Walk In Silence by John Gordon Sinclair

When John Gordon Sinclair’s debut novel Seventy Times Seven was published in 2012 it felt like a swift blow to the solar plexus. A punchy, page-turner of a thriller, it confidently combined a complex plot with memorable characters, hard-boiled dialogue and the kind of violence that could make your hair curl. He proved that this was no flash in the pan with his second novel Blood Whispers (2014) and now comes Walk In Silence in which he continues the story of Glasgow lawyer Keira Lynch. She remains a woman haunted by the violence in her past and constantly challenged by the moral dilemmas around the taking of a human life. This time, her unwavering commitment to helping others finds her caught in the tentacles of the Albanian Mafia and still at odds with a legal establishment seemingly determined to put her in her place.

Comparisons with John Grisham seem inevitable when discussing Sinclair’s flinty thrillers and over the past handful of years it has become clear that a new star has been added to the crime-writing firmament. The 55-year-old has been so successful in establishing this second career that you wonder if he regrets not starting it sooner.

“Weirdly, it’s something I’ve been thinking about recently,” he admits. “I made the mistake of counting all the books on my bookshelves that I haven’t read yet. I started doing all the sums and thought even if read one of those a week I’d probably be dead before I finished them all. I started getting a bit maudlin about it. Seventy Times Seven took four or five years to write, whereas the last two have averaged two years each. I’ve got about four or five ideas I want to write so say that’s ten years and that’s only 4 or 5 more novels and I started thinking about how many more I could write before it becomes impossible. At that point I thought I wish I’d started earlier.”

Seventy Times Seven began life as a screenplay before Sinclair decided that if his writing efforts were going to be ignored then he would rather they were ignored as a book than as a screenplay. The thing that surprised many about his first novel was the level of brutality. How could the beloved star of Gregory’s Girl turn out to have such a vicious streak? People tend to forget that Gregory’s Girl was more than 30 years ago and Sinclair’s stage and screen career has encompassed everything from Mel Brooks musical The Producers to Brad Pitt zombie film World War Z. Sinclair does concede that early readers may have had certain misplaced expectations of what his novels would be like.

“When I first went to book festivals, people would come up with things to sign related to Gregory’s Girl,” he recalls. “Now, when I go people talk about the books and that has been great. All I wanted was for the writing to be taken seriously. Initially, I wasn’t sure people would buy into it. I thought they might assume it was going to be a lighthearted, humorous novel based on what they think they know about me.”

It is some mark of his progress that the latest novel is published under the name of JG Sinclair rather than John Gordon. “There were a lot of discussions early on about the best name. All along I favoured a nom de plume. I left it with Faber as to what they thought would work the best and they went with John Gordon Sinclair. I moved literary agents about a year and a half ago and when we were coming up to publication this time he suggested this. JG Sinclair just sounds a bit more authorial.”

As for the degree of brutality in his novels, he has talked in the past about reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and finding it so violent that he wasn’t sure if he wanted to finish it. He hopes to achieve something similar in his writing, showing violence to be as ugly and repulsive as possible.

“I don’t want people to be sitting there enjoying the violence,” he explains. “I want them thinking this is a bit much. On the first novel, I went back and rewrote some passages to make them slightly more graphic and shocking than they were originally. Violence just can’t be anything other than shocking.”

Sinclair is chatting over the phone from London. He has just returned from the morning school run, having dropped off his two daughters for the day. Writing has become an increasingly important part of his working life but he has yet to develop a routine. He doesn’t set himself word limits that must be achieved before lunch or completed before knocking off for the day and the reward of a small sherry.

“You mean 1000 words before whisky-o’clock time?” he suggests, amused by the notion of such a strictly disciplined approach. “I don’t have a set routine as such. I worked with the late Simon Gray once on a play (The Common Pursuit) and that was his routine. He would start off in the morning with a bottle of champagne. That would more or less get him to midday and then he would look at his watch and say ‘Oh, it’s whisky-o’clock’ and get out a bottle of Glenfiddich and consume a significant chunk of it until three or four in the afternoon by which point he was becoming slightly incomprehensible. The jolly mood gave way to rumbling anger and then he would send us all home and that’s what I think his writing day was like as well.”

Sinclair’s writing day is more likely to be spent in the “Roald Dahl hut” at the bottom of the garden in the London home he shares with wife Shauna and their daughters. He takes the job seriously, immersing himself in countless books and the delights of Google maps as part of the research, honing and editing chapters after feedback from his editor and practising the craft of writing.

“I have learnt to write anywhere,” he reveals. “I realised that even if you are not spending the whole day doing it, even if you just move things forward by a few hundred words or write an idea down or spend half an hour on it of a day you are still moving forward.”

It seems likely that somebody will want to turn one of his novels into a film or television series and if that happens Sinclair is keen to take a shot at writing the adaptation. When pressed, he also has some ideas of who he might like to see playing Keira Lynch.

“For me, she’s got Rooney Mara qualities about her. I think Rooney Mara is quite stunning but not in a conventional way. She has a slightly ambiguous look and a slightly disconnected feel to her and she could be perfect. I would also love it to be a Scottish actress so if it ever happens it would be a nice problem to have.”

Sinclair is clearly passionate and committed to his writing but his acting career is still ticking along very nicely too. After Greg Hemphill’s Halloween romp Last Skerra Light in 2016, he will soon be seen in Susanna Nicchiarelli’s film Nico Icon, focusing on the final year of the Velvet Underground singer’s life and starring Trine Dyrholm, and he is also part of the stellar ensemble cast (Tamsin Greig, Tuppence Middleton, Roshan Seth, Gemma Jones etc) in the forthcoming BBC drama Diana And I, following four people during the week of Princess Diana’s death in the summer of 1997.

“In terms of writing and acting, it’s probably about 60-40 at the moment in favour of the books. I’ve learned so much from doing each one that rather than it becoming harder I’ve found it …I wouldn’t say it has become easier but I understand the process now. It’s less daunting when you stand at the foot of that Mount Everest and you’ve got to climb to the top. It’s something I look forward to more and more. I can’t wait now to start getting into the fourth novel and begin that journey again. I feel I’ve found my spiritual home.”

Walk In Silence by JG Sinclair is published by Faber & Faber on July 6, at £12.99, and John Gordon Sinclair appears at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Saturday August 19