Andrew Nicoll is not your archetypal novelist. “I detest this idea that a writer needs to retreat to a shed at the bottom of his lilac-scented garden in order to do any work,” the gruff, bearded journalist declares.
“It’s just a job like any other, or in my case, a very profitable hobby.”
Andy wrote most of his first three novels his second is due out this week, the third has just landed in his publisher’s hands longhand on his daily rail commute from Broughty Ferry to the Scottish Parliament. “Even when the train does actually run the journey is bloody awful,” he says. “It’s dead time. You can either read a book or write a book.
“I don’t understand why this surprises everybody. Graham Greene would write 1000 words a day even if that meant stopping in the middle of a sentence. He was a fire-watcher during the Blitz. No one said how can you go and rescue people from burning buildings and then write sensitive, thoughtful novels?”
Andy’s first novel, The Good Mayor, was released in 2008. It’s a slow-burning, magical love story about the bachelor mayor of Dot, a town in a forgotten part of the Baltic whose geography may or may not be based on Dundee’s, and his secretary, who is trapped in a loveless marriage.
Instead of being narrated by an omnipresent author, the story is told by Walpurnia, the town’s patron saint, who was ‘blessed’ with a full, luxurious beard and a body almost entirely covered by warts as a bolster to her chastity. It’s one of many imaginative quirks in a charming, unusual novel.
“The Good Mayor started out as a short story,” Andy explains. “I had a dream. When I woke up I thought it would make a good little short story, perhaps about six to 10 pages. Eighteen months later it was a book.”
The Good Mayor was an enormous success, with sales stretching into 30 countries and across at least 20 languages. Its popularity won its author the Saltire Prize for best first novel and sparked a bidding war for Andy’s subsequent work, which saw him move away from Edinburgh based Black & White Publishing to Quercus, publishers of Stieg Larsson’s multimillion selling Millennium trilogy.
His second novel, The Love and Death of Caterina, was released on Thursday. “It was inspired by a photograph I saw in a newspaper of a run-down tramp steamer in oily, still water with a crane and a net.” Andy explains. “That was when I met Valdez.”The Love and Death of Caterina is published by Quercus. ISBN 978 1849 164719Valdez is an outstanding writer whose work is celebrated far outwith his minor South American country, but who, as an individual, is sadly lacking in empathy, integrity and basic human decency. Such is the extent of his psychological airbrushing, when he looks in a mirror his eyes ignore a scar on his face inflicted in childhood.
“If you’ll excuse me saying some really poncey, artsy stuff, he can’t even really physically see himself, such is his lack of self-awareness,” Andy says of his creation.
A tragedy about a beautiful young student who falls in love with Valdez’s legend, the novel is unusual in that it gives away its ending in the first line:
“Only a few weeks after it happened, Luciano Hernando Valdez was almost unable to believe that he had ever been a murderer.”
Andy’s choice of setting was deliberate. “I see a lot of Valdez in the country he’s from. It’s got a navy but it’s landlocked.
“That actually happened after a war between Bolivia and Peru, when Peru took away Bolivia’s coastline. Yet Bolivia still has a flotilla of naval ships patrolling Lake Titicaca. A lot of the culture the tango and so on is taken from Argentina.”
Andy (49) lives in a Victorian terrace a few paces from the sands of Broughty Ferry beach. He grew up in the fishing town, going to Grove Academy, and has lived there all his life.
After leaving school he went to work as a forester on the Scone Estates. “Then I went for a job as tea boy on Jackie magazine but they didn’t want me,” he jokes. “So they put me to work on The Courier instead.”
Andrew spent 18 years working for this newspaper, as a general reporter and latterly as political editor. He left to join The Sun in 1998. He and his wife Anne have three children, Kenny (21), Margaret (19) and 16-year old Angus.
Andy’s office is in the Scottish Parliament and as such his days are long. “I get up at 5.30 in the morning and come home around 9pm. I spend an hour or two writing on the way to work and back. And that’s my life.”
Though he’s dabbled with poetry and short stories for many years – and has had quite a number of them published – Andy only began devoting more time to writing around a decade ago.
“It was a mid-life crisis thing. I was rushing towards 40 and had to find something else to do, some sort of external validation.
So how does penning novels fit in alongside a career in tabloid journalism? “It definitely stretches other muscles. If you write an 800-word article that’s a long article, with the books it isn’t a sprint it’s a marathon.
“I’ve not written anything for two or three months now and it’s killing me. Apparently with people who run marathons not that I’m speaking from personal experience here if they stop training they get antsy. That’s how it’s been with me and writing.”
My impression of Andy is of a man with a hefty intellect, common sense, and a strong instinct for right and wrong a powerful combination, as the Scottish Arts Council found to its cost.
“On the strength of my first book I was asked to be part of a commission that looked at the funding of Scottish literature,” he says. “I did it with a full heart … and was horror-struck by what I saw.
“I tried to resign about halfway through and was persuaded to remain, being told that my opinion was valued. The following day I discovered they were spending over £50,000 to send a team of ‘top’ Scottish writers to a literary expo in Canada.
“Out of those ‘top’ writers the only person in the group I’d heard of was Ian Rankin and the only person in the group who outsold me was Ian Rankin.”
Surely a multi-millionaire like Rankin doesn’t need taxpayer funding to travel to Canada? “To be fair to him, Ian was paying his own passage possibly so he wouldn’t have to sit in cattle class. I just don’t think that in these times we have the money for this sort of stuff. Within 24 hours of all this, I was invited to a dinner at which I just happened to be seated next to the director of the Canadian arts festival the expedition would be visiting.
“He asked me to come along.” This perceived attempt to buy away his concerns strikes at the heart of Andy’s misgivings.
“As if that was the price of me!” he rages. “That if they just invited me along I would no longer object to it on principle.”
In the end, the commission wrote its report, which was sat on for a year until the Scottish Arts Council was abolished and replaced by Creative Scotland.
“The report got ripped up but the madness continues,” Andy says. “I do not know why it’s in the Scottish taxpayer’s interest to fund the translation of a political history of Kosovo into Bulgarian.
“Nor do I know why they need to spend £1750 on the launch party of a book by an American male impersonator, particularly when she’s already had four book launches in other countries.
“Do they need to spend £10,000 on writing poetic fiction about transgender issues in the Old Testament? They sent a bloke to Ghana to learn bongo drumming and a woman to Tonga to learn hula dancing.
“Everyone agreed that state-funded art under Stalin and Hitler was a bad thing. To make state-funded art in Scotland different they have regulations that make ministers powerless in decisions over content.
“If someone said to Stalin ‘I’d like to write poetic fiction about the Old Testament,’ he would say ‘thank you very much but no, not today’ and then have the bloke shot. At least Stalin gave us Prokofiev. Who have we got? I want people to know the sort of thing their money is being spent on.”
Andy’s third book, which he describes as a “rip-off of The Prisoner of Zenda” is due out next year, and he has started work on the fourth. Publicity work for his novels has taken him to Australia and Greece, and his 2011 calendar contains the Budapest Book Festival and the less far-flung destination that is the Glenrothes Book Fair.
He professes to having no ambition to climb any further up the journalistic career ladder. “I have no wish to fly any closer to the sun,” he says, punning unconsciously. “I just want to keep working at the job I have and writing sensitive literary fiction in my spare time.
“During my 10-day book tour of Australia I was sitting at Circular Quay, with the shadow of the Sydney Harbour bridge on one side and the Opera House on the other.
“I was sipping a coffee and watching lightning play across the horizon and I thought, I’ve done no’ bad for a wee boy from Broughty Ferry.”