Thriller author Ian Coates chats with me about his new novel, Backlash.
Bio:
Ian Coates graduated with honours in electronics and often uses his experience of working in high-tech industries to give his thrillers an authentic backdrop. Although he followed a career in technology, his first love has always been books, particularly exciting page-turners about spies and assassins.
He won his first writing competition at the age of 14 with a crime novella. His debut thriller, Eavesdrop, was short listed in a Tibor Jones Page Tuner competition and was one of the winners in the centenary Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook novel writing competition. Eavesdrop was published in paperback in 2014 by Bad Day Books, Assent Publishing’s thriller imprint, and Audible Studios subsequently released it as an audio book. Backlash is his second novel, which was the runner-up in the 2024 Writers College Global Writing Competition. It is published by Wallace Publishing.
Ian lives with his wife in Worcestershire, England and is a member of the International Thriller Writers Association and the Society of Authors. A percentage of the proceeds from his thrillers supports the British Science Association charity.
Welcome, Ian. Please tell us about your current release.
Backlash follows a young interior designer, Trish McGowan, who’s being coerced into distributing blackmail demands to the blackmailer’s more dangerous victims – those who might retaliate. When she passes one to an illegal arms dealer, she finds herself running for her life, and her career is thrown into chaos. After narrowly surviving a bomb blast that destroys her shop, she realises tracking down her blackmailer, the mysterious Argus, and trying to get his help is the only way she’ll manage to stay alive. The problem is that an experienced criminal who wants to remain anonymous isn’t easy to find.
As the arms dealer’s noose starts to close around McGowan, she uncovers two more of Argus’ victims, and they form an uneasy alliance to stop the blackmail once and for all. But finding the blackmailer is going to need all their cunning and ingenuity.
What inspired you to write this book?
The inspiration for the thriller Backlash came when I was walking along a canal towpath and saw a woman smoking while sitting on top of a large canister of flammable gas in the boat’s stern. I started wondering, “what it…” My first thought was that if the gas canister the smoker was sitting on leaked, she and her boat would disappear in an explosion. I then wondered, “but what if the canister was inside while she was outside and it exploded, you would then be able to say that her habit of smoking actually saved her life.” That led to the opening line of the thriller (“It was Trish McGowan’s addiction to a daily half-packet of Lambert & Butlers that saved her life.”). A lot of the ideas then developed from that first sentence.
I carried on wondering, “but why would the gas canister explode inside? Was it deliberate? And if it was deliberate, why should someone try to kill her?” From there, the rest of the story slowly unfolded in my mind over the following weeks.
What exciting project are you working on next?
My third novel is already fully plotted and I’m about a third of the way through writing it. It’s got a working title of Knife Edge, but I don’t want to say too much about it at this stage. It will be the first of a series starring ex-assassin Marcus Trevelyan. Every now and then, I get ideas for other events he’ll get involved in and jot them down quickly, ready to plot subsequent thrillers in the series.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
That’s a hard question. I suppose it was when my first thriller, Eavesdrop, was published. When a publisher accepted it, then I knew I really was a writer. I’ve always wanted to write, though. I remember when I was child, copying out the start of an Enid Blyton Secret Seven book to pretend it was my own!
Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your workday like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
I’ve recently retired from a career in the electronics industry, but I’m not writing full-time. I tend to get up early, grab a mug of tea, and start writing then, while everywhere is quiet. I keep going until about 9.30, at which point I stop and get on with the rest of the day, doing normal day-to-day things. If I’m on holiday or away from home for some reason, I’ll probably grab some additional quiet time to do more writing then, but that’s more of an ad hoc addition.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
Probably that I write my first draft on paper with a “special” pencil that my wife gave me as present. I find creativity runs more freely like that, rather than when hammering away at a keyboard. I type it up the following day, of course, so that it’s easy to keep backed up, but whenever I need to add a new scene or even a few extra sentences, the paper and pencil come back out.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
When I was small, I loved reading espionage stories and so wanted to be a spy. But as I grew a bit older, I realised such a job was going to be dangerous! I’m rather a coward, so decided it wasn’t a good career choice! That’s probably why I started writing crime and spy stories – it gave me a way to be in that environment without the danger.
Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
Did you realise that, until 1978, when Ken Follett published The Eye of the Needle, no thriller had a female lead character? Before that, they only ever played small minor parts! I didn’t think twice when Trish became the lead in Backlash, which just shows how things have changed. But I got a bit of a shock about that a little while ago. I was at a crime writing festival, and there was a panel talking primarily about whether a white person could realistically write a book from a coloured person’s perspective. One of the panelists said it was similar to a man trying to write a scene from a woman’s point of view. I sat up with a jerk at that, suddenly worrying that the thousands of words I’d written for Backlash were all rubbish because it was from a woman’s point of view. As soon as I got home, I started Googling the subject, and found plenty of successful authors saying they wrote like that without any problems, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I hadn’t given it a thought before then.
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