CW: This review discusses suicide, mental health and trauma, eating disorders, and assisted dying.
At first thought, standup comedy and thrillers that explore the dark facets to human nature are not natural companions. But Benjamin Stevenson is both a standup comedian and the author of two thrillers, and when I ask him about how those two careers coexist in his mind, he responds with a definite, “I think they’re exactly the same.” As he elaborates, not only does his thoughtful and reflective nature become clear, but so does the fact that he has a clear understanding of the technical construction that comprises the thrillers that put producer and inadvertent amateur detective, Jack Quick, in the midst of puzzling murder investigations, and of the mechanics of comedy: “In terms of technique, they’re exactly the same. The reason people laugh is because they are surprised. All you’re doing when you’re writing a crime novel is surprising people by turning something. A classic joke does a set up, then pulls back and shows you what the answer is, and the answer is not what you’re expecting. A crime novel uses the technique of surprise, but you’re just going for a different reaction. And pace and tension, these are all valuable elements in a crime novel, but they’re also valuable on stage because you’re looking for times when you can break the tension to get the laugh. Whereas in a crime novel you still need to know when you have the tension, when it’s too tense, when it’s not tense enough, and the pacing, and the word economy…it all comes from the same place.” He sums up the difference succinctly, noting “I have more time in a novel to think about and expand particular ideas that you can’t do in 60 minutes on stage.”
We’re meeting via Zoom following the release of his second thriller, Either Side of Midnight, in which disgraced former producer Jack Quick investigates the apparent on-air suicide of prominent current affairs presenter, Sam Midford, at the behest of Sam’s twin brother, Harry. At its core, the novel’s running theme is about the power of words – something that resonates particularly strongly with me as an author, but, I suspect, with many others, too. Stevenson says of this book that he “wanted to try and write the most interesting, modern murder mystery I could. And I think I wanted to try and push the genre from a knife in the back in an English manor to someone’s died in a room that no-one’s set a foot in, [going to] a how done it rather than a why done it, or a who done it.”
For someone who’s accustomed to performing, quite gregariously, in front of crowds (his musical double act with his twin brother, Jimmy, has some truly funny moments, (and yes, Jimmy was “annoyed that I killed him off in this book,” but Stevenson “told him that he could choose to be annoyed that I killed him off, or he could admit that he’s not the handsome, charismatic one”), he’s surprisingly reserved. He speaks relatively slowly, and with obvious thought for each word that comes out of his mouth.
While he doesn’t seem to share some of his protagonist’s more extreme personality traits, Stevenson does bear some resemblance to how I envisioned Jack Quick when I read the book – not in a bad way, mind, but in the sense that he’d prefer to be behind the camera (or the page), rather than its focus. Although Jack has bulimia and starts the story in prison due to the events of the previous book (although Stevenson is very firm that he wanted Either Side of Midnight to be “a book that served absolutely as a standalone” – which it does), Stevenson’s comment about Jack’s character trait due to his profession, “of eyeing people up with a filmmaker’s eyes” feels as though it’s something he does – albeit with a writer’s eyes. It’s clear in talking with him that he sees the world through a thoughtful lens, and in the way that observational humour forms the backbone of comedy, what he observes in the world forms the nexus of his books. For him, “crime says so much about humanity. I like doing that a lot, and I like big twists,” and it’s clear that he works through his books to make comment on things we otherwise might miss.
The piece of societal commentary Stevenson focuses upon in Either Side of Midnight – which a comedy show doesn’t quite have the capacity to explore – is how the rise of personal communication has facilitated malicious behaviours, and how legal frameworks have responded and struggled to respond to this phenomenon. I ask him about this thematic focus and he pauses. “The themes I wanted to tackle in the book I think are so uniquely terrifying and uniquely modern. Even though the inciting incident [inspiring] is a newsreader shooting herself on the air, which happened in the 70s, I was thinking, ‘if that can happen in the 70s, imagine if that happened now, and imagine would could grow from that, and imagine the dangers…’ ”
One of the things the book asks is how people can be incited to commit suicide, and the way this act has been facilitated by mobile technology. Either Side of Midnight, in addition to being a gripping read, examines this point quite thought provokingly; how we all effectively carry something in our pocket that with the right – or wrong – intent, can be a weapon. Even more interestingly, was that inciting suicide via text (or online) messaging, was not specifically a crime when it first started to occur. Stevenson explained that this was a particular challenge for him; “I had to grapple with the questions of a changing legal system, or a legal system that couldn’t keep up. And actually, when I was writing the book there were other incidents that happened […] I knew I was on to something thematically interesting because when I started writing the book, not a lot of people were talking about it, there were a few famous cases, but there were more and more every day.”
He’s clearly done a judicious amount of research, and put a considerable amount of thought into the matter. It’s paid off, for me, at least – I left the book more than ever thinking about what personal communications technology allows and how little we consider that. Stevenson is definite when he says, “I set out to talk about the issue because I think it’s really important and I think it’s terrifying and I hadn’t seen it dealt with in fiction before.”
It’s heavy stuff, to be sure, but it gives the book a resonance that sets it aside from other thrillers that can be read quickly and put aside with little subsequent thought for them. The book’s subject matter is thought provoking, even if at times, it requires a little break. I tell Stevenson that I needed to put the book down for a moment after a particular scene, because I was a little overwhelmed. “I’m under no pretense that my book is anything other than entertainment. It is supposed to thrill people and be exciting, but I never wanted to make those themes, which I think make it interesting, sensationalist,” he responds. His careful way of speaking is even more pronounced now. “It’s a very thin and fine line to walk when you’re trying to write a piece of commercial entertainment that has a deeper meaning, but not take shortcuts to make the book exciting.” It’s a refreshing piece of pragmatism, given authors can be quite precious about their writing and the role it supposedly plays in discourse and society.
It also hints very clearly at what the answer will be when I ask Stevenson about his process. While the initial scene, which popped into his head and ended up “pretty much as it was” in the final draft, Stevenson admits that he’s a planner. “I write very slowly […] I’m in my final chapter and I change someone’s hair, I re-write the entire book to match that. …I don’t write the next sentence until I rewrite the entire book to put it in,” he says, making me feel desperately self-conscious for my occasional all-caps approach where I’ll remind myself to ‘GO BACK AND FORESHADOW THIS LATER’. It’s a meticulous approach, but he justifies it with an interesting comment: “I need to know what I’m laying in […] There are two things that I think make a good crime novel. There shouldn’t be 3 of 4 clues, there should be 300 clues. That means when it all comes together, you can pull from every element. I try to have a clue on every page, and it doesn’t need to an outright clue, it can be a vibe or an attitude. But to do that, you need to know where it’s going. But I also think that a good crime novel should have the ability to turn on a single sentence […] The more that you can build towards those three moments, the more impact they have.” In the interest of not revealing spoilers, I won’t say what the specific sentences were in Either Side of Midnight, but they definitely are the points where the novel turns, not simply because of the pace, but because, in Stevenson’s words, they “specifically tell you more than what they’re actually telling you,” in that they provide several pieces of information that not only reveal the mystery, but change the stakes of the story significantly.
The other interesting thing that Stevenson incorporates into Either Side of Midnight is mental illness within adult male figures. In keeping with what he’s demonstrated of himself across our discussion, he reveals that this was not simply a deliberate choice, but a choice that was thoroughly thought through and considered. This element is relevant to the murder, but also to the character trajectory of Jack Quick, whose bulimia is linked to a childhood trauma. “I wanted to do this thing, and I wanted to do it with a grown man, not a teenager. Our society’s way of looking at things is to put them in boxes and say ‘oh you’ll grow out of it.’ It’s a kind of dated way of looking at it,” Stevenson explains. And where we see Quick in Either Side of Midnight is the result of “hard-won and hard-worked-at progress,” taking the lessons that people who’ve read Greenlight will be rewarded by seeing put into practice.
It’s an interesting note for us to leave on, especially as I reflect upon Stevenson’s comments about looking at a specific message through the prism of a novel, and the power of crime novels to be so malleable when it comes to subject matter. I ask him if he has an idea for the next Jack Quick book. He says the next title he’s working on, while a thriller, will not feature Jack Quick. “I feel like I’ve been a bit mean to him,” he admits. “I think he needs a break.”
