He resigned from the library on the strength of his first writing contract. 'For many years I failed to get to grips with the fact that in order to be a writer you actually have to write. I finally started my first novel, Caroline Minuscule, in a spirit of sheer panic, feeling it was now or never. I resigned from my sensible job and became a full-time writer.' It was a decision that initially made his stomach lurch. 'But the great thing that made the lurch worthwhile was the sense that I was doing what I should be doing. A square peg had found a square hole.' He's been writing ever since, but due to severe RSI (repetitive strain injury) he rarely puts pen to paper or fingertip to keyboard. 'I dictate the story into a tape recorder. You have to keep going in a very linear way. If I'm lucky and it's going well I feel like I'm roaring along on the crest of a wave.' He adds: 'If I'm not lucky, it's like falling into the trough between the waves.' It is a brilliant way to create dialogue. 'I read it out in a very actorly, melodramatic way. I think if you write fiction you need a protean ability to slide into characters that you don't necessarily want to be. You just pretend for a moment to be a maidservant… or a murderer.'
The American Boy saw Andrew 'immersing' himself in the literature of the nineteenth century: he read memoirs, diaries, letters and novels to recreate how people spoke and thought and acted in late- Regency England. But for his next book Andrew is leaving behind all that 'utterly absorbing' Regency research for the delights of the twenty-first century. 'For the time being, I'm back to the future,' he explains. 'I'm working on something set in the present for the first time in years. Mobile phones and emails will abound.' The new novel is about missing children, 'a deliberately ambiguous phrase', and its narrator is testing the acting and research skills of this most meticulous writer. 'He's an architectural engineer, which is proving quite a challenge. Being a maidservant was much more straightforward.'
THE ONLY THING reviewers of The American Boy could not seem to agree on is whether the novel is a better piece of historically precise fiction or satisfyingly menacing crime writing. Andrew Rosenheim of The Times was impressed by Taylor's ability to balance historical accuracy with superb plotting: 'The 1820s London both of high society and cesspit is vividly portrayed… The attention to period detail is both loving and minute, yet it never overwhelms the story.' Philip Oakes of the Literary Review agreed, noting that the novel had 'a plot stuffed with incident and character, with period details impeccably rendered'.
Critics were also won over by the complexity of Taylor's engagement with his nineteenth-century literary predecessors. 'Taylor has produced a novel that recalls Wilkie Collins, a book that sounds like an original but contains all the candour and purpose of a contemporary thriller,' wrote Will Cohu of the Daily Telegraph, as he praised Taylor's skill at blending the conventions of nineteenth-century fiction with the tropes of modern crime writing. Patricia Craig in the Times Literary Supplement concurred, borrowing Charles Palliser's phrase 'ironic reconstruction' to describe Taylor's work as 'being both an elaboration of the primary genre (in this case, the Charles Dickens/Wilkie Collins school of intrigue) and a commentary on it'.
Many reviewers applauded the novel as a worthy addition to the legacy of Edgar Allan Poe, the American boy of the title. Jane Jakeman of the Independent wrote, 'Taylor's deeply absorbing and beautifully written book is a fitting tribute to the founding father of crime fiction', while Michael Carlson of the Spectator said that 'It is as if Taylor had used the great master of the bizarre as both the starting- and finishing- point, but in between created a period piece with its own unique voice. The result should satisfy those drawn to the fictions of the nineteenth century, or Poe, or indeed to crime writing at its most creative.' In the end, everybody agreed that The American Boy is a most successful and unusual crime novel, a 'hugely entertaining… beguiling mystery' (Observer) that is sure to become a modern classic.
On Writing The American Boy
by Andrew Taylor
'I had recently been re-reading Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination, old favourites.'
'The first thing I discovered was how little we really know about Poe's early life, how many mysteries it contains.'
'Soon I was spending more time in 1819-20 than in 2001-2.'
'Poe haunts the writing of the book, though for much of the time he appears to play a relatively minor role.'
THE AMERICAN BOY was never going to be a novel in a hurry. It sauntered into print by the scenic route. It took two years to write. The gap between the original idea and my starting writing was even longer.
The germ of the book emerged quite suddenly, as these things do, in June 1995. A theatrical producer invited me to lunch and asked me to send him some ideas for plays. In a flurry of creative panic, I sent him half a dozen. None of the plays was written but one of the ideas, Missing Edgar, concerned the childhood of Edgar Allan Poe.
I had recently been re-reading Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination, old favourites. I had been struck again by the European cast of Poe's imagination and by the sense of vulnerability, of wounds that had never quite healed. The margins of his fiction are populated with ghosts.
Afterwards I glanced at the introduction and discovered that Poe had lived in England from 1815 to 1820, while his foster father, John Allan, established a British branch of his American import-export business. One of Poe's short stories, 'William Wilson', is set mainly at an English school. It is known to have many autobiographical references.
William Wilson' is one of Poe's strangest stories. The eponymous narrator is a young man who since his schooldays has been haunted by a double – part doppelganger, part conscience. Poe gave both Wilson and his double his own birthday – 19 January – and something of his own background. Wilson is a rich, spoiled child who slips suddenly into depravity: 'From me, in an instant, all virtue dropped bodily as a mantle…' He plunges into 'years of unspeakable misery and unpardonable crime'. His hated double restrains his worst excesses until at last, in a fit of rage, Wilson murders him – only to discover that, in one sense at least, he has murdered himself.
In my original notes I wrote: 'While keeping within the confines of biographical fact, the play could invent a secret history of Poe's childhood. The story would concentrate on an episode in 1820 – the last year of Poe's stay in England.'
Gregory McDonald, author of the Fletch series, once wrote that authors should try to forget their ideas. If you succeed, the idea isn't worth remembering. If you fail, if the idea simply won't go away, then the only thing to do is to turn the idea into a novel.
That's more or less what happened with the American boy – he wouldn't go away. Five years later, in spring 2000, I bowed to the inevitable and did a little basic research on Edgar Allan Poe. The first thing I discovered was how little we really know about his early life, how many mysteries it contains. I jotted down a few notes on a sheet of A4 and faxed them to my agent to see what she thought about the idea I had failed to forget.
She liked it. She liked it so much that she sent a copy of the fax to my editor. She liked it too, despite (because of?) the fact that it was the shortest outline I'd ever written – indeed, it wasn't even meant to be an outline.
