Peter Lancett

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Stevie is a very tragic character – he has the potential to escape from the estate, but his belief that other people are inherently more powerful than him leads him to yield to temptation. Were you always working towards his downfall?

Stevie is an intelligent product of his council-estate environment, what Americans would call “The Projects”. He’s far from saintly but he knows that there is a way out of that world – he only has to look to his sister, studying law at university in Brighton. Stevie isn’t a tragic, sensitive soul caught up in a brutal world, he’s a part of that world. Holding the gun is seductive though; he realises that he had been living in fear. He realises this because when he has the gun, the sense of fear is removed. He fears no one. And he likes this. And sure, I was always working towards his downfall. There is tragedy here, but it’s avoidable tragedy. The fault is not all Stevie’s. If other authorities had been doing their job – I’m talking mostly about the Police here - Stevie’s tragedy could have been avoided. There are a lot of Stevies out there. I come from a council estate myself, so I do know this.

Stevie strongly relates to movie characters – why did you make this part of his character?

Movie characters are larger than life. Their heroism is compressed into a short story-telling time frame so that they appear stronger, tougher, more relentless than real people are. When we feel, in our everyday lives, that we are powerless, it becomes easy to relate to heroic movie characters, perhaps in the hope that we might become more like them. But with Stevie, it was also just a character quirk. I wanted to make him a big movie fan, and not just a fan of modern blockbusters, but of older classic movies. I have to confess here, a part of me would like to manipulate the reader. I would love to think that perhaps someone would read Gun Dog and then go on to watch some of the older classic movies mentioned in the story and get a taste for them.

Gun Dog is a very dark novel, even for the Cutting Edge series; it has a very pessimistic ending. Whereas many of the other titles have at least a glimmer of hope. Why did you give your novel such a hopeless ending?

The ending is bleak and without hope because, as I have said before, I come from that same environment myself. I know only too well what it’s like on those sink-estates. The idea that society’s laws afford any protection to the decent people left in those seething hell-holes is visibly ridiculous. And only in the pages of The Guardian and other progressive-liberal media outlets (which seems to be most of them) would this view be challenged. But on the whole, Guardian readers and contributors rarely if ever get within a few miles of a sink estate, so what do they know? And the idea that you can just call the Police to come to your aid when faced with threats, violence, relentless vandalism, intimidation – all of which are endemic to these nightmare places – is so ridiculous that I am almost falling off my chair laughing at the very thought. Look, a kid breaks your window, you catch hold of the kid and call the Police, the Police come and arrest YOU. That’s if the kid’s father hasn’t come around to give you a battering in the meantime. Because these people, they just don’t fear the Police. You see this story or stories like it every day in the news. On the roughest council estates, law and order has broken down utterly. The most brutal and the most vicious – they are the ones who set the tone in those neighbourhoods. You challenge them, you get beaten. So you stay quiet. And once the thug families notice you, then your life is hell forever. So tell me, how could there possibly be hope in a story like Gun Dog? For so many people living in these forgotten hells, there is never going to be any hope. I wanted to make that clear with the way this story ends. Thousands of people now living without hope.

The climax of the novel is really horrifying! Why did you choose only to have Mr Rogers maimed? Was there any point when you were writing that Stevie killed him?

I’m not so sure that the climax of the novel is really horrifying. Unless you mean psychologically. For me, the most horrifying aspect of the story is how the decent people are left helpless and at the mercy of the criminal thug families that surround them. And the fact that Stevie ends up taking the law into his own hands, an act that we all know will ruin his life forever, is particularly horrifying to me. As for Mr Rogers only being maimed, there are a couple of reasons why it turned out this way. First of all, I have striven to make this story reflect reality in every way. And the fact is – a fact that few people know or understand – that firing a hand gun in the heat of anger, and at a moving person rather than a static firing range target, chances are that your bullets will just go anywhere. In a gunfight, it’s not the fastest who wins, but the person cold enough to take time, and take aim. You have to have nerves of steel to manage that. Stevie isn’t a gun for hire. He’s just an overwrought kid. He’s lucky – if you think it’s lucky – that he hit Mr Rogers at all. And I didn’t want to fall into the cliché of having the gun turn Stevie from ordinary everyday kid into some kind of slavering vengeful killer. I suppose, referring back to the previous question, that if there is any hope at all, the fact that Stevie didn’t kill Mr Rogers gives us the hope that the system will go lighter on him, and that he will be able to rebuild his life at some point. You know, Stevie does consider killing Mr Rogers. And while he’s waiting in the Police Station earlier in the story, there is a scene of him fantasising doing just that. But it’s just a fantasy. Like I say, Stevie is not a natural born killer in real life.

Part of growing up is coming to understand why bad things happen, which is an issue Gun Dog explores. Do you hope that your writing will encourage young readers to consider the negative aspects of their surroundings and be aware of the way it affects them?

Oh, for sure I hope that readers will consider the negative aspects of their surroundings and the way that it affects them. And more than that, I would hope – however futile this hope may be – that readers will be encouraged to examine their own behaviour towards others, and the way they think about others. Even small things, like screaming obscenities in the street, throwing litter about, spraying graffiti tags. It all adds up to the creation of a miserable environment for everyone who has to suffer living among it. Yes, little things count. I’d love people to see that, to understand that. Perhaps it’s a delusional hope, but it is my hope, nevertheless.

Stevie uses animal imagery to describe himself and other characters, which dehumanises them. Do you think dehumanisation is a main cause of aggression in estates?

The short answer to this question is yes. I am convinced that there are a lot of people now who are not even aware of their own humanity, and because of that cannot ever be sensitive to the humanity of others. In many ways, life on the forgotten sink estates resembles the conditions that the boys in Lord of the Flies – a novel immeasurably better than Gun Dog – quickly revert to when left to their own devices. However, I see Lord of the Flies as a cryptic metaphor. Gun Dog spells it out in simple language and with situations that everyone reading it can relate to.

Do you find it difficult killing off ‘good’ characters, or making them suffer for the sake of the plot?

For me plot is everything. Story is everything. The characters only exist to help tell the story. Killing off characters or making them suffer for the sake of progressing the ideas inherent in the story is the reason why the characters exist. There have been some characters I have become emotionally attached to in the past, but when they have had to die horribly, I have not hesitated!

You have written a variety of different books including the Dark Man series. Is there a particular style/genre which you feel more comfortable writing?

I began writing horror stories. And I have always had an interest in horror literature and movies. But I don’t write that anymore. Actually, what I really enjoy about writing now is exploring aspects of the human condition. I particularly like to look at the darker side of human nature. I suppose that crime in the style of Film Noir is an area that I am very comfortable with. Having said that, I am currently writing a movie script, and this one is a very light, very girlie romantic comedy, and I am enjoying every moment of the process. This is a funny, uplifting story about a California girl, and I am finding the sunshine and the laughter in this story an absolute joy. It’s a total departure for me, and when I am writing, it’s putting me in a place that I am very comfortable with. Perhaps I’ll end up writing a chick-lit novel along the lines of Sophie Kinsella’s “Shopaholic” series next. Who knows?

You have written for Cutting Edge before – Seeing Red is a very different novel from Gun Dog; it is not nearly as dark. What did you learn from your first Cutting Edge experience? How did it influence the way you wrote Gun Dog?

Yeah, my first Cutting Edge novel, Seeing Red is very different, you’re right. Seeing Red was all about the lead character, to an almost narcissistic degree. Gun Dog is all about the situations, the events. I don’t think that Seeing Red influenced the way I approached Gun Dog though. Seeing Red was an exercise in pure fiction. Whereas Gun Dog looks at locations and situations and people that I know very well indeed. And it explores ideas that are very close to me and that I feel strongly about. Gun Dog is something I absolutely had to get off my chest. It had been festering inside me for a long time.