DBC Pierre: The Interview

Under sheets of dreary December drizzle, a rather dishevelled and scruffy-looking Peter Finlay – better known by his nom de plume ‘DBC Pierre’ – is giving me a guided tour of Ballinamore, the small Leitrim town he has called home for the past two years.

In fact, the most notorious winner of the Man Booker in the prestigious prize’s 35-year history resides halfway up the side of a nearby mountain (which, technically speaking, is actually in the parish of Aughnasheelin), but Ballinamore is where he comes for supplies and socialising. We’re looking for a suitably quiet bar in which to record this interview but, with only six days left to Christmas, the first few we try are all far too bright and noisy.
“Don’t worry,” he sighs, closing yet another bar door on yet another dazzling lighting display and a blaring ‘Fairytale Of New York’. “This place is fucking carnage with pubs so we’ll find one alright.”
His accent is a curiously clipped Australian-Mexican-London hybrid – like Russell Crowe imitating Benicio Del Toro imitating Ray Winston. It’s an internationalist voice, like a Bond villain’s or a ruthless Die Hard mercenary’s. And he has an experienced face to match. Bruised and battered from too many hard times, reddish and splotchy from too many good times. He has deep quicksand eyes.
As we continue down the main street, inspecting and rejecting various drinking emporiums, many locals call over cheerful ‘hellos’ or raise their pint glasses in greeting. As the only internationally renowned literary celebrity in the vicinity (McGahern lives miles away!), Finlay’s obviously a popular character around here. Actually, he tells me, the people of Ballinamore were this friendly from the moment he and Jennie, his long-term Australian girlfriend, first arrived in lovely Leitrim.
“The hospitality shown to us when we arrived was almost overwhelming,” he recalls. “I knew immediately that we’d come to the right place.”
He found his Leitrim home on the Internet when, having just written and sold his first novel in London, he was looking for a more relaxed and tranquil location to work on his second. He’d never been to Ireland before, but had heard good reports.
“I investigated quite a few places in Cork and Kerry, but they all seemed to be overrun with faux-Irish ex-cops from LA and New York returning to their roots,” he laughs. “Then I found this big old abandoned house – solid but in need of work – up a fucking mountain. It seemed ideal.”
And for the first 20 months or so, it was just that. He and Jennie lived a quiet, idyllic, relatively anonymous life on the mountain – popping into Ballinamore on the weekends for music sessions, chats and a few pints, but generally keeping themselves to themselves.
That all changed last September when, out of the blue, he was Booker-nominated for his sassy, satirical and darkly comic debut Vernon God Little – the story of a panty-obsessed Texan teenager wrongly accused of having assisted in a Columbine-style school massacre.
Not immediately though. Few of the locals initially made the connection between Booker-nominated DBC Pierre and Peter Finlay, the writer living up the mountain.
It wasn’t until Saturday, October 11, when The Guardian ran a front page story under the banner headline ‘Unmasked: the murky past of Booker author’ that the residents of Ballinamore realised exactly who they had living in their midst.
The Guardian article revealed that the mysterious author of Vernon God Little – a work already being favourably compared to Catcher In The Rye and A Confederacy Of Dunces (not to mention being described as ‘Huckleberry Finn for the Eminem generation’) had a past far stranger than most fiction.
It claimed that DBC Pierre was actually a rogue on the run – a former heroin and cocaine addict, gambler, love cheat and conman, who’d left a messy trail of broken hearts, shattered trusts and debts of hundreds of thousands of dollars on at least three continents. The article also mentioned car crashes, plastic surgery, Mexican shoot-outs and his failed careers as a cartoonist, filmmaker, treasure hunter, smuggler, publicist, photographer and graphic artist. Oh, and apparently he had sold his best friend’s house in Spain in the late 1980s and disappeared with the money.
All in all, it was the kind of shocking stuff that made the brief author biog on the inside page of Vernon God Little – ‘DBC Pierre is in the process of writing his second novel’ – seem direly in need of a rewrite.
Anonymity immediately took a hike and, by midday, the media had scrambled to the writer’s Leitrim retreat. One eager news crew even arrived by helicopter and buzzed around the mountain, frightening the sheep. Unfortunately for them, Pierre wasn’t actually there – he was in London meeting his publishers. Still, to their credit, his farmer neighbours sent all direction-hunting journalists and news teams off on a wild goose chase.
“That was the moment when the writing stopped and the circus began,” he sighs, leading me across the street to another bar. “I reckon I was about three months away from finishing my new book when all the shit suddenly hit. I haven’t written a fucking word since.”
Thankfully, Laurence’s Bar turns out to be empty and jukebox-less, so we settle damply in a quiet, darkened corner with a couple of pints of Smithwicks and an awful lot to talk about. Not least of which, the weird irony of an author of a novel about media distortions of the truth, becoming the victim of similar distortions himself.
“Yeah, it was curious because the book is partly about media distillations and the black and whiting of stories for consumption,” he says. “And it was interesting to see that first hand and be in the middle of it. There are some ironies there alright.
“The thing is, though, it was all played out as sudden exposure,” he continues, lighting the first of many cigarettes. “But none of this stuff was news to any of the people who’ve been around me for the last 15 years. It wasn’t news to the publisher because I’d told them about my past. So the ‘shock horror’ thing wasn’t there for us. And when the story did finally break, in the same way as Vernon’s story, it had been so broken-down and encapsulated, and made into just ‘DID LOADS OF DRUGS! STOLE A HOUSE! WROTE A BOOK!’ that it didn’t even feel like my story anyway, which had unfolded over 20 years.”

Longer even. ‘DBC Pierre’ was born Peter Finlay in South Australia 42 years ago. His father was a renowned genetic scientist, one of the earliest pioneers in the field, and young Peter spent his early childhood travelling the international academic circuit with his parents and older sister. When he was 18 months old, the Finlays moved to America, where his father lectured at Washington State University. A year later the family moved to England for a spell, before returning to Australia.
He began his primary education in Adelaide, did his second year of school in Durham in England, before the family made a permanent move to Mexico City. Unfortunately, having caught a mild case of hepatitis in England, he suffered a serious relapse in Mexico and spent much of his seventh year confined to his bed. “It meant that I missed out a year in school, but it was also where my imagination flourished. I practised arts and shit, and I developed techniques for drawing.”
When he’d recovered, his parents decided to keep him with his original classmates rather than make him repeat the year he’d missed, and he claims he never really caught up. Although obviously a bright kid, he really wasn’t all that interested in schooling.
“I was bored with a lot of it. Some things I could do naturally. Because I read books, English was never a problem. Because I could draw, art wasn’t really a problem. But anything where you had to apply yourself, I was shit.”
Always a bit of an outsider, he demonstrated artistic talent from an early age.
“I wanted to be a cartoonist when I was a kid,” he says. “I wanted to draw strip cartoons and be like Charles Schultz or something. And I could draw. I was published young, when I was about 15. And I remained published into my early twenties – just little box cartoons for magazines and shit. Cartoons don’t pay a heck of a lot, but it was something. I was working as a designer as well, even earlier than that.”
Although the Finlays travelled a lot and were always abroad for at least three months every year, Mexico City remained home throughout his adolescence. His life was extremely privileged, but still relatively normal, until the mid-1970s when his 53-year-old father suddenly took seriously ill.
“He was a very, very healthy man but he suddenly started getting headaches and shit. He actually collapsed at a UN conference – which, if you’re gonna do that, I suppose is actually a great spot.”
Although the doctors immediately discovered a serious brain tumour, his father didn’t burden his wife and teenage children with the awful news.
“We discovered some mail since which tells us that once they had identified the tumour – and it was a rare, fast-growing motherfucker of a tumour – he wasn’t gonna survive longer than three years. But he never told us that. He didn’t even write a will. He was a very positive thinking man. So we spent those three years knowing that he was getting more and more ill but always with this hope, if not expectation, that he was suddenly gonna turn around and get over it and bounce back.”
That wasn’t going to happen, though, and as his father got progressively worse and began requiring serious medical treatment in New York, the adolescent Peter suddenly found himself with a dangerous amount of freedom on his hands. His sister had already returned to Australia so when his mother accompanied his father to hospitals in the States, he was effectively left on his own in Mexico City.
“There were a couple of particular stretches that come to mind when my mother would have to travel and be by my father’s side in New York,” he recalls. “I was still doing school and had other things to do. But it was just by a quirk of fate that it coincided with just that moment in adolescence when you start running with a different peer group. It was a curious time.
“We had a huge place – more by influence than by wealth, I have to say. My old man was well-connected. He had semi-diplomatic status there so, apart from it already being a corrupt country, we were even untouchable within that. So you had a sense of wide ranging freedom. We had a house down at the south end of the city – a little neighbourhood that had its own police force. All the ex-presidents lived down there and all your big, big money.
“So they left me in a house there that had nine bathrooms and a sauna and a heated outdoor swimming pool. And it had five servants that ran it. It was a big sort of palatial architecturally designed building, sort of a modernist thing, in grounds with a 16-foot wall all around it with spikes and broken glass. And a gatehouse with a man at the gate. Obviously it had its own bar and pool tables and all of that.”
It didn’t take very long for the teenager to realise that this was a golden opportunity. Or at least, it didn’t take long with a little help from his friends.
“I was a fairly innocent kind of youngster,” he chuckles. “I came from a very decent family – never heard my parents swear or anything. But obviously the very first mate that I invited around to the house after they had gone… ha, ha!… you could see things dawning in his mind and it quickly came to me as well. Literally within two or three weeks all my mates moved in. After that, it was just wall-to-wall carnage.”
His friends were mostly rich kids, the spoilt sons of politicians, diplomats and industrialists. Typically, it wasn’t too long before they were getting their kicks from activities a little more hardcore than boozing and playing pool all night.
“One of my mates was actually an Italian count and his old man was head of a pharmaceuticals company in Mexico,” he says. “And he brought around a copy of sort of the phone directory that doctors use – the Physicians Desk Reference – and it’s just this very easy look-up book of drugs and their effects. And it also happened that he was one of the first diagnosed hyperactive kids – or Attention Deficit Disorder kids.
“We always knew he was a little bit crazy but he did have a clinical thing. And they had treated him as a kid with Ritalin. And Ritalin’s a drug that has a paradoxical effect when you’re growing up. Whereas it keeps you focused as a kid and it actually chills you out, as soon as you hit puberty the effect switches and it turns into an amphetamine – it turns into a kind of speed.
“And of course this may not have been known back then, but he’d undergone that change obviously a few years earlier but hadn’t told anyone that the effects had changed. So he had a supply of Ritalin and he came up with this Physicians Desk Reference, so between one thing and another – between that and dope and stuff – it wasn’t long before we were just going through the book and seeing what else we could sample.”
Getting their hands on these drugs didn’t pose any serious problems for the children of Mexico City’s wealthy elite. They simply ordered their pills like pizzas.
“Being a very exclusive neighbourhood, you could just phone up the pharmacy and they’d deliver – they’d send a man down on a bicycle. So traditionally on a Friday night we’d call up and get a box of Ritalin, eight cartons of Marlboro, and then work our way through the directory. It was just madness. I grew up a fat kid. After hepatitis, I was heavily overweight for much of my childhood. And within the first year that my dad left the house, I was back to slim again. I also had only slept five days in the year!”
Was your mother aware of what was going on while she was away?
“No, because the place had servants who tidied up after us. And I feel really sorry. They were beautiful – almost surrogate mothers to me. But their hands were tied, because I was the master by proxy. They could give me hints but they couldn’t really confront me because technically I was in charge. It was a sticky one.”
Finlay now recognises that this unprecedented freedom as a teenager had a fairly profound effect on his future life path. He could’ve been a contender, but instead went on a bender…
“It was just the moment, I’m sure, when my dad would have started talking to me seriously about college, about studying to get grades and putting incentives in front of me. He was a real high achiever himself. He was never a guy that threw a lot of money at me either – he always made me do something for it. I never had a big allowance. But obviously, in his absence, envelopes of money would turn up to upkeep the house. They would just turn up every week and once the staff was paid I couldn’t see much else to do with the money. It was just the wrong moment and the wrong country to be introduced to any kind of personal corruption.
“But I have to say, as a cautionary tale, there were seven close mates in my circle and only two of us are alive today. In fact, most of them wiped out before I was even 24.”

His father eventually died in 1980, when Peter was 19. Undoubtedly realising that the end was drawing near, he had taken his family on an extended holiday, firstly back to England and then on to Australia. “We realised afterwards that he was doing a kind of farewell tour of his family and friends – trying to say goodbye to everybody,” Peter reveals.
He collapsed for the last time in South Australia, Peter’s original birthplace.
“I had my last conversation with him at his bedside. He couldn’t speak or open his eyes but he would squeeze your hand. And I sat and had a chat with him and I told him all this noble Mexican type of shit – how I was gonna look after his wife for him and become the man of the house and all this kind of shit. Whatever, you know. And then he died one early morning. Within a week I went back to Mexico.”
Although his mother never returned there to live, Peter stayed on in Mexico City for another few years. He hadn’t graduated high school with any great honours but, funded by the considerable money his father had left, he still led a pretty comfortable lifestyle and also made a reasonably decent living working on the fringes of the music scene – taking publicity shots for bands, and designing posters and album covers.
“It kept me close to the drug scene and close to that 24-hour lifestyle – that all night lifestyle – which I know and love. I still work by night, I have to say. I dunno if I was a natural B-personality or if it came from that period, but I consider the daytime as kind of a lightweight administrative period, and night-time’s when shit really happens.”
Unfortunately, the umbrella of diplomatic protection that his father’s position had previously accorded him was now gone. When Finlay got busted for smuggling a car over the border, he immediately lost his Mexican permanent residency document – essential if you want to work there. Suddenly he was in the uncomfortable position of being a semi-outcast in his own home town.
Further Mexican disaster struck soon afterwards. In 1982 he was over visiting his mother in England, when an item on the BBC news caught their immediate attention. “One Thursday afternoon the Mexican government closed up all the banks and nationalised them overnight. They then decreed a new currency rate which was something like 600% beneath where it had been – and then floated it from that point. So that 600% put it on the surface of the place where it continued to plummet.”
He immediately flew back to find that, virtually overnight, the Finlay family fortune had been all but wiped out. He salvaged what he could from the wreckage of their bank account. One of his friends worked in a finance house and was able to help him illegally purchase US $20,000 with what was left of their Mexican cash. The government wasn’t allowing any US currency to be taken out of the country – even searching people’s wallets and purses at airports and confiscating everything over the allowed travelling expenses of $50 – so Peter nervously flew across the border to Houston with the twenty grand sewn into the lining of his sports jacket. His anxious mother was waiting for him at the airport.
He recalls this meeting in Houston as the moment when all of his troubles really started.
“I gave the money to my mother and sent her back to Europe,” he says. “But this is where I started fucking up. I didn’t tell her the extent to which we had been wiped out. She was such an innocent as well. She’d never really had any knowledge of handling money. She’d had a good and charmed life, my old man had provided utter and absolute security, and in that kind of vein I thought, ‘Fuck, this is where I have to step in’. I was being called upon and I told her, ‘Look – this is just some of it’. I made up some story and sent her home with it to England.”
As the mid-’80s approached, with the family fortune wiped out and his permanent residency status gone, Finlay decided to quit Mexico and give Australia a try.
“We’d been there on holidays, I’d been born there and I had family there. But it’s a very different culture from Mexico. I took to preparing for it in a very romantic and youthful way. I was like a fucking puppy. I started learning bush songs and all that kind of shite, and getting into that tourist imagery of Australia that you get.”
One hungover December 1984 morning in Mexico, he haphazardly packed boxes full of family chattels (“Books, socks, boardgames, shoes – just fucked ‘em all into boxes in about an hour”), arranged for the shipping company to pick them up and then took himself off to the airport to fly down under in time for Christmas and a new life.
Alas, almost immediately, he and Australia just didn’t get on. By April he was just beginning to establish himself in Adelaide’s advertising and music circles, when he got a call from the shipping company to say that his boxes had arrived from Mexico. When he arrived to pick them up, Customs did a search and came upon a dried flower arrangement, with a couple of cobs of corn in the centre, that had once belonged to his father.
“These fucking customs officers pulled this bag with these dried corn cobs out of the box and said to me, ‘What’s this?’ I said, ‘Looks like corn to me’ (laughs). And they closed back the rest of the box and took the bags. And then I suddenly realised that it was the type of moment where if somebody had called out from across the warehouse, ‘Hey – we’ve got a kilo of heroin here!’ they would’ve said, ‘Forget it – we’ve got corn!’”
Australia is notoriously strict about what kinds of flowers and fauna you can bring in anyway, but when the authorities discovered that his father had been a genetic scientist, they threw the book at him. Within five weeks he was summonsed to court to appear on two charges – one of wilfully importing plants or parts of plants, and also of signing a false customs declaration.
“This was the beginning of a quite traditional relationship I ended up having with Australia,” he smiles. “I pleaded not guilty – I denied that I’d wilfully imported them. I said I was just emptying chattels into the box and they just went in. I didn’t personally wanna spend any money bringing cobs of corn with me. I was twenty-something. I could give less of a fuck about corn! Like, I couldn’t smoke it! But the upshot was that for all my wide-eyed learning how to sing fucking ‘Waltzing Matilda’ my first taste of the place was having quite a major conviction.”
As it happened, his fine wasn’t all that huge in the end, but his card was now well and truly marked. His luck quickly got worse. Shortly after that, he crashed his car into a wall at high speed and was lucky to survive.
“This was my second inkling that it mightn’t be the spot for me,” he says. “I broke my head in a number of places, and smashed my face up, and spent the next nine months recovering from that. And the message that I took was that Australia might not be the perfect spot for me. I’d already had two or three traffic offences so I’d spent the whole time there either in hospital or in court. And so I got out and went to Spain.”

Still a little shell-shocked from his Australian experience, he went to live in Granada, ostensibly to recuperate from his extensive plastic surgery. Once again, he found sporadic work on the fringes of publicity, photography and commercial art. However, it wasn’t too long before he was off on his travels again.
“I fell in with this group of mad American artists who lived in this beautiful enclave outside the tourist zone,” he recalls. “I was having a good old time. But then I fell in love with this bird from America, chased her back to America and, being a good Mexican romantic, I lost her, had my heart broken and immediately went to Mexico again.”
It was during this unplanned return to Mexico that he seriously began his love affair with cocaine. He hadn’t really done much coke during his pill-popping teens, but he quickly began making up for lost time.
“That trip was the first time that I really got well acquainted with cocaine. It was cheap – about 20 bucks a gram – and it was high quality as well. And so with the authorisation of love behind me, I fell well into that and stayed there for a bit.”
After a few months of partying his woes away, mending his heart by damaging his nostrils, he finally left Mexico and returned to Spain later that year. To his utter dismay, he quickly discovered that a $100 a week coke habit in Mexico equated to more than a $500 a week habit in Europe.
“Things were ten times more expensive there,” he recalls. “And shit really started building up because, having told my family that we hadn’t been wiped out, I’d been working to send them money and it just came to a point where they were asking me for increasingly bigger sums. Eventually in the pursuit of a decent coke dealer I bumped into the gypsies that were selling heroin, and got well stuck into that as well.”
Within a few months he found himself seriously struggling to maintain a grand a week drug habit, as well as keeping his mother happy. Somewhat unsurprisingly, it was around this time that things began to get really bent out of shape.
“I was living about three lives by this time and, as all people do in these situations, trying to find the space to crawl out. And this is the much publicised house story. There are actually much greater anecdotes from around this time – that I’ll keep to myself [laughs]– but this is the house one…”
Ah yes, the infamous ‘house story’. When the shitstorm of pre-Booker publicity broke, most of the media attention centred on the outrageous claim that, in the late 1980s, Peter Finlay had swindled his older friend Robert Lenton, an American artist and puppeteer, out of his Spanish retirement home. Allegedly, he had tricked Lenton into signing over ownership of his property by presenting him with Spanish documents to sign, sold it on for £50,000 while his friend was on holiday, and then legged it with the cash. Really, it was the ultimate kind of house robbery.
It’s a great newspaper story – but actually not very accurate (though there’s a kernel of truth in there). Finlay explains the whole thing to me at great length, obviously anxious to set the record straight. It’s all much too detailed to go into properly here but, suffice to say, this condensed version of events seems much more likely.
“I had a sufficient enough drug habit that I simply couldn’t support myself and, at the same time, my family was looking for increasing amounts of money and shit like this,” he explains. “I just didn’t have it. So I set out to borrow some money on the apartment I was in, which my family owned. I went and put all these fucking papers through the bank there to just borrow on it. Spain’s not a quick place to do any of that kind of gestation and they took months. I started borrowing from everybody far and wide – friends in Mexico and Australia even – because I knew this money was coming. Just to survive the gap.”
In the end it took eight months for the bank to authorise the loan, by which time he’d practically borrowed the equivalent anyway. Unfortunately, they then announced that they wouldn’t give him the cash until he signed documents stating the address of the property he was trying to buy. They weren’t just going to give him cash without any security. If he tried to borrow on the strength of the family apartment then he’d need his mother’s signature, and she’d know that they were in financial trouble.
Ultimately, the long and short of it was that, as a favour to a talented young man he liked and admired, Robert Lenton agreed to put his own property down on the loan papers.
“I won’t even get into all the mechanics of what was going on, but this was the nature of the thing. I said to him, ‘Let’s just put your property on the form so I can get this money, get myself sorted out, new lease of life, and when the time comes that you’re leaving we’ll fix this up’. So I put on my loan agreement that I was buying his place and they released the money. I didn’t buy his place, kept the money, Robert stayed in his house and whatever, and life went on.”
This rather ambiguous financial agreement worked fine until about 18 months later, when Lenton suddenly decided to sell up in Spain and head back to the US. By now chronically addicted to coke, smack and their associated lifestyles, Finlay had neither the money nor the wherewithal to get him his property deeds back. However, he did have a rather vague, drug-addled plan to make a movie about the search for Montezuma’s lost gold.
“After some time, I decided that I would make a film and at least try and make an artistic statement and keep my drug habit alive and in one foul swoop solve all of my fucking problems.”
Putting everything and everybody on hold in Spain, he returned to Australia (“Where previously I had had such a good time,” he laughs, sardonically), carrying several years worth of accumulating debts and an increasingly bad smack habit. When telling me about his planned film, he effortlessly conjures up a magical Aztec world of wizards and warlocks, throwing in a little bit of historical/mythological detective work to boot. It’s easy enough to see how he managed to convince numerous Australians to invest money in the project.
“Australia at the time had a very good tax incentive for film-making,” he says. “It was on the heels of Crocodile Dundee so it was a good time for investment in film. So here’s me sitting with an increasing amount of debt. I owed Robert for his place, I owed everyone else that I’d borrowed from. I was still sending money to my family and I had a good grand a week drug habit. I wasn’t gonna make it drawing cartoons. It seemed like a good and genuine way out, so I mounted this film production.”
Needless to say, his drug addictions and general inexperience dismounted it fairly quickly…
“I knew fuck all about production and the movement of money and all that kind of shit – which is my problem around the world actually,” he laughs. “I didn’t wear the right spectacles or have the right haircut for those club-like industries that you need to have to break in. So the whole thing went arse-up spectacularly, having taken in investments from some good people who’d got behind it.”
He had seriously fucked up, but he wasn’t going to get away with things so easily this time. There was no walking away. Angry investors wanted their money back, but it wasn’t there to give. Worse, the banks were making serious legal noises about bounced cheques and credit card debts. And when the Australian authorities checked his file and found that he was a convicted corn-smuggler, he was well and truly fucked.
He remembers the last few months of the 1980s as being all about dealing with an ever increasing circle of bailiffs, creditors and court appearances.
“It was a question of having to phone them once a week and telling them some bullshit, then having to phone them twice a week, and then having to phone them once a day. In the end, I literally had to pawn my last audio cassette to get enough money for the coin box to hold them off for half an hour, before they signed some kind of document to put me away. I was being increasingly fucked-up by being kept back in court just from commercial debt – credit cards and bounced cheques and shit.
“It was just an increasing nightmare of shit coming down on me and trying to maintain a drug habit at the same time. Eventually I ran out of the wherewithal and just collapsed at the very end of the ‘80s.”
He was court-ordered to drug rehab, but not absolved of any his debts. They were gonna nail him to a cross. As legal proceedings got underway and trial dates were set, he found himself in an increasingly desperate position, watching his whole life swirling down the plughole. It was during this awful time that one of his Australian friends jokingly christened him ‘Dirty But Clean Peter’ – thus DBC Pierre. It was actually a pretty apt description, but he wasn’t clean voluntarily.
“I was off drugs purely by dint of being unable to afford them. I was literally on the street, I had no car, no phone money. I was smoking cigarette butts off the street.”
Denied free legal aid, he wound up spending much of his time in the law library of Adelaide University, working out his defence strategy. There was one particular official who seemed to be out to get him and he spent weeks reading up the best methods of cross-examining hostile witnesses.
“I spent the last two years of my stay there studying in the law library in the university of Adelaide, because legal aid wouldn’t represent me. There were 18 months of pre-trial motions and I was appearing in court on an almost weekly basis. Every time I went to court it could’ve been the day it was decided to lock me up.”
It was during this stress-athon that he met his current girlfriend Jennie, an Adelaide-based investment banker. They were introduced through a mutual friend. “She’s younger than me by quite some years. A very practical foot on the ground kind of woman, who was a panacea because I’d grown up in a world of dreams and passions and unfettered living and thoughts. I’d never really seen how things worked.”
When his case eventually went to court in 1993, it totally collapsed within 20 minutes of Finlay’s own cross-examination of the main prosecution witness (“He’d been so anxious to put me away that he stupidly made up all this extra stuff that I hadn’t done – and I caught him on it”). However, even after he’d won – or at least gotten off – he still didn’t bankrupt himself, because he says he didn’t want to close the chapter on his film debts. He’s an honourable man at the end of the day.
“It’s worth noting that I’ve never been pursued for any of these private debts – ever,” he points out. “Not by Robert, not by anyone. So for as much as they say ‘stole this and did that’, nobody has ever made a legal report, and I’m still in touch with everyone.”

That same year, he bid a bitter farewell to Oz and relocated to London with Jennie, hoping for some kind of fresh start. However, the three years of legal hell and the dehumanising process of drug rehabilitation had totally knocked the stuffing out of him. He says he felt like an empty vessel, a shadow of his former self.
“The same stupid confidence that got me into all the shit… I was deprogrammed from that by the type of social worker mentality that they threw me into in rehab. Which said that life is a question of medium and lows. To them, life was just this mediocre thing. You have to work in a factory for 200 bucks and whatever. And I’d gotten into all my trouble because I was enthused with this mad passionate idea that I’d fucking do something, or paint something, that would wipe the roof off the world.
“And through therapy they showed me that that was actually a disorder and it was fucking bullshit and it would never happen and I’d fucked up. I had no skills, no education and I was worse off than the social worker who was talking to me, and that I should just fucking do nothing. And I just wallowed with that feeling for ten years and became a very regular guy.”
London life wasn’t particularly easy but with Jennie’s loving support he survived. He lacked both the self-confidence to smooth-talk his way into a decent job, and the academic qualifications to get one by more normal means.
In the meantime, contact with Robert Lenton and his numerous other creditors gradually tapered out.
“Travel aided and abetted that in a way. Because I was in touch with Robert and all these other folks. There’s a long tale to that. It wasn’t that something happened one day and I did a runner, but rather we were all in touch for a good two or three years after the fact of it becoming increasingly evident to them – and to me – that there was no way I was gonna be able to pay any kind of money. And slowly I was disconnected from all of that and entered a whole new milieu with my Aussie girl. I was left in a tunnel self-contemplating myself until I was almost approaching 40. “
Dreams dead, he spent much of his thirties in a deep depression, feeling like a failure, and toying with the idea of suicide. He still occasionally used drugs but with nowhere near the same reckless intensity as before. He couldn’t afford them anyway. It wasn’t until 1999, with the millennium and his 38th birthday approaching, that he somehow found the will within to give an artistic career one last shot. Writing was one of the few disciplines he hadn’t tried his hand at, and the sight on the TV news of a handcuffed American teenager being led away after a school shooting gave him the beginnings of an idea for a book.
“I was just pissed off. One of the things that got to me was that it occurred to me that I’d been an outrageous bullshit artist. Obviously for all these things we’re talking about – and many more. If I collected all the great anecdotes of the time, all of them were lubricated with some smooth bullshit that I had. Bullshit that comes not from being a good inventor, but from really believing your own bullshit, without having to reference any double story – like, you live it.
“Then I went through this whole reprogramming and realising that actually things are very mundane and fucked, and that what I was doing was speaking pure romance and pure bullshit without any substance behind it. I never actually produced anything of real value for all the noise I made. And I was quite right to fail in a certain way, I felt.
“So I suddenly wake up at the end of the ‘90s and the commercial world now has taught everybody that same syndrome, and to use that in their daily lives. Substance doesn’t matter any more, you know. It’s all about how you look and the noises you make.
“And so when I sat down with Vernon there was an edge of pissed-offedness, that I’d gone through this whole fucking process of getting my feet on the ground and suddenly I couldn’t even get a decent job because the whole culture around me now relied on fucking spinning bullshit! And I’d been so much better than them as well!
“I suddenly felt that I had a unique insight on where we were at. Because we’re basically talking through our arse, doing shit, there’s fuck all new that’s happened. The world is devalued by and large. There’s no question in my mind that we’ve been led a merry dance. The wider milieu is becoming dumber. The biggest industries now are distraction industries – industries that take you away from the actual business of figuring things out. It just seemed, perhaps in a naïve way, that I could offer some little insight into that.”
He wrote the first draft of Vernon God Little in just five weeks, and then spent the next 18 months reworking and crafting it. He finally finished the book – which flows like prose poetry, incidentally – in April 2001.
“What a fucking wonderful odyssey that was,” he recalls. “I loved writing it. Actually, nobody has written this yet, but the thing started out as a trilogy. I drafted a trilogy. Vernon was the first and then there was gonna be a white one where, in an opposite way, the protagonist was the villain and the culture was actually great and intelligent and supportive, and this was the new way forward. And then the third one that tried to draw a line in the middle and the results of two halves. And I got as far as Vernon before trying to find a publisher. And they sort of said, ‘Don’t push your luck – this stands on its own’.”
He sent the manuscript out to a dozen literary agents – some of whom never got back, most of whom sent standard rejection letters. In August 2001, after four months of frustration, he was just about to accept a creative position in Saudi Arabia (“Yeah – finally I was offered a job. It was a nightmare position, but it would have helped me make a start on the debts”) when he got an e-mail out of the blue from an agent named Clare Conville. The rest is Man Booker history.
“Within ten days of me receiving her e-mail, she’d sold the book in eight languages.”

Even before Vernon was published he used his advance to buy the house in Leitrim, and has spent the last two years working on his second book. “It’s a different kind of tale, set in England and the Far East, and it has a globalization theme,” is all he’ll say. The Booker brouhaha has taken up a lot of time recently, but he hopes to have the novel finished early in the new year.
He says that all of the recent controversy began shortly after he called Robert Lenton, told him about the book being short-listed for the prize, and sent him an initial cheque for $5,000.
“Yeah, I called him actually. That’s what started the thing. That’s when the writing stopped and publicity took over. I called him when I was short-listed because it suddenly occurred to me that I was gonna sell enough books now to make some headway on my debts. And Robert was the one man that I had to do. It was a priority. And I watched it and watched it for about ten days, watched the sales.
“I phoned him up on Mexican independence day, near the end of September, because it was a type of independence and I’m a bit superstitious. And I just took my balls in my throat, in a way, and called him from here, from the mountain. He was really pleased to hear from me. He said there was no problem, he hadn’t thought about it for years and everything was cool. We had a good old chat.”
Although Lenton was pleased to hear from him, some overly protective members of his extended family weren’t quite so happy to hear that he’d been in touch.
“Some of his family obviously heard that I’d called him and thought that I was gonna fuck him over or mess with his head in some way,” he says. “And they went on the net because he’d told them about the book, and they saw that I was short-listed and about to attend the event for this prize. And they contacted the Booker Prize people to say, ‘Don’t give anything to this fucker because he’s a bastard – let me tell you what he was doing in the 1980s’. And within a few days of that they spoke to the press, saying the same things. But I don’t really blame them for that. They were just trying to protect him from getting hurt again. And, of course, the whole thing was like fucking rocket fuel for the sales.”
It must have been. Last month, shortly after he’d sold the film rights to Vernon, he sent Robert Lenton a cheque for $100,000 – double the original amount. The American artist was wholly gracious and understanding, telling the Sunday Times recently, “[Peter] lived a terrible life undercover and now he’s glad to be over it. Now he’s a good man. We can start off perfect and get all twisted, all out of shape and go through some horrible periods and get out of them. If we’re lucky. And he has been lucky.”
Extraordinarily lucky. And also extraordinarily talented. But what life lesson has (Dirty But Clean) Peter Finlay learnt at the end of this long and rocky road?
“Jesus, distilled into a lesson?” he laughs. “Em… don’t let the fucker get you down! Ha, ha. And I’ve learned some Arab things out of it too, you know, in a certain way. Like, from their way of thinking.”
What sort of things?
“Your secrets are your blood and when you give all of them away, you fucking die,” he says. “It’s a certain question of knowing when to open up and when to not.”

Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre is published by Faber & Faber. Last week it won the Whitbread Best First Novel Award.