the world to many places that were then untouched by air travel. Later, he travelled to Canada where he was engaged in air traffic control in Montreal.
This was followed by a stint with the Canadian Marconi Company as a technician where he served with the US Airforce on the DEW Line in remote Northern Canada. He then worked for a number of years at the Fylingdales Early Warning Radar Site in North Yorkshire. In recent years he was employed by Digital in Ireland and Holland, from whom he took early retirement in order to devote his time to his twin passions of sailing and writing.
great tales
I left Digital six years ago, when I was 56, he says. I took early retirement in order to write the book. It was just something I had always wanted to do and I figured it was a now or never situation. Fortunately my wife, Hilary, was still working in Aer Lingus at the time and we decided okay, if we pull in our horns we can manage this . So basically that s what I did. I quit my job to write a book.
Foote quickly found that writing a novel is easier said than done. I had this idea in my head but I didn t know how to do it, I didn t know where to start, he smiles sheepishly. And in the end Chapter One was written at least 48 times or perhaps more and I hated every minute of it. And if I can see any weaknesses in the book I would still see them in Chapter One. I would do it differently now if I could do it again.
The book took me three years to write. I d read that if you re gonna write a book then you should get up at 6am every morning and work for x number of hours, whether you produce a single page or not. And I just didn t see myself in that role. I was very non-structured. I d go at it, have a good blast at it, then I d take a few weeks off. I eventually got blocked in the middle of it and took several months off, just left it in a drawer. I finally got back into it again because it was annoying me. So even though there was a three-year time scale, the actual writing of the book if you cramped it all in was maybe ten months or so.
When Undertow was finally completed it took a while to find a publisher. When it was finished it went to two publishers, he explains. It went to Harper-Collins in London and to Townhouse in Dublin. So they were the only two who had a crack at it and they were both rejections. Harper-Collins gave me no reasons whatsoever, just sent a slip wishing me the best of luck. Townhouse were a little more kind they sent me a three-page synopsis of why they were turning it down. Some of their criticisms were quite useful, others I didn t really agree with.
So in the meantime I had already started my second book. I thought to myself alright, the first book isn t good enough obviously but the next one will be better . So I sat down and began writing it, hoping I d learned enough from the first one to make the second worthwhile. And I thought at some stage I ll get a publisher who ll do the second book and say have you got anything else? Maybe the first one would get done then. But, in the end, I was lucky enough to find a small publisher who was interested enough to go out on a limb and do it.
Foote attributes his gift for story-telling to long nights spent yarning with his colleagues on lengthy trans-Atlantic voyages. There was tremendous yarning that went on at sea, he says, lighting up a Rothmans. A lot of your time would be spent on watch up at the bridge and you d be talking all night. You d be talking about places you d been to, other boats you d served on, various characters that you d met. There was always a lot of story-telling, lots of great tales.
heroin scene
Unsurprisingly then, Undertow is a marine thriller. It opens with a yacht being rammed off the coast of Galway and, although sections of the novel are set in various exotic locations, much of the action takes place at sea. The main advantage in writing about what you know is that you don t have to do too much research.
Well, it s very much a sea story, he nods, laughing. Alright, it s got connotations of the IRA and terrorism in it but basically it s a sea story. It all came very naturally to me. I knew everything there was to know about boats and ships, I knew all the terminology, so I didn t need to research any of that. When it came to the IRA connection and the gun-running and so on, to be honest, I still didn t do much research for it. I kept in tune with the newspapers, cut out relevant articles and so on, but that s about all. I have a huge file in my study full of old newspaper clippings and news articles that interest me and might be useful for a story someday. I m sure most writers do that.
The only thing I had to properly research was the Libyan section. Although I ve been to Libya, I ve never actually been to the barracks where Gaddafi lives. And because I was involving him in the story, I had to learn a little more about that. An afternoon in the library sorted that one out. So I didn t really have to do much.
Undertow isn t short on tough, hard-hitting and uncompromising scenes. In fact, some of the novel s action is practically Tarantino-esque. In one section a female German terrorist deals with a drunken rapist by cutting his penis off and shoving it down his throat.
Funnily enough, that was rather overtaken by events, he laughs. Probably around halfway through the life-span of bringing Undertow out, the Bobbitt case happened in the States. Up until then there hadn t really been anything like that. So I was a bit pissed off when that captured the headlines. But probably not as much as he was!
Foote is now working on a second novel. Another thriller, this one is about a renegade Foreign Legionnaire and is set around Dublin s heroin scene and Rwanda during the Hutu/Tutsi massacres. So is he set to become a one-man thriller factory in the Clancy/Grisham mould?
Well, that s certainly part of the ambition, he avers. I d like my books to do well obviously but I m not particularly precious about the whole thing. I know that I m getting better at it. I don t see it so much as art. I see it as a way of satisfying my own needs in terms of expressing myself and probably I look at the business end as well. If it was to make me pots of money I wouldn t be displeased. However, if something I wrote didn t make money and yet people got some enjoyment out of it then I d be happy also. And providing somebody wanted to publish what I wrote, then I would feel content that what I was doing was right. n
Undertow by Tom Foote is published by Knockeven Press. It s available from all good bookshops, priced #5.99.