“…just as a paroxysm of nausea swept over him,” I finished, looking up from my exercise book. My schoolmates looked bored, and somebody flicked a chewed-over paper ball at me. Paroxysm. Not a word you hear used much in everyday language, but I’d read it somewhere and decided to shoehorn it that week’s chapter. My English teacher was thrilled though. Every Saturday I was persuaded to stand in front of my class and read the latest instalment of a serial adventure I was writing. One month it was Doctor Who, another it was my version of a James Bond yarn. No sex, just gadgets. Not that I needed any persuading. I loved storytelling. Being an only child, a lot of my time was spent drawing comics and poring over books while my idea of heaven was taking the bus to the local library and just trailing my hand along the shelves.

Eight years later. By now I am living in a squalid basement flat as a student, and submitting work to what were then known as little magazines, which published fiction by starting out writers. By this time I had left my chaste James Bond behind and was splicing together pornography to create surrealistic short stories – basically I was ripping off William S Burroughs (Pretentious? moi?) – but I truly believed that I was doing was very avant garde. My stuff was published alongside that of another writer who was starting out, Will Self. Of course Mr Self has gone on to a fabulous career as a novelist, comedy show panellist and TV celebrity.

By now, having worked among other things as a hospital porter, warehouseman and dishwasher, it dawned on me that if I liked writing so much I might as well get paid for it. So I enrolled at journalism school. It will give you some idea of how puffed up I was with my own pretentiousness that during my first role-playing exercise on interviewing technique, my teacher and I sat in awkward silence until he gently pointed out that I was meant to be interviewing him, not the other way round.

I got a shock on coming out of journalism school to find there were no jobs. My low point came during a job interview for editorial assistant on Dogs Today magazine. “How do you feel about judging doggy dieting competitions?” the editor asked. “Love ‘em,” I said, nodding as enthusiastically as a dashboard toy. I still didn’t get the job.

I did end up getting a position on a local newspaper, just like generations of hacks before me, and then graduated to working on a trade magazine. For years I had been obsessed with the movies. At the time the British film industry was healthy enough to support two competing trade magazines. The one I got a job on would now be known as “the challenger brand” and these were happy-go-lucky days travelling round the world covering film festivals and markets. Asked what attracted him to the movie business, one producer told me, “I wanted the circus life” and that pretty much summed up my attitude too. We saw ourselves as pirates, even if at times our newsroom did have all the morale of a Klingon warship. I remember once sitting in a Moscow hotel room banging out copy watching the snow fall outside my window and practically hugging myself with happineess because I knew I was exactly where I should be.

Methuen published my first book The Producers: Money, Movies and Who Really Calls the Shots, which argued that if some film directors could be auteurs the same could be said of movie producers too. (Pretentious? Moi?) Bloomsbury published its follow-up, Hollywood and the Mob, a history of how the Mafia has corrupted Hollywood, three years later. The Mail on Sunday made that one its Book of the Week, while it was Critic’s Choice in the Daily Mail.

However discovering how Mafia dons cozied up to Hollywood was nowhere near as dangerous as tangling with the subject of my next book: Vanessa Redgrave. Having written what I felt was a warm and accurate family portrait of the Redgrave acting dynasty, I found myself in a claustrophobic and expensive legal correspondence with dear Vanessa. The Redgraves blocked publication of the book I had spent four years working on. And booksellers behaved like the housekeeper in Tom and Jerry whenever she sees a mouse. Although in the end Vanessa called off her attack dog libel lawyers – “Quite a victory for free speech,” my lawyer observed — it made me vow never to write another biography unless the subject was dead and I had the family’s cooperation.

Next I decided to write a thriller.

I wanted my debut Slow Bleed to be a woman-in-jeopardy story, and the idea came to me of a female surgeon whose five-year-old son disappears inside the vast hospital she works in. Who has taken him? Why do they want Matthew? Slow Bleed pays homage to the kick-ass action movies I have enjoyed so much, and also the mystery thriller in which you have to solve the mystery of somebody’s disappearance such as The Lady Vanishes.

Finding a home for Slow Bleed though proved tricky. We are in an age where publishers are making increasingly large bets on a decreasing number of titles. Agents and publishers want to push all the chips onto this season’s must-read, whether it’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl or, this year, I Am Pilgrim. Slow Bleed came out exclusively on Kindle in March, and ironically the reviews have been better than some Big Name Authors.

Attending a recent crime writing convention though made me realise that there is a huge difference between the self-published minnows such as myself and the machines behind these top-flight writers, who arrive with an entourage of an agent, editor and publicists (note the plural).

Of course, I realise there were flaws in my first book Slow Bleed, which I have hoped to correct in its follow-up, Surrogate. The artist — or should I say craftsman — asks and answers thousands of questions about his or her work before anybody else even sees it. Which is why a dismissive review on Amazon – “Too long” – can be so hurtful … I mean, considering the hundreds of hours which go into writing a book, the financial rewards are risible.

So why do it?

The real reason why I write is to create something that’s as beautifully hand-crafted as I can make it, the way a cabinet maker takes pride in his handiwork.

We talk about “self-publishing” when really we should be calling it “artisan publishing” in much the same way as a perfumer makes a few bottles of a sublime scent rather than hundreds of gallons of synthetic perfume in vats. As one crime blogger said to me, self-publishing frees an author’s individual voice to emerge rather than being kneaded by the corporate machine.

What the Big Five do offer though is visibility, and without those posters on the Tube your self-published title, no matter how good, is just another e-book drowning in the Sea of Kindle.

First published on rachelabbottwriter.com on July 16 2014

Main photo © Wendell (CC BY-ND 2.0)

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To my mind, the apogee of art is where fiction and non-fiction meet, twisted around each other like a strand of DNA. Look at how a TV show like The Affair uses a hand-held camera to give it a more fly-on-the-wall approach. Or a gripping cop show like the BBC’s The Line of Duty has a documentary feel.

Authors such as Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald were really writing autobiography, whether it was Hemingway’s First World War experience in A Farewell to Arms or Fitzgerald coldly noting down what his wife Zelda said woozy with anaesthetic after the birth of their daughter Scottie for The Great Gatsby (“I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool…”)

What is now called narrative non-fiction or “new journalism” took off in the Sixties, and we have become so used to it in magazines and feature articles, we don’t notice it anymore. It is important to remember that even in the early Sixties feature pages as we know them didn’t exist — in Britain newspapers such as the one I work for, The Daily Telegraph, baldly stated the news which consisted of eight flimsy (rationed) pages. It was down to magazine writers like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese in New York to invent the form.

Today, in a magazine world where PRs get to approve copy in exchange for access to Hollywood stars, it is hard to imagine a journo like Talese being given unfettered roaming rights to a star like Sinatra and being allowed to write whatever he wants. Today’s “in-depth” magazine profiles often consist of a trawl through the cuttings and 20 minutes with a star in a junket hotel bedroom, watched over by a disapproving PR. And I am as guilty as the rest of them.

Here are five pieces of narrative non-fiction that you must read:*

Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream, Joan Didion

Didion, one of those writers with what Graham Greene called “a chip of ice in the heart”, recounts a true-life case in Sixties California as if it was a James M Cain murder novel with the hot and dusty Santa Ana winds driving a wife to murder. “It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread wherever the winds blow,” she writes. Didion is especially brilliant at metaphor, and has a killer final image — as the adulterous wife’s lover goes up the aisle for a second time, Didion details her wedding dress, ending with the words, “a coronet of seed pearls held her illusion veil.” (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Zola Books, 2015)

The Muses Are Heard, Truman Capote

Capote was one of the first American writers to introduce fiction techniques into journalism. This 1956 piece for The New Yorker recounts a visit to Moscow by the Broadway cast of Porgy and Bess. Capote dizzyingly described himself as “a Semantic Paganini” and it is hard to argue against his almost perfect ear. The author went on to write the classic non-fiction novel In Cold Blood. (A Capote Reader, Penguin Classics, 2002)

Ten Thousand Words a Minute, Norman Mailer

After pooh-poohing what Truman Capote had done in In Cold Blood, Mailer embraced the concept wholeheartedly writing a string of brilliant non-fiction books including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Executioner’s Song. Poet Robert Lowell called him the greatest journalist in America (“I thought I was the greatest novelist in America,” the pugnacious Mailer replied). This 1962 magazine piece for Esquire has some of the best prose I have ever read, as Mailer describes the moment when boxer Emile Griffith kills his opponent in the ring: “Some part of his death reached out to us. One felt it hover in the air. He was still standing in the ropes, trapped as he had been before, he gave some little half-smile of regret, as if he was saying, ‘I didn’t know I was going to die just yet,’ and then, his head, leaning back but still erect, his death came to breathe about him, and he sank slowly to the floor. He went down more slowly than any fighter had ever gone down, he went down like a large ship that turns on end and slides second by second into its grave. As he went down, the sound of Griffith’s punches echoed in the mind like a heavy ax in the distance chopping into a wet log.” If that isn’t exciting writing, I don’t know what is. (The Time of Our Time, Abacus 1999)

War, Sebastian Junger

If you want to know what it’s like to be in the stinking furnace of Afghanistan with white-hot tracer bullets zipping past you, read this book. Junger spent a year living with a forward platoon of American soldiers in the Korengal Valley, reputed to be the deadliest valley in Afghanistan. It gets you inside the mind of a US Marine, the ghostly exhaustion of a tour of duty and how the entire US Army acts as support for this tip of the spear. This book was pulled together from Vanity Fair articles — one of the last places which still does this long-form journalism — and also provided the basis for the Academy Award-nominated documentary Restrepo. (War, Fourth Estate 2010)

 A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace

Funny is money, as the show business saying goes, and David Foster Wallace’s account of a holiday cruise in the Caribbean had me shaking with laughter when I first read it. Being funny is difficult in print. It usually involves using exclamation marks! which, to my mind, are like somebody putting on a red nose and doing jazz hands. Foster Wallace is hilarious throughout this account of a ghastly trip on one of those mid-level, all-inclusive cruises. Another of Foster Wallace’s pieces of reportage for Harper’s, A Visit to the Fair, made me laugh so much I thought I was going to be sick.  (A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Abacus 2012)

*As the form originated in the States, I have restricted my selection to American writers — I would be grateful for any recommendations from France, Germany, Japan, etc.

Reporter’s Desk, November 1963 Photograph: © Brian Watkins all rights reserved

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As a teenager, Tim Adler associated Pink Floyd with the worst of Prog Rock. Thirty years on, will a new concert movie of Roger Waters performing The Wall change his mind?

Celebrities often get stuck at the emotional age they first became famous. So Michael Jackson was forever a child, while Miley Cyrus with her middle finger raised is a petulant teenager. Roger Waters first found fame in Pink Floyd aged 22, and watching Roger Waters The Wall, his new concert movie, you get the sense that at the age of 73 he is still a disaffected polytechnic student.

Roger Waters The Wall documents the biggest tour by any solo artist in history, staged around the world between 2010 and 2013.

Waters seems to hate everything: WAR = BAD, EDUCATION = BAD, COMMUNISM = BAD, FASCISM = BAD, MOTHER = BAD, EX-WIFE = BAD … especially CONSUMERISM = BAD (although presumably that doesn’t extend to the audience wearing Pink Floyd tee-shirts and other tour merch). The only thing that Waters doesn’t seem to find bad are FEELINGS, and the two-hour concert movie was like struggling out of the weed-stinking embrace of an avuncular old hippie.

When I was a teenager, there was a huge difference in musical taste between years. The study of one boarding schoolmate, a couple of years older, was swathed in a Moroccan tent of crushed velvet with gatefold album covers of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Yes thumbtacked to the walls. “Once you get into this, you’ll never get out of it,” he assured me. “Really,” I murmured, turning the pages of that week’s NME. Compared to Echo and the Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes and Talking Heads, Pink Floyd just seemed so, well, old fashioned.

Look, when it comes to Pink Floyd, I’ve really tried … I love the naive English psychedelia of the early Syd Barrett era, but as they went on, the more pompous the sound became. Nevertheless I thought I would give Roger Waters The Wall another go, taking along my 18-year-old son as a litmus test. In this digital jukebox era of Spotify, he wouldn’t have all my emotional baggage of the Floyd when it comes to the actual music.

There is no denying the brilliance of the concert staging: mind-bending animations of bricks reassembling are combined with the genius of original Gerald Scarfe movie animation. I suppose my problem is Waters himself, who, hunched over his guitar, has an unfortunate tendency to look like your grandfather masturbating at the point of ejaculation — there’s lots of grimacing as we launch into another extended solo. And the audience — mainly French teenagers trying out those irritating adolescent wispy moustaches — seemed to love it. Some of them were even in tears when Waters, in a moment of pure Marcel Marceau camp, finally “breaks through” the wall. Clearly the problem was me.

“So, what did you think?” I asked hopefully as we came out of the screening. “I just kept wanting it to end,” my son replied.

Roger Waters The Wall will be released simultaneously in cinemas at 8pm local time on Tuesday, September 29. Tickets are available at www.rogerwatersthewall.com

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British gangsters Ronnie and Reggie Kray are back in the limelight, thanks to a new movie Legend about their rise to power. Local resident Tim Adler still feels wisps of their influence in the East End

Ronnie Kray was very small.

His dinner suit (rather vulgar with a braid collar) is the key exhibit in an exhibition about the infamous Kray brothers and the old East End to coincide with the release of Legend, the new Tom Hardy biopic of Ronnie and Reggie. Gazing down at Ronnie’s dinner jacket presented like a holy relic in a Perspex sarcophagus, I am unsure whether to drop down on one knee and cross myself. My wife, who has lived in the East End of London since the early Eighties, says that Ronnie Kray’s funeral in 1995 felt like a state occasion; even today, the Kray brothers are thought of locally with some affection — the streets round Bethnal Green were safe and the elderly looked after. Compared to today when you see stone-eyed toughs openly selling drugs in the street.

Legend of the East End is an exhibition of photographs by Don McCullin, Brian Duffy, Steven Berkoff and Jocelyn Bain Hogg showing the Kray brothers in their prime — the matter-of-factness of holding forth over dainty tea cups in shirt sleeves having just been released after 36 hours of questioning over the death of Jack “the Hat” McVitie.

This confluence of gangsterism, celebrity and politics came together in the early Sixties: in America, Frank Sinatra was close to Jack Kennedy and both men owed their careers partly to the Mafia. Gangster Willie Moretti shoved a gun down the throat of bandleader Tommy Dorsey to get Sinatra released from his contract, while Sinatra ferried cash to Meyer Lansky in Havana as tribute. Sam Giancana helped make sure Kennedy won the 1960 US election by swinging the key state of Illinois. Meanwhile in sleepy England, the Krays were rubbing shoulders with Lord Boothby and film stars such as Diana Dors and Barbara Windsor.

Ronnie and Reggie loved celebrity and would have probably gone to the premiere of Legend themselves. Back in 1963 they appear in cameos at the end of Sparrows Can’t Sing, Barbara Windsor’s first film. So convinced were they that royalty was going to attend the premiere near their nightclub in Mile End that they strung a banner across the old ABC cinema, “The Kentucky Club welcomes Princess Margaret to the East End.”

The exhibition shows an East End that has nearly vanished — you still get a slight shiver walking past 178 Vallance Road — known as “Fort Vallance” — where the homicidal psychopaths planned their operations.

I only moved to the East End a couple of years ago, and Mrs Adler jokes that I still have to go up before the immigration committee. One of my first invitations was to a friend’s birthday party, where a few old girls who had lived under the reign of the Kray brothers had also been invited. One of them stood up to sing in true East End fashion. Listening to her faint, high-pitched sentimental song was profoundly moving — a glimpse of an East End which has all but disappeared. I felt privileged to be a witness.

Legend of the East End runs until September 11 at 135 Bethnal Green Road, E2 7DG. Admission is free.

*Full disclosure: as a Daily Telegraph journalist, I have worked on the advertising campaign for Legend

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Productivity hacks have become the in thing in self-publishing, with gurus offering to boost your daily word count, says Tim Adler

Over the past few weeks, I have been listening to a lot of self-publishing podcasts from Joanna Penn’s The Creative Penn to Rocking Self Publishing. All of them are “super helpful” as Penn herself would put it and it is clear to me that with all the talk of auto-responders, price per target lead acquisition and the sales funnel, self-pubbed authors such as Mark Dawson are light years ahead of traditional publishers.

Each week many of these shows have on some American self-help author — let’s call him Wade J Horsenfeffer — all of them trying to seel their own particular brand of snake oil, often tied to a book they are trying to sell. In one hilarious podcast, one self-help guru inadvertantly revealed he was only inspired to create his latest batch of snake oil after his previous self-help business crashed and burned.* This idea of being able to change yourself, of continual improvement is very American somehow.

One trend is for these self-help gurus offering to make you more productiive. For authors this means cranking more words out. And so, there are books which promise to boost your output to 5,000 words an hour, 20,000 words a day or write a screenplay in 21 days. No doubt having plenty of product on the shelves is one way to be successful as a self-publisher– one wrote six novels in a single year.

Then there is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) where thousands of self-pubbers crank out 50,000-word novellas in the space of a month. Agents and publishers must dread December when this flood of manuscripts pours in.

All this talk of productivity hacks makes me thing that self-pubbers are the pulp hacks of today, men such as Lester Dent, who wrote Doc Savage (over 150 novels) and Edgar Wallace, the now-forgotten Twenties author who cranked out 170 thrillers and marketed a “plot wheel” to help inspire fellow authors if they got stuck for a plot. According to Stephen King, “these gadgets sold like hotcakes.” Some things never change).

Yet at no point does anybody ask, yes, but is any of it any good?

Nobody expects a TV dinner pinged in the microwave to taste as succulent as a slow-cooked boeuf bourgignon. Good writing and plot development needs time to steep itself in its own juices. Donna Tartt spent a decade writing The Goldfinch, while Truman Capote spent six years on In Cold Blood and Thomas Harris left a 10 year gap between The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. It seems to me that many self pubbers risk devaluing themselves by offering thsee quick sugar rush pop tarts.

Or, as the Beastie Boys used to sing, “Slow and low, that is the tempo.”

*Which is why the conceit of having a self-help guru who has been an utter failure was such a brilliant premise for the comedy Little Miss Sunshine.

Main photo © Nell Moralee (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

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I hesitate to review these books. Who wants a magician to give away the secret of how he does it? Keeping a secret from the audience is after all a perfectly valid position. Both these books set out to explain how stories work, and, in the case of John Yorke’s why we need to tell them.

Over the years I have devoured nearly every important screenwriting book after being handed a copy of Syd Field’s seminal Screenwriting — from Robert McKeee’s Story to Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! McKee’s book in particular left me feeling like a fairly lumpy dancer with two left feet being told he needed to understand how DNA works before attempting a soft shoe shuffle.

Sean Coyne, who happens to be McKee’s literary agent, has basically boiled down McKee’s sometimes incomprehensible tome into an easier to understand step-by-step guide to building a novel. Elsewhere what Coyne talks about has been referred to as “the Snowflake structure” — endlessly replicating the same pattern of “inciting incident, complication, crisis, climax, resolution” from an atomic level of a chapter up to three acts and then finally the overarching book – like a motif being endlessly repeated in a Persian carpet. The Story Grid makes the argument extremely well. I would love to have Coyne on my side as an agent.

Yorke’s Into the Woods brings together all the different systems into one whole explaining their similarities. He takes a more intellectual approach than Coyne’s, but is probably, in the hackneyed phrase, “the last book on screenwriting you’ll ever need.” He is very good at debunking the claims of some screenwriting gurus, all of whom are busy trying to sell you their own particular brand of snake oil. It’s truly excellent.

Back in the day, screenwriter Dan O’Bannon (Alien, Total Recall) grumbled about Syd Field giving away trade secrets in his rudimentary book Screenplay. O’Bannon would have been deeply unhappy about what is revealed in both The Story Grid and Into the Woods. However I take comfort in that few people will actually sit down and put the work in. Reading the crime fiction and self-publishing blogs, you read all the time about American lady novelists shrieking, “I’m a pantster, not a plotter” — i.e. they would rather sit down and bash stuff out by the seat of their large crimplene pants than take the time to plot something carefully. This strikes me as ridiculous. “That’s not writing, that’s typing,” said Truman Capote when he heard about Jack Kerouac bashing out On the Road on a single roll of paper. As a crime writer or thriller author, what you are selling is a plot as intricately worked out as the innards of a Swiss watch. It has nothing to do with real crime. So I take comfort in the fact that few people will actually listen to what Coyne is saying and take the time to develop a plot that ticks like a Rolex. It’s hard work thinking.

The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know by Sean Coyne is available to buy on Amazon UK, priced £4.73 here. Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them by John Yorke is available to buy on Amazon UK here.

Main photo © JE Therlot (CC BY 2.0)

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This week I signed a paperback publishing deal with Urbane Publications, an independent publisher which launched in February 2014. For me, Urbane represents the future of publishing in that both author and publisher have some skin in the game. It’s a joint venture. Decisions are made together as is which areas of marketing to spend money on. Just as the internet has flattened every other business structure, so it has leveled the old top-down pyramid of publishing.

So far, I have had three nonfiction books published and no publisher has ever asked my opinion on, say, the marketing strategy or paperback cover design (indeed, I only became aware of one book going into paperback after the publisher sent me complimentary copies along with a press release riddled with typos. You can imagine my horror when I opened the cardboard box to lift my presentation copies out only to find I didn’t even recognised one of the people photographed on the cover).

So, why did I decide to go with Urbane when I could have happily carried on self-publishing on Amazon Kindle?

As the American artist Jeff Koons remarked to my painter friend Maynard Monrow: “You’ve got to take it up to the next level.” The fact is that most people still only read paper books bought in bookshops, and Urbane will get me into those stores. Plus there’s still a moue of disappointment when people ask, “So, who’s your publisher?” and I reply, “Well, actually I’m self-published.” (Tom Williams of The Williams Agency represents my e-books, which we will continue to put out exclusively through Amazon, while Laura Morris represents me for nonfiction.)

The enthusiasm of Urbane’s director Matthew Smith was so refreshing compared to the silence of most people in the industry. “Here,” I thought, “is a man I can do business with” — as Mrs Thatcher said after meeting President Gorbachev for the first time.

And how about this for an interesting twist?

When I told Laura about my decision to go with Urbane for my new book Hold Still, she told me that she had just sold a book to Urbane Publications as well. The Huntingfield Paintress by Pamela Holmes will come out in May 2016. So, if an agent as respected as Laura — who usually deals with the Bloomsburys and Harper Collinses of this world — buys into Urbane and its business model, it shows how the publishing world is changing. Fast.

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*contains spoilers*

The moment in The Truman Show when Jim Carrey’s boat bumps up against a soundstage and he realises that he’s in a TV set. When Michael Douglas touches a price tag hanging from a lampshade in his girlfriend’s apartment in The Game and realises everything is fake. Arnold Schwarzenegger noticing a drop of sweat on the forehead of one of the baddies in Total Recall and realising this is not a dream…

Every film fan has his own favourite genre — obviously mine is the thriller — and a subset of which could be the chase thriller (North By Northwest, The Fugitive), the conspiracy thriller (Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View) or the heist thriller (The Killing, Ocean’s 11). There’s something in each subgenre that speaks powerfully to each person on an individual basis.

My personal favourite is what I call the “discombobulation” story — i.e. what on earth is going on? — or less politely, the mind**** movie. Films that mess with your head. Great examples include the Spanish film Open Your Eyes (later remade as Vanilla Sky); Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, based on the Dennis Lehane novel; and the original Total Recall, where an average Joe construction worker is told that in reality he is a James Bond character who lives on Mars (Richard Dreyfuss and William Hurt were among the original choices for the role, not Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose cartoonish-ness makes you think he could be capable of anything anyway).

Often the reveal of these films — and here I am going to put my Madame Pretentious turban on — are a metaphor for the nature of reality. And what is reality keeps changing. So, in The Matrix the reveal is that we are all trapped in a computer simulation, while The Truman Show has the metaphor as being reality television (seems dated already, right). Drugs were the reality in the Sixties, which is why psychedelics are the reveal in Jacob’s Ladder.

This kind of story seems less common in literature, although The Magus by John Fowles is one good example. The reveal there is an unhappy mix of existential roleplay and Classical Greek mythology. Total Recall (great title) was based on Philip K Dick’s awkwardly-named Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

However my personal favourite has to be David Fincher’s The Game because game-playing is such a timeless metaphor: Michael Douglas finds himself trapped in a self-help cult that turns into a murderous game.

So, what is a good metaphor for reality today? Big data harvesting everything it can about you or the American intelligence agencies hoovering up metadata about every website you visit is the metaphor of the moment. However, as a thriller writer, I am scratching my head trying to think of exciting scenes involving Excel spreadsheets and data-mining. Any of you think of something better?

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Driving upwards through the Gorges du Verdon – the French equivalent of the Grand Canyon – the sinuous echo-ey blues of Led Zeppelin on the car stereo seemed the perfect accompaniment. The Gorges du Verdon is a couple of hours north and a world away from the trashy glitz of St Tropez. This mountain area is for hikers, kayakers and extreme sports enthusiasts. This is the real France, nothing to do with vulgar yachts and Beyoncé/Jay-Z/Kanye Riviera bling.

Canyoning is a mixture of rock jumping, abseiling and swimming – well, to be honest, more like doggy paddling on my part. It apparently traces its origins back to Native American Indians, who would descend from the scorpion-hot plains in summer to camp at the bottom of cool canyons.

The adventure starts easily enough scrambling over rocks as you work your way down the canyon. All you can hear is the roar of water. Soon, I was pushing myself along improvised rope zip wires and jumping 20 feet off cascading waterfalls into dark rock pools, where the shock of the cold water makes you gasp. And this is in high summer.

Our guide was ever-so-slightly ridiculously too cool for school, wearing a khaki kepi beneath his rock climbing helmet. You felt that he and his colleagues were the sinewy mountain men who would have led the Resistance in the war.

The highpoint for me was a potholing moment when our guide pushed me down a hole you would have to be a fairly supple rat to squeeze through, and I found myself traversing a rock face on my back before plunging into icy water.

After a couple of hours of the daredevilry getting riskier and vertical drops getting steeper, I did start to wonder why I was going this. Compared to my teenage companions, I felt like an old horsehair sofa lumbering down the valley – next morning a couple of springs had definitely gone. The anaesthetic bliss of a large gin and tonic or wolfing down an entire packet of chocolate biscuits was the only thing that kept me going, as our guide would grin, “Ca va?” before another death-defying leap. And that’s the thing. Once you start, you cannot turn back. Hanging there in pitch dark, with freezing water pounding my head, the moment before being dropped into an even colder pool, I did wonder, “Wait, and I’m paying for this?”

Having finally staggered back to my hire car weighed down with crash helmet, safety harness and claustrophobic wetsuit, I did feel a sense of achievement though. Not for me the listless selfishness of staring into a holiday villa swimming pool – I had achieved something with my afternoon.

You can go canyoning with Aboard Rafting, Castellane (8, place de l’eglise 04120 Castellane). Tel +33 4 92 83 76 11 or email info@aboard-rafting.com

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