Going deep with Tom Bradby

January Magazine crime fiction editor J. Kingston Pierce presents a monster interview with ITN correspondent and crime novelist Tom Bradby, who writes incredibly entertaining historical thrillers (I really dug the Shanghai-set THE MASTER OF RAIN and especially THE WHITE RUSSIAN, set in post-Revolution Russia.) Bradby’s latest effort is THE GOD OF CHAOS, featuring an American detective waging battles in 1942 Cairo. Bradby discusses the current book, his path to publication, getting shot at, why family comes first, and much more. My favorite bits involve his relationship with his agent, Mark Lucas:

Should all those would-be novelists out there be jealous of your publishing experience? Did you have any trouble at all selling Shadow Dancer?

I’m really sorry to say this, but I’m afraid the answer to the first question is probably "yes." My wife had once worked for a literary agent and she referred me to a man called Mark Lucas, who is more like a professor than an agent and quite simply a genius. He licked Shadow Dancer into shape and after that, it was easy to sell. Having said that, he was, and remains a brutal task-master. To begin with, I sent him 100 pages and when I finally got a hold of him to discuss them (at the l00th attempt), he said, "Ah, yes. I’m glad you called today. Yesterday, I was just thinking your novel was absolute drivel, but today I feel it has something."

Three years and countless rewrites later, I was finally done. He has taught me everything I know, but I’ve had to develop a thick skin. At one point, in an early draft of Shadow Dancer, the hero was on top of Black Mountain, doing more hand-wringing than was good for him. Mark wrote in the margin, "Hmmm … yes. But the trouble is, he’s a wanker and this is going nowhere."

I wrote underneath, "No, go on Mark, say what you really think …"

CHAOS is available in the UK from Transworld, but at the moment, there are no plans to release it in the US, as Bradby explains:

I don’t yet see your new novel slated for U.S. publication. Are plans for that in the works?

Not at the moment. My U.S. publishers [Doubleday] say they want to build a bigger platform for me and that they’re more likely to be able to do that with the New York novel than with Chaos. So they want to do that first. They profess great loyalty and passion still, so I’m happy with the strategy. They’ve done amazingly, fabulously well with the likes of Dan Brown (with whom I share an editor, but not yet a sales curve), so I’d like to stick with them if I can.

I think the truth is that they did quite well with The Master of Rain, but The White Russian never really got out of the gate. I feel it slipped beneath the radar a bit in the U.S., which was disappointing. All the reviews and reader responses were universally positive, so I’m not sure why it didn’t acquire legs. Maybe the Russian Revolution was too distant a subject for the U.S. mass market.

It does seem to be difficult for British writers to crack America, but I’d obviously love to be able to do it. I think it’s the best long-term guarantee that I’ll be able to keep writing until I croak. Most successful American writers do well here, but going the other way is more difficult.

Since Bradby’s next novel centers around the 1929 stock market crash, he may well be right that it would prove to be a more successful effort. Time will only tell, I suppose…