Biteback know Paul Moorcraft as the author of books like Shooting the Messenger and Inside the Danger Zones. This summer he's promoting a book of an entirely different kind.
We Biteback authors try to be all-round writers. The last two books I did for the friendly crew in Albert Embankment were non-fiction about hacks, heroes and harlots in war zones. I’ve got some more ‘bang bang’ for them, but this summer I am promoting my latest novel, Regression.
Tongue-in-cheek, it’s being marketed as ‘daddy porn’ in response to the ‘mummy porn’ tag on 50 Shades of Grey. This may seem like a pincer movement: Biteback are publishing Edwina Currie and carrying the sexy video of her daughter, Debbie, singing with few clothes on. I found Edwina’s offspring disturbing and sexy at the same time; I could almost imagine myself wearing (not sharing) John Major’s underpants a generation ago. As I said, a disturbing thought.
In trying to outflank E L James with Edwina’s political sexiness and my, er, historical and psychological romance, maybe we are trying to prick the mummy porn bubble, so to peak.
I started writing novels partly because of the writing restrictions imposed when I worked for the Ministry of Defence. I couldn’t write any political stuff, but I thought, ‘Damn it, they can’t strop me scribbling historical fiction.’ The first one was based on the true story of the Anchoress of Shere, a woman bricked up alive in the wall of the local church in my beautiful medieval village of Shere (made famous by Hollywood films, especially The Holiday). It has gone into numerous editions (including in Japan, strangely) and won a number of American accolades. A new edition is out in October.
Anchoress was set in the 1320s and the 1960s. Regression is set in the 1790s and the present day. It’s about a London psychiatrist exploring his own history via past-life regression therapy. It’s set in the smuggling heyday of the Surrey Hills and the fleshpots of Georgian London. It has bad sex – deliberately, not just because allegedly men can’t write sex scenes as well as women – in order to contrast the finale when the hero finds what he has been searching for throughout his life, and perhaps previous lives.
It’s a male view of romantic love, hence the daddy porn pretensions. It won’t ever sell as many copies as Ms James’s oeuvre, but we men must fight back.
I persuaded a few people, mainly women, to read the first drafts of a sex scene in a shower (no homage to Psycho). One comment was that is was ‘like a manual for assembling IKEA furniture’. Now I happen to find IKEA sexy, so that might explain a lot. I rewrote it 30 times in one day and had to confess to startled female friends that evening that ‘I have made love 30 times today and the woman still complained that I couldn’t get it right.’ They soon understood that it was my female character who was moaning.
I thought it authors’ bullshit when they claimed that their characters created their own dialogue and even story lines. But it happened to me with this novel. Either my inner voice or the actual female character in the shower certainly complained about my poor performance. I had lots of other experiences in researching the novel, including subjecting myself to regression therapy with an eminent practitioner. People used to say ‘that must be expensive’. I would joke: ‘Depends how far back he takes me – he could just charge me just sixpence or even a florin or two.’ When I started appearing in 1790s gear in the local pub, my friends told me to ease off on this line of research. S’funny, you can’t smoke in pubs, but you can wear a sword.
I have rejected whips and butt-plugs and handcuffs; this is a traditional straight-sex love story of a man obsessed by one woman whom he wants to marry. He faces numerous obstacles, not least a 200-year age gap, but how he manages to overcome that is the point of the story. Call me old-fashioned if you like but I am waving the male banner of romantic love versus mummy porn. And the male readers may like the very occasional sword fight and the battle scene. (No car chases, I’m afraid.)
When the first Surrey Hills novel was published in 2000, some of the locals threatened to burn the book in the village square. If I had been more PR savvy and cynical, I would have secretly supplied them with books and sneaked in a TV crew. I just hope the locals – and others, including the Japanese – support my latest scribbling attempt. And, thank you, Biteback, for the encouragement with this book and my other macho efforts in war zones. We can’t always leave love and war to the girls…