The lock gates look as though they are simply staying up out of bloody-mindedness. The timbers are rotten: sinking, inch by inch, into a sucking chocolatey sludge. The rusty metal struts are half hidden behind hanging tapestries of green slime. Anybody wanting to test the path must first wriggle past lethal-looking metal security railings and a tattered curl of barbed wire.
This is St Andrew’s Dock in Hull.
The warehouses and office buildings around me are either boarded up, falling down or both. The graffiti artists have had their fun. Critical response: D-plus. Enthusiastic, if not artful. Metal shutters have been nailed across every door. The floor is a smashed mosaic of broken glass and cracked concrete. It feels like a bomb-site.
This is the landscape that journalists and bloggers and booksellers seem keen to talk to me about. The bleak, rain-lashed spit of land on the far edge of things. The area where Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy tries to enable the wrongly bereaved to say their final goodbyes. The area that has allowed me to quit my old job as a crime journalist and make a living writing books that have sold all over the world.
I give all kinds of answers. It’s the people. The architecture. The sense of closeness I have with a city I know through the soles of my shoes. But none of these answers seem to fit. So for a moment, I’ll ask you to indulge me. See out through my eyes, if you will. I promise, you’ll come back, but you might not enjoy cold meat buffets as much.
Stand with your back to the devastation and you will see the outline of the Humber Bridge; sharp slashes of charcoal half lost in the low cloud. The sun is trying hard today, spilling a violet, honeyed light onto the cold coffee of the shimmering water. I’m thinking of lavdender-scented nectar. I’m thinking of a sunny day when I was nine. A big stately home somewhere. Air that smelled of damp leaves and toffee apples. Me, sitting inside, sulkily eating a jam sandwich, because a huge bumble bee had spoiled the outdoor picnic. Seeing the man at the nearby table. A world away. Lost in thoughts. Head full of his own intentions and regrets. I can see what would matter to him. What he would set right, if pressure of circumstance were to silence his conscience.
I’m thinking. Imagining. I’m leaning on the grey wall and imagining how many times a body would bounce off the sloping harbour wall below me before it plopped into the water. I’m thinking of this place in its heyday, when colossal trawlers full of ordinary men slipped through these same lock gates heading for rich fishing grounds across terrible seas. Thinking of how the body would look when it bobbed up a week from now at Dutch River near Goole. They always seem to. Bad place to walk your dogs.
I’m remembering. A chat with a proper Hull lass. 70-years-old and never met an ‘o’ she couldn’t pronounce with an ‘ur’. Fruit Pastilles in her handbag in case she bumped into one of the bairns. A sense of self you could bend a horseshoe around. Talking to the writer in between bites of buttered scurn…
Don’t wave, she said, licking butter from a lumpy knuckle. “Never wave. Bad luck if you wave. Bad as carrying your bag or bringing a woman …”
I’m seeing it. Seeing the offending hand nailed to the lock gates. Seeing a sort of pagan justice meted out for a crime half a century old and McAvoy’s big sad face staring down and through his own rippling reflection. And now I’m writing. Scribbling in my notepad like the journalist I used to be. I’m meeting the characters that my brain is spitting out like slides.
Why do I write about Hull? Take a walk by the water. You might just see what I see.
Also of Interest
- The Origins of DARKNESS FALLS
Best-selling author DAVID MARK lays bare the bleak origins of his latest novel, DARKNESS FALLS. Many years ago, in the midst of one of my bleaker depressive bouts, I took myself off on a walk to the Humber Bridge. I lived a couple of miles away and the forested area nearby was a favourite haunt of ...
Continue reading >> - Full Time Writer? Apparently!
The psychiatrists have all been clear. I need peace, serenity and room to let my thoughts unspool. But what do they know, eh? Four kids, a dog, a newborn baby and a publishing deal makes for a far more interesting life…
Continue reading >> - A Bite of the Big Apple
During the research process, I’m pretty much a sponge. I absorb and soak up until I am saturated. Sitting at a bar in Little Italy, earwigging as the wiseguys spoke about ‘some bum’ who needed ‘a talking to’ it occurred to me I probably had the best job in the world but probably shouldn’t be seen taking notes. Drinking rum-filled hot chocolates in an Irish bar, I had a vision of McAvoy’s boss, Trish Pharaoh, getting insanely excited at the selection of whiskies and realised that I needed to get her into the story...
Continue reading >> - Setting the Scene
Invariably (until recently) my books have been set in Hull. Why? Well, I know the city. I’ve lived around the area for 17 years and I was a journalist in the city for an age. I know that if you drive down Southcoates Lane with your windows down you will smell the cocoa from the chocolate factory. I know if you head for Wincolmlee to avoid the traffic on Beverley Road, the stink from the tannery will make your eyes water. I know that the car park at...
Continue reading >> - North v South
There’s a good reason why Londoners take such pride in the fabulously cultured ways they can spend time in the capital. It’s because nobody wants to go home.
Continue reading >> - Research With a Difference
“No way. No. No, it’s too dangerous. No, you can’t. Seriously, you’ll hurt yourself. It’s not worth it. There could be a total psycho! Oh for goodness’ sake, all right. But if you get hacked to bits, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” My 12-year-old daughter has been telling me off for the past ten minutes. She’s adamant...
Continue reading >> - McAvoy Takes Manhattan
It’s a little after midnight. I’m freezing. The flight seemed to take forever and the security guy at the airport was a right prick. Apparently ‘a bit of both’ isn’t an answer that they can work with in reply to the question ‘business or pleasure?’ The cab driver who brought me from JFK to the Lower East Side had been thrilled to discover he had an author in his taxi. He took it as an opportunity to outline...
Continue reading >> - David Mark talks about DS McAvoy and Hull
Continue reading >> - A Room Without a View
You’ve got me feeling nostalgic. Until a few weeks ago, I had an office of my own. Green walls. Burgundy leather recliner. My horses looking up at me from the stables and snowdrops sprouting among the headstones in the graveyard next door. Books by the cartload and a cork-board covered in random newspaper articles, interspersed with photos...
Continue reading >> - David Mark interview on Audible
Learn more about David Mark, Hull, the DS McAvoy crime series and Cruel Mercy, in this interview with Robin Morgan in the Audible Studios. 12 minutes. Listen now
Continue reading >> - David Mark on location in Hull reads from Dead Pretty
Continue reading >> - David Mark on location in Hull reads from Original Skin
Continue reading >> - David Mark on location in Hull reads from Dark Winter
Continue reading >> - David Mark on location in Hull reads from Dead Pretty
Continue reading >> - David Mark leads you into the streets of Hull
Continue reading >> - Might you also talk a bit about your writing process? Your daily process while you are writing as well as what is it like to write a series—keeping all those plot threads straight!
I’m very lucky that I have the kind of mind that is perfectly suited to writing fiction and which is horribly ill-suited to everything else. I take notes now and again and sometimes find scraps of paper with random words and aide-memoirs scribbled upon them but by and large I think of my skull like one of those candyfloss machines. I just swirl a stick around in there and ideas stick to it. The story I’m living and breathing then squats there in my head and pushes everything else out. Sometimes I look at the clock and I’ve lost a day and I realise I haven’t been to the bathroom since dawn. I write a chapter a day, no matter what. I’m at my desk by 9am, drinking coffee and grinding my teeth. It’s delightfully masochistic. I kind of enjoy the agony of it, which sounds very pretentious for a writer of dark thrillers! As soon as it’s done, my brain just kind of flatlines for a bit. Then it starts preparing for the next project. Two years later, when the book is in people’s hands, I’ve largely forgotten what it was about. Sorry!
Continue reading >> - What is essential to writing good crime fiction? Do you stick to some sort of formula or do you break all the rules? Do you read a lot of crime fiction or thrillers as well?
I read everything I can get my hands on. I love thrillers and psychological fiction but it is rather difficult to read them for pleasure now that it’s my day job. It’s hard not to read with an air of comparing the market. I don’t really take any notice of rules, either in the writing process or in life. Actually, I do have one – if the novelist has mentioned the make and model of a car by the end of the first paragraph, the book isn’t for me. And for God’s sake, don’t start off with a dream. For me, it’s just a case of meeting interesting people and twisting preconceptions on their head. Listen to the radio a lot. People who phone DJs are particularly inspiring – they always seem like the sort of person who could be a killer or the killed. Listen to your inner voice. When some dullard is telling you about their tedious problems, think of ways to kill them, and why. It’s less risky than actually doing it. And you think I’m joking.
Continue reading >>