A white knuckle read from start to finish, bestselling author Alex North shares the origin of his new novel The Man Made of Smoke - a haunting portrait of a psychopath and the psychiatrist trying to understand what drives him.
I can’t drive, but I love motorway service stations.
I have done ever since I was a kid. My family could never afford to go abroad, so our yearly holiday was always a quick trip to a caravan or a cheap cottage on the coast. As lovely as they were, my favourite moments were often halfway through the journeys, when we turned off the motorway and pulled into the services for a time. I remember the enormous, silent trucks parked up in lines off to one side, and the flat featureless hotels that I could never imagine anyone wanting to stay in. Inside the main buildings, I remember the chatter of amusement arcades, the mixture of people, and the little shops selling magazines and sweets, where my family would buy the provisions we needed for the rest of our adventure, whether there or back again.
I think what caught my imagination was the sense of being neither here nor there – of being in an inbetween place, amongst people with nothing in common beyond us all having taken what felt like a step sideways out of the real world for a time. It made me think of ancient travellers stabling their tired horses at inns, enjoying a moment of calm from the long quests they were on.
Like Daniel Garvie, my protagonist in The Man Made of Smoke, I was too young back then to know the term ‘liminal spaces’. But now that I’m older, I still find them oddly magical. To this day, I love being airside at an airport or settled in for a long journey in a train carriage. My favourite part of the John Wick films isn’t the fight scenes, but the idea of the Continental Hotel, a place for assassins where they can holster their weapons and take a break from the action. I like the mythology of that: the idea that there are places out there that sit apart from the everyday surface of the world. And I enjoy the sensation of finding myself in one for a time, and being a small part of that.
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The initial idea for The Man Made of Smoke was the killer in the story and the awful decision they ask their victims to make. I can’t talk about that in any detail – it’s a bit of a spoiler – but while it lingered at the back of my mind, I couldn’t figure out how to make it work in a crime novel. That’s often the way. Ideas are great, but you need a handful of them to make a book, and they often seem separate until they begin to stick together and form a story.
Some time later, I hit on one of those apparently separate ideas: that of a young boy who has a terrifying encounter with a serial killer. I didn’t know much about the boy at that point, beyond the fact that he would survive what happened but fail to stop the killer, and that the guilt from that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
So the next question was: where does this encounter occur?
The crime and horror genres are replete with well-known and well-worn spooky settings. The creepy old house with the boarded-up windows; the dark forest; the shortcut through the cemetery. I’ve used many of them myself, but I wanted something a little different here, and my thoughts kept returning to those visits to service stations as a kid.
I remembered one time when I came back from the toilet and couldn’t find my family in the crowd, and for a few seconds it felt as though I’d been left behind: lost and forgotten in a pocket of the world that nobody would ever search for me in. There was another occasion when I realised that a man sitting at a table by himself was staring a little too intently at me. And I realised that, alongside the frisson of magic I recalled from those places, there had always been a slight hint of danger there too. Perhaps the two go together. After all, in stories, there are often good reasons why travellers are advised to follow the map and keep to the path. Magic and monsters go hand in hand. When you step outside the real world, the usual rules no longer apply.
Anything might happen.
I decided that the boy in my story’s encounter with the serial killer would happen at a service station – in one of those sideways places – and that it wouldn’t happen in darkness, but on a sunny, summer afternoon. There would be a crowd of decent, everyday people there who should come to his aid. Everything would feel very safe, in fact, as though nothing terrible could happen – until it did. And those decisions began to shape the nature of the killer in my head.
“Nobody sees,” I imagined him saying. “And nobody cares.”
Which I recognised was exactly what the killer from my original idea would say. At that point, those two ideas stuck together and began accumulating others. That’s often the way too. I worked out who Daniel was. Where his life would take him after he returned from that horrible encounter, changed and scarred. The impact it would have on him and those around him. And how the awful thing my killer does finally made sense, and would eventually collide with Dan again, in devastating fashion, so many years down the line.
But like I said, I can’t talk about that bit.
You’ll have to read the book to see where the journey goes next.
