How did you become a writer? 

In 1988, I won a competition run by The Spectator magazine, and so became their Young Writer of the Year. At the time, I was a postgraduate law student trying to decide whether to give up the law for journalism. Winning that competition persuaded me to do so, in that I didn’t see myself ever becoming Young Lawyer of the Year.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

I try to learn from my favourite writers, who include Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Vladimir Nabokov, Patricia Highsmith, Martin Amis. But any writer who said they were influenced by, say, Nabokov could expect to be laughed it. It’d be like saying you were influenced by Shakespeare. 

When and where do you write? 

In the morning, between about 9.30 and 1pm, while lying in bed. Sometimes, I feel guilty about proceeding in this way, so I get up, make the bed and write while lying on it rather than in it. I might do an extra hour later in the day, perhaps sitting in my garden shed while smoking a cigar. One petit corona (that’s a cigar, not a virus) equals about eight hundred words. But mornings should be enough. Charles Dickens, I think, wrote only between about 9am and 2pm.

What are you working on now? 

I’m reading the proofs of the latest novel in my series of historical thrillers about a railway policeman called Jim Stringer. It’s the tenth one in the series. The ninth appeared about seven years ago, so my publishers are billing this as ‘the return of Jim Stringer’. It’s called Powder Smoke and is a kind of western set in the north of England in 1925. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

No – can’t afford it. I always need the delivery money. 

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

When I was at university, a friend who was reading English (whereas I was reading History) looked over a job application letter I’d written. It began something like, ‘Dear Sir, I wonder if, by any chance, you might possibly be willing to consider my application for…’ My friend said: ‘There are too many words here.’ 

What’s your advice to new writers?

Keep writing until you are genuinely pleased with what you’ve produced, by which I mean that you still like it a week later. That’s your tone. Don’t analyse it too closely, because you don’t want to become self-conscious about it, but keep trying to re-locate that groove. 

Andrew Martin is the author of fifteen novels and seven works of non-fiction. His novels are mostly in the historical crime genre, and include the award-winning Jim Stringer series, set on the railways of early twentieth century Britain. A new Jim Stringer novel, Powder Smoke, is forthcoming in January 2021. Martin’s latest stand-alone novel is The Winker, which is set in 1976, and concerns a would-be pop star who winks at people and then kills them. Andrew Martin’s website is at jimstringernovels.com.