We chat with author Alex North about The Man Made of Smoke, which is a story of fathers and sons, shadows and secrets, and the fight we all face to escape the trauma of the past.
Hi, Alex! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hi there! Thanks for having me on the site. I’m 48 years old and live in Leeds, UK, with my wife and son. My first book as Alex North, The Whisper Man, came out in 2018, but I wrote ten books before that under a different name. I studied Philosophy at Leeds University, and then worked in the Sociology department there for a while. When I’m not writing – which is most of the time – I’m probably either reading, listening to music, watching films, going to the gym, or trying to stop doomscrolling and get some sleep.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
It’s been with me for as long as I can remember. Books were a big thing in my house growing up, and I used to love weekend trips to the local library. When I was a kid, my mother would fold sheets of paper into a book, sew the edge, and encourage me to write stories inside. It never really occurred to me that I would do anything else. I have a strong memory of messing up a maths test at school when I was eleven and thinking “It doesn’t matter – I’m going to be a writer.”
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: As a kid, I had this old, battered book of fairytales and children’s stories, some of which I learned later came from Struwwelpeter by Heinrich Hoffmann. Terrifying stuff. I remember the story about the tailor with enormous scissors bursting in and cutting off the little boy’s thumbs.
- The one that made you want to become an author: Anything by Diana Wynne Jones, but probably Power of Three.
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: I mean, I can stop thinking about anything if I try, but maybe All The Colours Of The Dark by Chris Whitaker. It’s been a while since I loved a book so much.
Your latest novel, The Man Made of Smoke, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Despair. Acceptance.
What can readers expect?
Okay, so now I need to explain those five words!
First and foremost, The Man Made of Smoke is a psychological thriller about Dan Garvie, who has a terrifying encounter with a serial killer as a child and grows up to become a criminal psychologist. When Dan’s father goes missing, he returns to his childhood home to investigate, and begins to discover possible links to that old crime. And on that level, I hope a reader can expect tension, mystery, surprises and scares, and characters they’ll come to care deeply about.
But the book also involves Dan revisiting and processing some very painful memories. It’s about coming to terms with our mistakes in the past, which is why the five sections of the book are titled after the five stages of grief and trauma.
Where did the inspiration for The Man Made of Smoke come from?
The initial idea was always the M.O. of the serial killer in the story – which is something I can’t talk about, as it’s not revealed until halfway through the book! But I sat on that particular idea for a long time, trying and failing to find a way to make it work. I couldn’t figure it out, but it wouldn’t go away. It was only when I came up with the very first scene in the book – a teenage boy experiencing something frightening at a service station – that things started to click into place.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
There are always the good days when the writing flows, but what I enjoy most is when some little detail that’s been there since the first draft suddenly makes sense and takes on a larger meaning. Survivors of the killer in The Man Made of Smoke all remember fairylights strung between the trees in the location he takes them to. That detail was in the book from the very beginning, but I had absolutely no idea why, and I kept thinking I should take it out. It was only at the very end of the final draft that I realised what it meant – at pretty much the exact same point that Dan does in the book. Those moments are great. It can feel like ‘past you’ gave you an amazing present, and you’ve just figured out how to unwrap it.
Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?
All the usual ones. I wish I was the kind of writer who gets everything correct first time, but I’m not. It takes a lot of drafts to get to the finished book. I always need to write it a few times before I work out what it should have been all along. Which is exactly as irritating as it sounds.
With a number of books to your name, what are some of the key lessons you’ve learned since your debut?
It never gets easier – it gets harder, and I think that it should – but you start to become familiar with certain stages in the process. Every book is a little bit like climbing a mountain, and you learn to recognise the steep bits and the places to rest. You begin feeling certain things and think to yourself “Oh, so I’m at that point, am I?” The key lesson there for me is that I know I can do it, even if it feels impossible. There’ll be countless times when I’ll say “I can’t do this” to my wife, and she’ll tell me “yeah, that’s what you always say.” Which is true. And it’s reassuring to keep that in mind even if it doesn’t help all that much when you’re in the thick of things.
What’s next for you?
Another book. I’ve got it all planned out and have made a tentative start on it, and it feels okay at the moment. But we’ll see how that goes…
Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up this year?
I don’t know, really – it’s nice to be surprised by some random pick. To cheat and answer a slightly different question, a few I’ve read recently and really enjoyed would be We Live Here Now by Sarah Pinborough, The Impossible Thing by Belinda Bauer, and The Midnight King by Tariq Ashkenani. They were all great.
