Backstory

by Hurley, Graham

  Now he had a suggestion to offer. A bright young in-house agent by the name of Oli Munson had started making a name for himself and Conrad thought that now might be the time for us to meet. Oli, he said, was my kind of guy and with things maybe a bit sticky with Orion then he might be just the chap to turn things around. The three of us met for lunch in London a week or so later. Conrad was right. Oli and I talked for a couple of hours, and on the basis of an agreed forward stratgey I was more than happy to sign up.

  My stock at Orion seemed to rise overnight. Maybe it was Oli’s growing reputation, or the simple fact that I’d acquired an agent again, but negotiations bustled to a conclusion. The deal Oli brokered was more than satisfactory and I found myself wondering why we hadn’t met earlier.

  But there was even better news to come. Less than a week later, Conrad was back on the phone. In the summer, I’d received an e-mail from a guy called Jacques Salles. Jacques was a producer with a Paris-based TV production house, GETEVE. He was enquiring whether or not the French rights were available to the Faraday series. He’d read a couple of the books and had been much taken.

  At the time, I’d sent a polite acknowledgement and passed the inquiry on to Conrad. This kind of stuff happens more often than you might imagine and mostly comes to nothing. How wrong I was. In the intervening months, Jacques had drawn up a contract for two books, nailed down a screenwriter, attached a couple of top actors to the project, and won an expression of warm interest from France 2, a leading non-commercial TV channel. Conrad was now looking at the contract and telling me to sit down. Once we were happy with the terms, which evidently needed a tweak or two, filming would begin.

  Geteve would be adapting two books, Angels Passing and Cut to Black, for TV release in the late autumn. Le Havre would be the new Pompey and filming was to start in February, which was just a month away. Naturally Lin and I had a standing invite to pop across for a couple of days on location with the cast and crew. This was, Conrad assured me, a bit of game-changer.

  And he was right. We went over in mid-February, staying with Ann and Dom LaFosse, friends we’d made during earlier visits to Les Ancres Noires, the Havre crime fest. We met Jacques and the crew, watched interminable retakes on a patch of dockside wasteland in the cold, bright sunshine, then retired for a long location lunch. This we shared with Jean-Marc Barr and Bruno Solo, the French incarnations of Faraday and Winter (“Winkler” in the Geteve version), and it was obvious at once that these two actors had understood the spirit and the thrust of the original books.

  The afternoon was scheduled for a couple of scenes in the middle of the city, and I watched the Havrais traffic piling up behind the temporary roadblock while Jean-Marc and Bruno did their stuff. How come my Pompey fantasies had come to this? How can Faraday and Winkler bring an entire French city to a halt? That evening, back at Ann and Dom’s, we drank lots of beer, ate prawn curry, and watched the first leg of the epic Champions’ League double-header between Arsenal and Barcelona. Seldom, I thought, does life deliver days like this.

  The following afternoon, we returned to Pompey on the ferry. Jacques, who would have made a fine Smiley in Tinker Tailor, had given me copies of both scripts and I spent the crossing reading them. The scriptwriter, Bernard Marie, had done a fine job, managing to compress the story while preserving the essence of both the plot and the characters. The contrast with Tiger Aspect’s treatment of the same bit of Pompey turf couldn’t have been starker. Jacques and his team had respect for the material, as well as countless other talents. I was very definitely in good hands.

  DVDs of the finished films arrived in July. By now, Happy Days was edited, typeset, and on the way to the printers. Faraday and Winter had picked their way through twelve books and their adventures were over. Except here they were again, reincarnated in Le Havre for the benefit of a French audience. Geteve had thown a lot of money at the project and it showed.

  The performances were magnificent, especially Jean-Marc and Bruno. They’d built the beginnings of a strange on-screen rapport, something you could almost touch, and a little of this had spilled into Faraday’s relationship with J-J. The technical direction – the lighting, the camera moves, the sudden changes of pace – were hugely effective and the director, Edwin Baily, had used the Havre locations to superb effect. Like Pompey, this was a rough, sharp-elbowed city, making its living from the oil business and the sea. Refinery flares lit night time sequences and elegant French gulls wheeled and swooped in front of Faraday’s binos. The music, too, was superb.

  Jacques’ movies transmitted on 11th and 18th November. The first pulled an audience of 3.76 million. Les Lignes Blanches, the second, did even better with 3.90 million. I couldn’t begin to imagine all those French bums on French sofas but I believed Jacques when he said that he – and France 2 – were delighted. They’d be filming two more books after Christmas. And maybe two more after that. Conrad had been right. A definite game changer.

  There’s a post-script to this story, and I offer it not to make a point but to illustrate what a strange game writing can be. Twelve long years ago, Malcolm Edwards had lured me into crime fiction. It hadn’t been an easy gig, far from it, but the characters had grown with the series and I seemed – in the end – to have offered a snapshot of a certain corner of English society over a single decade. That’s what people were telling me more and more through their e-mails; that’s what had attracted the UK reviewers; and that’s what had taken Faraday and “Winkler” across the Channel. Not massive helpings of violence. Not car chases and anal rape. But the minor key, caught, manupulated, turned to good fictional account, and then put on the page.

  After the transmission success of the French films, I sent an e-mail to Orion suggesting that we might be looking at a tasty story. BBC4 was currently building decent audiences with foreign crime, especially the first series of the Danish production, The Killing. So how come it took the French to pluck a UK series out of Pompey, reframe it in Le Havre, and score nearly four million viewers?

  I never got a reply from Orion but early the following year, in the wake of the hardback publication of Happy Days, I had a meet with Brian Oliver. Brian used to be Sports Editor of the Sunday Observer. He’s a big fan of crime fiction, including the Faraday series, and yonks back he and Ed Vulliamy had found space in the Observer to explore the various linkages between my books and the Pompey that turned up twice a month on the terraces at Fratton Park. Now, nine years later, he’d been checking something on my website and come across the news from France. Great story. Might I be up for an interview?

  I was. We met at the coffee shop above the Pompey Waterstones after a hugely successful signing for Happy Days. I told Brian about our French adventures and what a fine job they’d done. I’d managed to rustle up a DVD of one of the films with English sub-titles. He watched it that night, over a bottle of red, and agreed it was bloody good.

  Four days later, this appeared. It occupied the whole of page seven in the Observer’s main section and – as you might imagine – did me no end of good. The real kicker, though, lay in the first of the readers’ comments at the end. All us scribes need a reality check from time to time. And this was to be mine.

  Pompey meets Le Havre in French TV crime hit

  British writer Graham Hurley’s detective duo are proving popular across the Channel

  By Brian Oliver

  Filming for Two Cops Down at the Docks, which is set in the port city of Le Havre.

  Graham Hurley has sold more than half a million books and been translated into nine languages. Last Wednesday he was in a bookshop in Portsmouth, where his most popular series is set, signing copies of his 12th and final novel featuring Detective Inspector Joe Faraday and Paul Winter, a fellow detective who becomes increasingly disenchanted with police work and eventually goes over to the other side.

  On the same day 100 miles away, a crew of 60 were filming the third of four 90-minute TV adapt
ations of the Faraday-Winter books. The first two drew impressive audiences of just under four million, the next two will be finished by spring for broadcast at the end of the year and a deal has been signed for numbers five and six.

  The rights have already brought Hurley a five-figure sum and “been a game-changer for me”, he said. The cameras were not rolling in Pompey, though. The series is being filmed across the Channel in Le Havre – in French, for French TV. “Le Pompey de Graham Hurley transposé au Havre,” as Le Parisien says.

  BBC4 and Sky have been widely praised for showing crime dramas from Sweden, Denmark, France and Italy, and have been rewarded with impressive viewing figures. Now Hurley is redressing the balance and exporting his stories. The French have “pinched” one of Britain‘s popular fictional detectives and turned him into a capitain.

  For years, the former documentary-maker tried to persuade British companies to film Faraday. His work has been praised by the Financial Times and the Guardian, and there has been interest, “but it takes years”. As for the French, within two months of contacting Hurley they had signed a contract, found a TV station, chosen actors, appointed a scriptwriter and started filming. “I went over with my wife,” said Hurley. “It was great to see the traffic stopping in Le Havre for the filming of one of my books.”

  Why opt for Faraday and Winter in a country that takes crime fiction more seriously, and where there are so many writers to choose from? “They told me the books had significant social content and were politically committed,” said Hurley, who is fluent in French and regularly speaks at crime-fiction festivals in France.

  Faraday would fit well into one of the gloomy Scandinavian books that are so popular here. He is summed up by Winter in one of the later novels as “dogged by a reputation as a weirdo loner with a passion for birdwatching and a deaf-and-dumb son”. He lost his wife to cancer, is a deep thinker – especially when out looking for a pectoral sandpiper or a black-tailed godwit – badly dressed, anti-consumerist and becomes convinced that, for all the police efforts, society is falling apart and “anarchy rules”. “Family breakdown, substance abuse, domestic violence, crap education – there’s plenty of all of that in Pompey,” said Hurley. “The community is in a state of near collapse. The police are always there to see it first.”

  Social workers and young offenders feature prominently in the series and Hurley pays great attention to police procedure – especially the ever-changing guidelines and time-consuming paperwork. It could almost be the detectives themselves complaining through Hurley’s fiction: he has exceptional contacts throughout the Hampshire force.

  Winter is also a widower, but he is different – abrupt, pragmatic, jovial, a Stella drinker to Faraday’s Guinness. The real star of the books is Portsmouth, where Hurley lived for nearly 30 years before a recent move to Devon, the setting for a new series on which he is working.

  “Without Pompey, the books would never have been written,” he said. The series is set in the 00s and there are constant references to the social problems of Britain‘s most populated city, and its “rough, gruff, wry humour”. Portsmouth football club features prominently, and many of the villains are former hooligans. As Dickens’s birthplace, the city was a focus for the bicentenary celebrations last week – but outsiders have not always warmed to it. General James Wolfe wrote in 1758: “The necessity of living in the midst of the diabolical citizens of Portsmouth is a real and unavoidable calamity. It is a doubt to me if there is such another collection of demons upon the whole earth.” The city’s official motto is “Heaven’s light our guide”. The unofficial one, said Hurley, is “If in doubt, have a fight”. He is, he said, “not the most popular man in the tourist office”.

  How does this work in France? There is no translation for “mush” (a Pompey term of affection), “scrote” (the opposite) or “scummer” (anyone from Southampton). Can the city be exported? “I was intrigued by the move to Le Havre,” said Hurley. “But they have done a good job. What holds true for Portsmouth also holds true for Le Havre. There are similarities: neither city is fashionable, they are both at the end of the railway line, relatively uncursed by money. Sharp-elbowed places, robust.” Could you move other English detectives – Morse to Rouen, say, or Rebus to Marseille? “Rebus, maybe yes. But I’m not sure about Morse. You can’t get away from those dreaming spires.”

  Jacques Salles, the French director of the Faraday episodes,, titled Two Cops Down at the Docks, said: “When I read Graham Hurley’s books I immediately thought of Le Havre. A huge port, the same kind of atmosphere – same causes, same effects.” Salles made an adaptation of a Val McDermid book for French TV two years ago, in two 90-minute episodes. He is excited about doing more of Hurley’s work, and said that the TV audience for the first two was “a tremendous success” because they were up against a hugely popular show on France1. The French treat crime writers, Hurley among them, with great respect and have dozens of literary festivals for policiers. “Being from Pompey, at first I thought they were taking the piss,” said Hurley. “The festivals have been a very civilised and civilising experience. I remember a coach load of people from Nantes coming to a festival in a remote town in Brittany, the European capital of pig breeding, and they’d know more about my characters than I did. The housewives love Faraday: they all want to mother him.”

  Attending the festivals helped popularise the books – and now, with the TV series, sales in France have risen. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the French TV episodes appeared on BBC4 with subtitles. “Oh yes, that would be good,” said Hurley. “I’d laugh – in French.” Would the people of Portsmouth laugh with him? Maybe not, because Le Havre has a dark secret they will not like – it is twinned with Southampton.

   Gladiatrix

  12 February 2012 10:39AM

  I am sorry but I have never heard of Graham Hurley and don’t remember ever seeing his books on sale in any bookshop here.

  Malcolm Edwards, yonks ago, made a bid to put me and a Pompey-based series up there with crime fiction’s biggest hitters. For whatever reason, in the crudest of commercial terms, it never happened. In my darker moments, which are mercifully few, I wonder whether I’d have been better advised to have gone for something racier, splashier, simpler, more violent, more visceral, more in tune with the ever louder thump-thump of the culture. But then I think of Faraday, the kind of man he was, and I know at once that books like that were never going to be a serious option. You are what you are. You see the world the way you see it. You write the way you write. And everything else, in Winter’s phrase, either sorts itself out or falls flat on its arse. End of.

  *****