'There's always unfinished business'
Tony Parsons has seven Max Wolfe books under his belt, and says a TV version with Aidan Turner is on the cards
Bill Waters
- Bill Borrows
To order Murder for Busy People by Tony Parsons (Century, £20) for £18 including p&p, click here.
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You can tell when you walk into a publishing house exactly where your stock is and how well you’re selling,” says Tony Parsons, a “hip, young gunslinger” at the NME in the 1970s, author of 2001’s bestselling Man and Boy and, since 2014, the Max Wolfe detective novels. “If you’re doing well, girls you’ve never met say, ‘Hi, how’s it going? Love the new book.’ When your stock starts falling, guys you know don’t catch your eye because you’re on the way down… but it ebbs and flows.”
Right now, Parsons’s stock is high: the seventh book featuring DC Max Wolfe, Murder for Busy People, is in bookshops and Aidan Turner is in talks to play the tough but compassionate London detective. But the 71-year-old author is playing it cool. “You know how it is. People want to do it and it doesn’t happen for whatever reason. We’re looking at a six-part series, they cost a few million each, and you come to that moment when even if it looks fantastic, someone’s still got to make that major investment.”
Tony Parsons (far right) interviews The Clash in 1977. Getty
Perhaps he’s still scarred by the Man and Boy experience. “We sold the TV rights to the BBC and the film rights to Harvey Weinstein, which you’re not allowed to boast about these days but was a big deal back then. The BBC took a book that was loved and turned it into something that was loved by nobody and I’d have preferred it not to have been made. Weinstein loved the book but didn’t make the film. Sometimes something not being made isn’t the worst outcome.
“With the Max Wolfe series, [the people trying to put the adaptation deal together] are talking to me and I’m involved but, as Nick Hornby said, you sell them the right to do what they like with your book, their own vision, and I’m not writing it. I’ve always got this thing: if you’re smart, you’d get me to write it. I always believe that.”
I'd have preferred the film of Man and Boy not to have been made
Peculiarly, it was this insistence that helped give birth to Max Wolfe in a roundabout fashion. “[Director] Sam Mendes phoned me out of the blue when Man and Boy came out. He was interested in making it but I told him I was the only person who could possibly write it. It was a bad phone connection and the line went dead.
“We met again a few years later at a screening and he told me that he was going to direct the next James Bond movie and was re-reading all the Ian Fleming books, so I decided to re-read them as well. Before I got through the first page of Casino Royale, I thought ‘I’m going to try and write a serious hero.’ If you can invent a character like Bond or Philip Marlowe that lasts beyond your lifetime, that’s an incredible achievement. The determination to do that is where Max began.”
That first Wolfe book, The Murder Bag, became a number-one bestseller, and ten years on we have the same London setting but a new challenge for Wolfe in the form of career criminal Emma Moon. She’s based loosely on a real person. “I know a couple of people who knew Micky McAvoy, the youngest on the 1983 Brink’s-Mat robbery. When he died I became interested in him because he didn’t rat out the people he was with. It’s unusual, a professional criminal keeping the old code. It struck me as something a woman was more likely to do because they have more emotional intelligence.”
Aidan Turner is rumoured to play Max Wolfe. Radio Times/Robert Wilson
The deadline for the book was extended last summer because, at that point, “It wasn’t good enough. I was aware I could raise it a notch, and now I think it’s the best in the series. I’m working on another book called Man and Dog, about my beloved cavalier King Charles spaniel Stan who died last year. And with Who She Was [his 2023 bestselling psychological thriller set in Cornwall] and now Murder for Busy People, I think I would quite like to go out on a high.”
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Max Wolfe fans need not panic, however. Tony Parsons often says something like this after publication of a new book. But, as his anti-hero Emma Moon puts it in his latest story, “There’s always unfinished business.”
Authors
Bill Borrows
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