Big 4 Interview: Paul Collins

Paul is interviewed by Bec Stafford.

The Only Game in the Galaxy, Book 3 in The Maximus Black Files, is hot off the press. Congrats! Can you tell us a bit about this third instalment and your experience writing it?

The back cover blurb says: 

In a galaxy of cut-throat companies, shadowy clans and a million agendas, spy agency RIM barely wields enough control to keep order. Maximus Black is RIM’s star cadet. But he has a problem. One of RIM’s best agents, Anneke Longshadow, knows there’s a mole in the organisation. And Maximus has a lot to hide. 

So begins a game of cat and mouse between Maximus Black, our anti-hero, and Anneke Longshadow, pillar of light and good. You might remember ROR conducted a survey a long time ago when Mole Hunt, the first book in the series, came out, you asked if main characters need redeeming features. No respondents thought they did, and a few came out with some classic bad guys who have none. And this is where major publishers fail themselves. This “redeeming features” business is a fallacy. This trilogy was rejected by many publishers. The closest it came to even getting published was with Penguin in the UK, but after a meeting decided they already had the young James Bond series and I think Artemus Fowl, so they declined. It’s lucky I’m a publisher myself. The Maximus Black Files finally saw print with Ford Street Publishing, and it’s been selling extremely well.

Paul, Maximus and his sassy nemesis, Anneke Longshadow, are lively, emotionally complex characters that leap off the page. Can you talk to us about their development and how much fun you have playing them against one another?

I get asked sometimes if I use friends as inspiration for my main characters. I don’t think I do, but I definitely have in mind my favourite characters from other writers’ books. I think of Anneke as Modesty Blaise, Maximus as Artemus Fowl’s evil twin, Daretor from The Jelindel Chronicles as Willie Garvin (Modesty Blaise’s sidekick). When playing characters off against one another you need to know how far your characters will go to top the other one. You need to know from the outset that they’ll do anything to win, bar killing their opponent. So to suspend disbelief, you need to show how the characters are feeling toward their nemesis, and how they personally want to exact revenge rather than hiring someone to do their dirty work. And when it comes to a time when they have their opponent in their sights, the reader needs to know exactly why they’re not going to pull the trigger. So all of this has to be foreshadowed. If you hate someone enough to wish them dead, and then you don’t kill them when you have the chance, there needs to be a rationale for this outcome.

As well as your latest Maximus Black story, Damnation Books in the US just released an adult horror novel, The Beckoning. Do you enjoy getting into different creative headspaces, and do you do anything special to prepare before you sit down to write for one audience or another?

 To be honest, The Beckoning was written over thirty years ago. Yes, persistence is the key when being a writer! This book was first typed on an electric typewriter on the counters of two bookshops I owned in the 80s and 90s. Luckily for me I saved it by typing it on to my first computer back in the mid 90s. It’s since been stored on 3.5 discs, floppies, CDs, zip drives and USB sticks and transferred to about four computers. So in answer to your question, there was no trouble in getting into a specific adult versus young adult headspace when writing these books. But seriously, I can swap genres quite easily. While writing and editing The Only Game in the Galaxy, I also wrote six Lucy Lee books for Macmillan, a choose-your-own adventure called The Toastinator for Macmillan NZ and a middle reader called The Pranksters’ Club for Blake. So we have lower, middle, young adult and an adult horror book that I revised with an editor, all happening at the same timeframe.

Which of your fictional characters Burns Brightest in your mind and why?

 The answer to this might have once been Jelindel, from The Jelindel Chronicles. She’s feisty, going through the rite-of-passage with two young blokes, one of whom is a shyster, and yet somehow she never (well, most of the time!) complains. She learns, she battles wizards and foes despite overwhelming odds, and fulfils her quest. I think Maximus would now burn brightest. As I’ve implied, I thought I had the ultimate anti-hero, someone so bad he killed an entire civilisation seemingly on whim, eliminates enemies with not a second thought, and yet somehow, Maximus Black fans have told me they wound up rooting for him to win. Maybe I did too good a job on him lol. A close friend of mine read the first draft of Mole Hunt and basically said the lead character was so bad that he found reading the book distasteful. Luckily for me the vast majority of readers found the complete opposite.