Christopher Bowden Interview Published on: 11, Jun 2018

I was born in London, grew up near there and have lived back in the capital for the last forty years. The books certainly draw on London settings but go much wider to other parts of the UK and abroad. The Yellow Room, for example, has a section in Kenya, where I worked for a while, and The Purple Shadow is set mainly in Paris, which I often visit.

My first novel (The Blue Book) was so-called because it featured a book with a blue cover that is at the heart of the story and I liked it as a title. It then occurred to me that the colours approach would be an attractive way of developing other novels so I decided to complete the primaries with yellow and red before moving on to the secondaries (green and purple so far). The choices are not arbitrary, though. The title colour of each book is related to its plot and themes.

I write because I enjoy the creative process, getting from the blank page to the completed book. The use of language, characterisation, settings and plot and how the interaction between them sheds light on the themes of each book. And I have to keep going to find out what will happen; it’s not all mapped out from the start.

The characters are fictitious – figments of my imagination – and do not correspond to real individuals. But imagination does not exist in a vacuum and I necessarily draw on my experience of types and characteristics of people I’ve encountered in one way or another over the years.

I like writing fiction that develops and explores the plot and themes through mysteries in the form of problems to be solved. These vary from book to book. They involve detection on the part of the main protagonists but there are no detectives in the conventional sense. There are no policemen in the books. There are no criminals to be caught, which is not to say that no crimes take place. That’s part of the mystery!

The Blue Book started with just a single idea: somebody finding something hidden inside a second-hand book that would lead them to do something or find something or someone. I have collected second-hand books for a long time. I often find things slipped inside - postcards, bus tickets, chocolate wrappers. This gave me the idea of someone finding a mysterious note hidden between the pages of a book, setting them on a trail to discover the meaning of the note and the identity of the person who wrote it, uncovering secrets, lies and deceptions along the way.

The Yellow Room features at its heart an English country house and the family that lives or used to live there. We see the place both in the present day and in the 1950s, focussing on the run-up to the Suez Crisis in 1956. What emerges is a picture of a landed family fighting to stem the decline in its own fortunes in a post-war world in which Britain’s own role is steadily declining.

The Red House of the title is a fictitious house on the east coast of England. From the outside, it looks solid and respectable; inside, it is a different story. Red signals that the house is a place of danger. Our hero goes there on a mission, thinking that the initiative is his. In reality, he has been lured to the place, with bizarre and unpredictable results.

I have no theatrical experience, other than the odd school play years ago, but I am a keen theatre-goer. Actors and acting feature in several of the books, notably The Red House. The Purple Shadow builds on that interest (with the same protagonist) and takes us back to the 1930s as background to the events which unfold in the present day.

I have a murky past as a civil servant and only turned to creative writing later when I realised that that was what I really wanted to do.

I’ve always been a keen reader but my tastes have changed and broadened over the years. I tend to read literary fiction, ranging from modern American authors, like Paul Auster and Richard Ford, to quintessentially English ones, such as Barbara Comyns and Barbara Pym, Jane Gardam and Penelope Lively, William Boyd and Ian McEwan. A bit of crime fiction by the likes of PD James and Dorothy L Sayers – and many of the Noir Series published by Akashic Books. ‘Strange’ or supernatural fiction is also an interest, from the ghost stories of Edith Wharton to the strange tales of Reggie Oliver.

No, it’s essentially a plot device, a search with unexpected consequences kickstarted by something found or lost. I find it’s a good way of developing and maintaining momentum, even if there are set backs and occasional blind alleys.