Gary Moffat interview: Actions louder than words

Published on Thursday 26 February 2009 15:40

IMAGINE, FOR A MOMENT, THAT you are a civil lawyer. You're in your late thirties, steadily progressing up the corporate hierarchy. The job pays well: your firm earns £280 for every hour you charge a client, and a substantial slice comes your way. Because you handle insolvency work along with commercial work and contract disputes, you're well covered even during a recession. Good money, a steady job and an intellectually demanding one too. Where's the downside?

I'm talking to Gary Moffat, Glasgow civil lawyer by day and Kilmarnock thriller-writer by night, and the more we talk, the clearer it becomes. The downside of being a civil lawyer is precisely what he doesn't put in his debut novel, Daisychain, which is slightly odd because that's the job his main character, Logan Finch, holds down too.

You don't, in other words, see Logan Finch pressing the button on his time-recording system when he's at work and wants to take a break. You don't see him ploughing though 100 e-mails a day, handling 20 different cases, timing each new microtask on his computer, assiduously logging the duration of each phone call. Unlike every other civil lawyer you'll meet, Finch doesn't divide up his working day into six-minute segments, each of which he has to be accountable for. You don't see him worrying about whether or not they add up to the seven hours a day he has to rack up before he can start charging the daily rate. Imagining Logan Finch ploughing through his chargeable time-recording is like imagining Bruce Willis doing his tax returns. It's not what he's there for.

Because Logan Finch isn't part of the real world, the one you, me and Moffat inhabit. He's an escape from it. And instead of wondering how to distil his working day into six-minute chargeable segments, Finch is caught up in something much bigger – what his Daisychain not-quite-love interest describes as "this murder slash kidnap slash Hollywood bullshit".

So I'm talking to Moffat and asking him where Finch comes from and he's telling me that he only started writing when the first of his two children was born in 2001 and it was something to do with that, with taking stock of one's life, with responsibility. And I know I should believe him, and I fundamentally do, because he's likeable and seems trustworthy and all of that.

But no, I'm thinking to myself, surely Finch is what you get when a civil lawyer gets home after such a time-pressured, time-managed day, cuts free, loosens his imagination and takes his mind off the clock. And surely a working day in which measured time is so obviously money has to affect not just what he writes but the way in which he writes it?

"Subconsciously, perhaps it does. I start writing usually within a couple of minutes of switching on the computer, and even if it's not flowing smoothly I just push on and within about 20 minutes it starts to. If I switch the computer on and don't write, it's very rare: certainly I don't just sit and look at the screen for ten minutes or whatever."

The story he's imagined for Daisychain is every parent's worst nightmare: the abduction of a child. In Logan Finch's case, the complication is that for a long time he doesn't realise that 11-year-old Ellie is in fact his daughter. But when he does, and moves to get her back from kidnappers pressurising him to approve a money-laundering deal, his best friend turns out to be as tooled-up as Rambo. And so, come to that, are all of his employees.

In other words, if you want a confrontation with full-on firepower, this book is for you. Though Moffat is too modest to mention it, a battery of publishing deals means that it is also being targeted at readers in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, Singapore and Germany too. But given the bristling arsenals of weapons on its pages, and the climactic, no-hold-barred firefight between the forces of good and evil – well, aren't people in all those countries going to get the wrong idea about Scotland?

"Actually," says Moffat, "that's one of the taglines in the synopsis on which I sold it to the publisher in the first place. There's one scene in the book where I have Finch saying to Cahill (his best friend] 'You can't just go running around Scotland with guns' and him saying, 'Course I can!'

"That's one of the concepts of the story. I wanted to bring a sort of Wild West, Americanised thriller into Scotland, something of the kind that I'd like to read myself. Yes, absolutely, you have to suspend your disbelief – but I hope the attraction of the book is that it's slightly out of the ordinary."

For Moffat, the ordinary isn't dramatic enough. In the four years in Kilwinning when he occasionally practised criminal law, the crimes of the people he represented were small-scale and seemed depressingly predictable. Bike thefts, Saturday night fights, vandalism. Hardly the Wild West.

His father, a monumental stonemason, read a lot of Westerns, and there was something about that combination of violence and a world easily delineated between good and bad that appealed to his son too. Somehow, that all made more sense in an American context, so when Moffat wrote his first (unpublished) thriller, about a serial killer, he set it in Denver, even though when he started writing, he'd never been there.

Westerns (and thrillers) aren't known for the subtleties of characterisation, and Moffat admits that he finds such scenes harder to write, though he appreciates their necessity. Writing action scenes is different. "That's when I write really quickly, almost as though I'm fuelled by the adrenalin of the scene itself. Although I can do the character stuff, what I really want to do is press on with the story, get back to the wide-screen action."

That's how I imagine him too. Sitting at home in Kilmarnock after he's put his daughters to bed, switching on his computer, becoming Logan Finch, getting the bad guys in his sights and gently squeezing the trigger. And never, ever, looking at the clock.

&#149 Daisychain, by GJ Moffat, is published by Hachette Scotland, priced 12.99. Moffat will be reading with Karen Campbell at the Aye Write! Bank of Scotland book festival at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, on 8 March and at Waterstone's (West End), 128 Princes Street, Edinburgh, on 26 March at 7pm.