THE FIRST NOVEL Stephen Booth wrote was never published. Given that he was only 12 when he completed the sci-fi work, that's perhaps not surprising. But it took him a further 35 years before he made it on to bookshop shelves, striking gold with his debut crime novel, Black Dog, in 2000.
Booth had written compulsively in the intervening years, but was more concerned with day-to-day life - university, marriage, his job as a journalist - and didn't apply himself seriously to finding a publisher for his efforts, including several more supernatural thrillers.
'I knew what I wanted to do was become a novelist, but you can't just leave school and become a novelist,' he says. 'I went into newspapers because that was a way of making a living writing.'
But after working his way up to middle management in local newspapers in the north of England, with plenty of crime and court reporting along the way, Booth realised he was spending his life in meetings and writing staff appraisals, rather than doing what he loved.
He found an agent who advised him to forget his supernatural detective - 'publishers hate cross-genre books' - and focus on crime fiction, which he loved to read. With the discipline of a middle manager - 'I set myself goals,' he says - Booth wrote every evening after work, even going to the local library at lunchtime to dash off 1,000 words of the narrative that was whirling round in his head.
'It was like it was all going on in my mind,' he says. 'I'd work late and go to bed with the story going on in my head. Going to work in the morning I could hear conversations between the characters. It was so frustrating that I had to go and sit in the office all day.' But Booth knew he could do it. He had a lifetime of writing to draw on, beginning with editing his school magazine in the English seaside town of Blackpool. Even his first novel helped. 'It was a great confidence boost because I knew I could write a novel, I knew I could finish a novel. When I wrote Black Dog I was sure that was going to be the one.'
