Neil White Talks Last Rites

18 May 2009

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Neil White may be a successful author, now on his third book Last Rites, but he is also a criminal lawyer and family man,  it's amazing he finds the time for anything else.

But I caught up with him to talk about his new book, his career and how he manages to fit everything into twenty four hours.

So what have been up to recently?

Writing really and that's pretty much it, I'm about half way through what will be the fourth book, so I'm trying to make some hay with that and convince myself not to go out in the garden because it's really sunny.

Your latest book is the Last Rites so what is it all about?

It's a tale of ghastly deeds in the shadow of Pendle Hill. It's the third book in the Jack Garrett series, he is a reporter who lives with a detective, and there has been a murder of a teacher’s boyfriend in the small Lancashire town that he lives in.

He gets wind that perhaps the young teacher suspect isn't the suspect that she ought to be so he starts looking into it and discovers it has links with Pendle's dark witchy past.

So how does the writing process work for you do you start with plot or characters?

Probably more plot lead, I tend to see something in either the news or general criminal research and I'll think that’s a good background for a story and I try and craft the plot around the idea.

And that was the process with the Pendle witch thing I thought it was an interesting local story and quite good to craft a modern day murder around that story.

You are a criminal lawyer so how much influence does your work have on your writing?

Erm I don't tend to use, little snippets come in and things that I pick up at work from the police or on a call and those are little side things that may fit in, but I never use cases or recent cases.

Obviously it's not fair on the police to start using confidences but what it does do is it makes you realise that there is no limit to evil cruelty whatever sick thing you can think of you can usually find a sicker thing in a file.

You realise that you be too gratuitous because someone has done worse so you don't have be too fearful of thinking that someone wouldn't do that because they would, they probably have, and I could probably find you a file showing you that they have.

What was it that drew you to the crime genre don't you get enough of that in your day job?

I think I have always been draw to it, even as a child I was drawn by the likes of the Crown Court series, and as a child I wanted to be a police office, when I lived in Wakefield, and that turned into a criminal lawyer so I think I have always liked crime and been interested in it and what makes people do the things that they do.

But I was initially drawn to horror, the Stephen King stuff, but it gets to a point where it doesn't scare you anymore because you have seen it all before but with crime can always intrigue you and leads you to think how would I get out of this particular situation where horror is just another scary story.

Ok so you are a criminal lawyer so how did you get into writing and why did you decide to pursue it?

I had always wanted to be a writer and when I was in college I would always say that law was what I would do until I could become a writer. I started writing as some as I finished studying, I finished studying in 1993 and starting writing in 1994, so even when I was still training to be a solicitor, when I was doing my two years training contract, I was writing then and was always plugging away at it until I got published.

And getting a book deal can be quite a long process with manuscripts being knocked back so how did it all work out for you?

What I took from it was if ever two people said the same thing about something that I had done that I would think that was probably right, I can accept that there might be different views, but when you have two people saying the same criticism I think that they are right and I look again at where I have gone wrong.

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