The third and final instalment in Simon Marlowe’s mad, bad and darkly comedic Mason Made trilogy, The Heart is a Cruel Hunter, was published yesterday, marking not only the end of Steven Mason’s venture into the dark underbelly of the criminal world, but a huge milestone for the author.
Simon says…
“The Heart Is A Cruel Hunter, is the final instalment in my darkly comic crime thriller trilogy Mason Made (so check out book one, The Dead Hand of Dominique , and book two, Medusa And The Devil). And for my protagonists next little adventure, I have Steven Mason, now a jaded drug fuelled criminal, indulging in extremes: personally, professionally (i.e. illegally) and politically.
It’s also probably as good a time as any to look back on the birth of Steven, born on a cold winters night in a well-known brand of Budget hotel in the Georgian city of Bath. I was away from my home and family 5 days a week, working as a contractor to keep our heads above water. A few years earlier, I had self-published my first novel, as well publishing some short stories, and had finished what I thought was another ‘literary masterpiece’.
However, there were a few nagging doubts, not least the worry that I was sadly deluded and might not be up for the Booker prize just yet! It was a critical moment, with personal and professional struggles fairly acute, wrestling with the disturbing realisation that just because I’d written another book, didn’t mean it was any good. And I knew, in my head and my heart, I needed to ‘let go’ and start again. And that is one of the hardest things as an author, having spent a year or so slavishly writing, to then face the stark reality that a hundred thousand words needs to be put in the virtual bin. It’s a tough one, but a necessary process in learning how to be your own editor, your own objective critic, in order to realise your potential.
It was in this heady mix of isolation and creative crisis that Steven Mason popped into my head. Or I should rather say, ‘the voice of Steven’. You could call it a bit of a eureka moment, but it just poured out of me like an uncontrollable torrent. I was amazed, shocked, as I kept reading and re-reading what I had written on my laptop, daring to think, to believe, that at last I was writing the way I should.
The rest, I suppose, you could say is history. I was cautious with the first Steven Mason book, but I knew, even if it had some success, there was another story, and another story after that, sketched in my head and ready to go. The working class anti-hero, whose moral ambivalence could be used to contrast the social and politically themes I wanted to explore was ideal. And it also enabled me to do what I was good at: a twisty plot with sardonic humour, splashing around in the slightly surreal, whilst all the time making it realistic and believable – at least that’s what I like to think!
And so now it’s time to say goodbye, to move onto another chapter in my literary career. Through the four years I have been writing the trilogy, I have also been developing other stories, finding new voices, and so in someways I couldn’t wait to get to the end of Mason Made, so I could start telling stories with another angle, with another voice. I can look back now on the trilogy as the three books that have ‘made’ me into the author I am. And that’s satisfying, knowing that Steven Mason, for all his crimes and misdemeanours, was helping to shape the trajectory of my story telling. I feel like he has been the literary train journey I took in order to arrive at my destination – that has been 15 years in the making.”
Visit Simon’s website, simonmarlowe.wordpress.com, to find out more about the Mason Made trilogy, and stay tuned to see what adventures he comes up with next!
