Paul Howard opens up about Ross O'Carroll and Irish aristocrats

Having clocked up well over a million sales of his long-running Ross O’Carroll-Kelly series, Paul Howard is one of Ireland’s most successful writers… but it didn’t happen overnight. When the then-journalist self-published the very first ROCK book in 2000, he wound up having to pulp more than half of the original print run. Having created the obnoxious D4 rugby jock for a popular weekly column in the now defunct Sunday Tribune, Howard – who worked for the paper as their chief sportswriter – had decided to weave the pieces together into a comic novel entitled The Miseducation of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly.

“In the beginning, in a fit of optimism, I ordered 5,000 copies of the very first Ross title,” the 45-year-old Dubliner recalls. “I had no idea what 5,000 books looked like until they arrived, and they arrived loaded on five pallets on this truck. I saw two of those pallets and went, ‘God there’s a lot of them’, and the guy goes, ‘There’s three more in the truck!’ So 5,000 is a lot of books.”

Howard hadn’t just self-published, he was also selling them himself. “I was driving a Nissan Micra at the time,” he laughs. “It was my first car. I just went from shop to shop. I didn’t even think to bring them to a warehouse and sell them at the Eason’s warehouse. I’d go to Eason’s on O’Connell Street and they’d say, ‘What’s it about?’ and I’d say, ‘Oh, it’s a satire about Celtic Tiger Ireland, about privileged young people’. And they’d say, ‘Sure, that sounds pretty good. Yeah, well give us ten and we’ll see how they go’. Like, I’ve got 5,000 of these things!”

In hindsight, he really hadn’t thought things through. “I was so naïve about it,” he admits. “I think we published it in January, or something stupid. We should have gone out for Christmas. We were getting a lot of requests, this was before the internet, a lot of requests like, ‘Can you send me the column from three weeks ago?’ That sort of thing. That’s the reason I decided I would do a book of them.

“It was kind of based on Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones,” he continues. “Like, lots of people ask if I was inspired by Adrian Mole, but actually it was Bridget Jones more than anything. And that was my idea. They were just a collection of columns with a loose narrative weaved between them. I brought it out in January, and they were all in the Tribune offices, they were all in the fire escape. [The editor] Matt Cooper called me and told me that the fire safety officer had said, ‘You have to move those books!’ And I said, ‘Well, where am I going to put them?’ Matt said to me, ‘Have you thought about a bookshop, maybe?’

“So, that was it. I think we sold about 2,000 in the end, over the course of six months. It took about a year or two years, and then it took off after that. But I think of the original 5,000, we pulped about 3,000.”

Times – and Howard’s fortunes - have certainly changed. Hot Press is meeting the affable author in the Library Bar of the Central Hotel to discuss not only his sixteenth ROCK novel, Game of Throw-Ins, but also his new non-fiction title, I Read The News Today, Oh Boy. An in-depth account of the short, colourful and gilded life of Irish aristocrat Tara Browne - the 21-year-old Guinness heir whose tragic death in a London car crash inspired The Beatles’ song ‘A Day in the Life’ (the closing song on 1967’s classic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band) - the book has been a decade in the works.

While that seems a long time, it’s worth noting that Howard is a very busy scribe – with plays, TV programmes, columns and other books to his credit (including his ghost-written autobiography of rugby pundit George Hook). When sales of the ROCK books finally started to take off, he found himself in a position to quit sports-writing. Fairly disillusioned with his journalism career, and also with all of the obvious doping scandals in sport, it couldn’t have happened at a better time.

“I think I was getting very bored and I was very cynical about sport, especially for the last five or six years,” he says. “I went to the Athens Olympics and I remember I had twenty research books with me. I think about nine or ten of them were about drugs. They’re my bibles, right. I could pronounce chemical names of drugs that were nine syllables long without even hesitating. I was kind of worried about myself with that. I fell out of love with that. I fell out of love with covering it as well.

“And then my first two books with Penguin, Curious Incident [Of the Dog in the Nightdress] and Should Have Got off at Sydney Parade, had huge sales. So I got a second contract from them. As it happened, what I was earning for writing the books was more than I was earning for a year in sports journalism. So, I kind of thought maybe I’ll just do this fulltime for two years. I thought it would be two years. It wasn’t a life-changer, it was just a sabbatical (laughs) and then I never went back. And now the Tribune is gone, so I’m never going back there anyway.”

The Browne book has its origins in a feature article Howard wrote for the Tribune magazine on the 40th anniversary of his death.

“It was exactly 10 years ago, it was Tara’s 40th anniversary, and I interviewed [his older brother] Garech in [their Wicklow family home] Luggala about the legacy of the song. Garech was great, but Garech couldn’t tell me a lot about London because he wasn’t there. There’s six years between Tara and Garech, which is a huge amount of time when you’re young. They were just getting to a point in their life where that gap didn’t matter anymore. It was mattering less and less.

“But Garech didn’t really know anything about London. He didn’t know Tara’s role as an icon of Swinging London. So I wasn’t that happy with the piece, and, you know what it’s like, you’ve got to let a piece go before you feel it’s properly finished. And over the course of the next two or three weeks, a lot of people I’d put calls into started to return my calls, you know, people like Mike McCartney.

“And they were all saying the same thing: ‘It’s such a pity you didn’t get to us before, because I could have told you this and I could have told you that’. So anyway, Mike McCartney – brother of Paul - said to me, ‘Look, if ever you’re in Liverpool, come and see me, we’ll go for lunch and I’ll tell you some of my stories’. So I just booked a flight to Liverpool the next day and met Mike in the city centre, and he took me to a bistro, and five or six hours later I’m leaving with a just head full of stories, amazing stories.”

Did he know there was a book in it at that point?

“I think I certainly thought Tara was worthy of a better treatment,” he avers. “I mean, I was probably thinking in terms of a bigger, longer better magazine article. But that kind of long-form journalism, it’s kind of hard to sell a 5000 word article to anybody anymore. Nobody wants to read 5000 words, not if you can say it all in a tweet.

“So I sent it to Garech, and I think it really took about a year until he really agreed it was a good idea. And I kind of hung on in there because I really was convinced that it was a terrific idea for a book. Because of what it represented, you know, because of who he was in the context of swinging London.”

Tara Browne was certainly a hugely interesting character: a racing car driver, Vogue model, friend of The Rolling Stones, style icon, son of a peer, heir to a Guinness fortune, and the young man who first turned Paul McCartney on to LSD.

“He wasn’t just this social butterfly who floated across the London scene and then disappeared, he was really a vital figure in London,” he explains. “When all these class barriers are coming down, when the lords and ladies are mixing with the Rolling Stones, that doesn’t just happen. You need somebody to be the social grouting, if you like. You need somebody standing in the middle to say, ‘Princess Margaret, have you met Mick Jagger?’ How does that happen, you know, how does Princess Margaret meet Mick Jagger? Well, it happens because Tara or one of his coterie of switched-on, upper-class dandies would just happen to be there. And what was happening that spring in London was just an extension of what his childhood was like.”

Howard conducted more than a hundred interviews with Browne’s friends, acquaintances and family members as research. Some individuals proved easier to track down than others.

“I always felt privileged that I was getting to tell the story. I never felt anything but privilege that I’m the one who has access to all of these extraordinary people, and they’re telling me about this amazing young man. But, there were a couple of things that sort of kept me going. First off, usually when you’re doing a biography, or any kind of journalism, you get used to doors closing in your face. Never really happened with this. You know, everybody was happy to talk… if you could get them.”

It took him a while to get the legendary Anita Pallenberg to go on the record. “Yeah, it took me about four years to get Anita,” he recalls. “I went to London probably three times, knocked on her door, rang her bell, sent her letters. I remember sitting in coffee shops on the King’s Road, three days in a row, writing her letters, cards, putting them in the thing, going back to King’s Road, sitting there looking at my phone hoping she’d ring. And she didn’t. And then I had some friends, a friend of a friend who knew her, and he tried for me, couldn’t get anywhere. “And then Garech just had the idea of ringing her one day. It was about 11 o’ clock in the morning, and Garech said, ‘Well, let’s ring her’. Garech just felt that if she knew that the book had his input then she might talk to me. But she’s very reclusive, you know, especially wary of journalists. So we rang her, and it was very intimidating, well, she’s not intimidating, she’s sweet as anything, but, just the legend of Anita Pallenberg is very intimidating.”

Some Dutch courage was required. “Garech said, ‘Let’s have a drink, before we ring her’. So we had a drink, and then we had another drink, and another drink. I think it was about two in the afternoon before we’d finally had enough Dutch courage to ring her. We sat in the little kitchen in Lugalla and rang her, and she said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I didn’t answer all your letters because I just thought you were a journalist and Gareth didn’t approve of the book. Come over’. So I just went over and met her. But even then, I had to walk around the block about five times before I even had the courage to knock on the door.

“But she was great, when I met her, she was brilliant. Her memory’s very vivid, and she’s just got some really wonderful memories of that time. I was sitting opposite her, she’s sitting on the end of her bed, and she had this day room. Not quite her bedroom, cause everything’s in the room, all this furniture and then the bed right in the middle looking out onto the Thames. So she sat there on the end of the bed, and I sat trembling on the chair opposite her asking her questions (laughs).”

As the creator of one Irish legend and the biographer of another, what does Paul Howard think that Ross O’Carroll-Kelly would have made of Tara Browne?

“I don’t know,” he laughs, “but I think Tara would hate Ross. Actually, I don’t think Tara would hate anyone, but I think Tara, and the people in Tara’s world, would be quite disdainful of people like Ross because he’s middle class. I spent so much time around aristocrats the last ten years that I have a rare insight to a world I’d no idea about before. And one of the things that really amuses me about them is how utterly disdainful they are towards the middle classes.

“Billy Connolly always says that, ‘the upper classes and the working classes actually get on really famously’, and I’ve seen that and it’s completely true. I’ve spent a lot of time hanging around up in Roundwood Inn and talking to practically everybody. And just about everybody in the village of Roundwood has at some point worked in Luggala. In some capacity they have worked for Garech Browne, down in the grounds or at the house, and they just completely love the man. As he does them.

“But the middle class thing is funny. It’s funny because Garech read the manuscript of the book before it was published. I had referred to ‘fox-hunting’ at one point, and he said, ‘Oh, you know, if you’re referring to hunting foxes then it’s just called hunting. It’s presumed to be a fox unless otherwise stated’. So I said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that’. And he said, ‘It’s just what you’ve written in your thing. It’s terribly middle class.’ And I said, ‘I know you don’t mean any offence by that’, and he said, ‘Oh no, I do!’ (laughs)” Game of Throw-Ins is published by Penguin Ireland. I Read The News Today, Oh Boy is published by Picador.