Martyn Waites

• Born: 1963
• Place of Birth: Newcastle upon Tyne, England

TYPES OF PLOT: Hard-boiled; private investigator; thriller

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Stephen Larkin, 1997-2003; Joe Donovan, 2006-2009; Tom Killgannon, 2018-2022

Contribution

Martyn Waites has become a leading figure in British neo-noir since the publication of his first novel, Mary’s Prayer, in 1997. This subgenre consists of extremely dark, ultraviolent crime fiction influenced by American writers like James Ellroy, Andrew Vachss, Elmore Leonard, and Walter Mosley; however, the British version of this subgenre is not without faint rays of hope.

Waites has staked out the city of his birth, Newcastle, as his fictional territory. Newcastle, in the northeast of the country in the enclave of Tyne and Wear County, is neither quite English nor entirely Scottish and has a contemporary face and a hidden past. Once a heavy-industrial area, it has become a modern service and call center with many new buildings. Yet, it retains a shadowy, seedy quayside district full of despair, desolation, and abandoned warehouses. Waites populates that milieu with a cast of colorful characters—criminal perpetrators, victims, crime fighters, and witnesses—whose qualities are neither all good nor all bad. He deals with disturbing social issues in a uniformly blunt and unflinching manner, and his depictions of horrific acts are not for the faint of heart.

Initially a writer with a cult status among cognoscenti, Waites has slowly achieved greater recognition for his work. Reviews of his novels have been overwhelmingly favorable. His Born Under Punches (2003) was listed among January Magazine’s best crime novels of the year. For his body of work, Waites was nominated for the Crime Writers’ Association’s Dagger in the Library Award. His first entry in the Joe Donovan series, The Mercy Seat (2006), was selected as the initial title released by the publisher Pegasus and was nominated for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award. Waites has continued to publish n the twenty-first century with his Tom Killgannon series. He sometimes writes under the pen name, CB Everett.

Biography

Martyn Waites was born in 1963 in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, where he was raised. He grew up reading comic books, particularly enjoying the exploits of Batman, and developed a fondness for crime novels, especially the work of Graham Greene. Following high school, he worked in various occupations—bartender, market trader, leather-coat salesperson, stand-up comedian, and stagehand at the Playhouse. During his late teens and early twenties, Waites played bass, sang, and wrote songs in several obscure local bands, including Dennis, Pin Up, Tractors Are Go, and the Fire Escape. In the early 1980s, on behalf of the National Association for Charitable Recycling Organizations (NACRO), he taught drama to teenagers who had broken the law. After two years of service with NACRO at Huntercombe Young Offenders Institution, Waites left for London to study acting. He later served as writer-in-residence at Her Majesty’s Prison in Chelmsford.

As an actor, Waites landed a few minor roles in such television series as Spender (1991-1993), The New Adventures of Robin Hood (1997-1998), Badger (1999), and Close and True (2000). He began writing in the early 1990s and contributed short stories and articles to both print and Internet publications, including Bizarre, The Big Issue, and The Bookseller. His fiction has appeared in such anthologies as The Adventure of the Missing Detective: Nineteen of the Year’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories (2005) and London Noir (2006). Waites’s first novel, Mary’s Prayer, a dark-edged thriller involving mobs and featuring tabloid reporter Stephen Larkin, appeared in 1997. Two additional entries in the Larkin series, Little Triggers (1998) and Candleland (2000), quickly followed.

In 2003, Waites released the first of a pair of dark thriller novels dealing with Britain’s “secret history,” Born Under Punches, a literary crime thriller that shows Stephen Larkin—just one of several central characters—as a young, idealistic journalist investigating an actual historical event, the long, drawn-out miners’ strike of 1984. The second, The White Room (2004), named one of The Guardian’s books of the year, also deals with history, focusing on 1960s Newcastle child-killer Mary Bell.

Waites began a new gritty, noir-flavored series, built around psychologically damaged investigative reporter Joe Donovan, in 2006 with the publication of the critically acclaimed The Mercy Seat, nominated for several major awards. He followed up with Bone Machine (2007). White Riot (2008) and Speak No Evil (2009) are the third and fourth books in the series. In the late 2010s and into the early 2020s, Waites began a new crime thriller series following protagonist Tom Killgannon. Books in this series include The Old Religion (2018), The Sinner (2020), and The Gravedigger's Song (2022). In 2014, he published the nonfiction book, Great Lost Albums. 

Though writing is now the primary emphasis of Waites’s career, drama and acting still consume part of his life. He participated in the 2003 National Film Theater Events: Crime Scene with workshops on “Rogues and Vagabonds” and “Snobbery, Assault, and Battery.” He has also given dramatic readings for audio versions of other authors’ works. Waites has overseen arts-based workshops for socially excluded teenagers and adults in South London and Essex, where he was a fellow at the University of Essex (2006-2007). Although he has not been involved in drama as an actor for quite some time, Waites has written audio dramas for the cult classic Dr. Who.

Analysis

As Martyn Waites is a product of culturally distinct Newcastle, England, it is unsurprising that he writes with a strong sense of place. In all of his books, Newcastle assumes a brooding presence that affects each of the critical elements of his fictional work: plot, characterization, dialogue, atmosphere, pace, theme, language, and style.

Waites’s plots, which verge on melodrama in their striking contrasts between the heights of good and the depths of evil, typically revolve around the examination of social issues—government and police corruption, unemployment, drugs, the huge chasm between the wealthy and the poor, or the exploitation of mine workers—and their effects on a select group of individuals. Waites does not preach; rather, he demonstrates in shudder-inducing closeups and cringe-worthy vividness how the corrosive influence of poverty breeds crimes and how violence begets violence. The pacing is frequently breathtakingly fast, with disturbing but memorable images piled one on another.

Characterization, reinforced by blunt, brutal, and profane dialogue, is a particular Waites strength, thanks in part to his background in acting, a profession in which one must slip into someone else’s skin to be believable. His many years of work with both teenage and adult offenders have undoubtedly given him considerable insight into the workings of criminal minds. Waites is adept at drawing subtly shaded characters across a wide range of behavior. Heroes are severely flawed, often due to a traumatic past event, but are redeemed through their all-consuming drive toward a specific goal: the solution to a problem. Villains, no matter how perverted, violent, or nasty, have some small quality that makes them at least slightly sympathetic. It is through the confrontation of these damaged and unpredictable characters that Waites creates tension, conflict, and suspense.

Stylistically, Waites is a study in contrasts. Playing off his pithy, pungent dialogue are descriptive passages that, while lyrical, are nonetheless lean and stark, with no wasted words. Stories are told in the third person, past tense, often with shifting viewpoints from chapter to chapter and a dearth of gimmicks or literary pyrotechnics to clutter the narrative.

Paying homage to his lifelong love of music and his brief career as a performing musician, Waites often includes comments on the current pop music scene. The titles of all his fictional works are taken from songs: “Mary’s Prayer,” for example, was composed by the 1980s Scottish band Danny Wilson; “Little Triggers” is from a Waites favorite, Elvis Costello; “Candleland” is courtesy of Ian MacCulloch; “Born Under Punches” comes from the Talking Heads album Remain in Light (1980); and “The White Room” is a 1960s hit by Cream.

Born Under Punches

Born Under Punches describes a real-life 1984 miners’ strike in the northeast of Great Britain and the nearly two decades passed by the book’s publication in 2003. The book focuses on a group of interrelated characters, each somehow connected to the strike: Tony Woodhouse, a professional soccer player with a shady past; thuglike debt collector Tommy Jobson; miner Mick Hutton, who, as the strike lengthens, grows ever more desperate in his attempts to support his family; young journalist Stephen Larkin, looking to make a name for himself in the news world with an exposé of the conditions that caused the strike; and Stephen’s sister, Louise, who is infatuated with Tony. Moving back and forth between 1984 and the present, Born Under Punches examines the immediate effects of a debilitating work stoppage and the long-lasting repercussions on those involved.

The Mercy Seat

The first in a series of novels featuring Joe Donovan, former investigative reporter for the London Herald, The Mercy Seat is set in modern Newcastle upon Tyne, Waites’s birthplace. The city plays a vital role in the novel, serving as both a backdrop for much of the action and a symbol of modern society's deterioration. After Joe’s six-year-old son, David, disappeared from a department store two years earlier, the reporter began an obsessive search that cost him his job and marriage and left him in despair. He is pulled out of his depression through the visit of former colleague Maria Bennett, the attractive young editor of the Herald, and the newspaper’s slimy lawyer, Francis Sharkey. Maria enlists Joe’s aid to help find reporter Gary Myers, who has gone missing while investigating a story. If Joe assists, all the newspaper’s resources will be at his disposal to determine what happened to his son.

Joe accepts the deal and plunges into a convoluted, deadly game of predator and prey. Gary was working with a corporate scientist, Colin Huntley, who is also missing. A key piece of information, the missing reporter’s computer mini-disc, which contains incriminating evidence, is likewise gone, stolen by a slippery fourteen-year-old half-African London street hustler and sex worker, Jamal Jenkins. Jamal, hoping to sell his prize, flees with the disc to Newcastle, pursued by a professional killer called Hammer, a large, muscular man with a shaved head and a tooth into which a sapphire has been set, who can pound nails using just his fist. Hammer is in the employ of Alan Keenyside, a corrupt police officer with a thriving drug trade who perpetrated the incident that propels the story: the brutalization of a band of Travelers (a nomadic group) in exchange for a supposed secret scientific formula that Keenyside hopes to sell to a foreign power. Exposure of Keenyside’s illegal activities would cost him his career and all his ill-gained possessions, and the crooked police officer will do anything—including kidnap and murder—to prevent that from happening.

In Newcastle, Jamal falls into the clutches of Father Jack, a grossly obese man who pretends to shelter runaway juveniles but is, in reality, nothing more than a peddler of their young flesh. Father Jack is being observed and photographed by a pair of private investigators, former police officer Peta Knight and her gay Asian partner, Amar Miah, who hope to gather enough evidence to put Father Jack out of business and gain publicity for their failing private eye business. When Donovan turns up, following Jamal’s trail in the course of resurrecting his lost investigative skills, the private investigators ally with him: Joe will help them put Father Jack out of business if they will help him corner Jamal long enough to extract the information he holds that will locate the missing reporter and scientist.

Played out against a nightmarish urban wasteland of derelict cars, abandoned homes, and rat-infested warehouses, The Mercy Seat is a brutal, violent, noir-flavored thriller. Narration, pared to the bone, is crisp, fragmented, and harsh. Dialogue is rough and profane but realistic, spoken by characters who could exist. The story is disturbing, a glimpse of horrific and distasteful things hidden among decay, but necessary. Only through exposure to the full light of day does Waites seem to be saying that humankind has the chance to end all the nastiness that lurks in the darkness.

Principal Series Characters:

• Stephen Larkin is a dispirited, world-weary journalist working for a sleazy London tabloid. Given to bouts of self-pity because of his own actions, which cost him his wife and son, he returns at the orders of his boss to his hometown, Newcastle, to report on a series of crimes and their consequences—a mob-style murder and subsequent trial, a pedophilia ring, and child prostitution. He reenters the human race and is redeemed through his work, which often involves physical danger. Though he has different qualities, traits, and motivations, Larkin, who has a strong sense of right and wrong, may be seen as a precursor to investigator Joe Donovan.
• Detective Inspector Henry Moir of Newcastle and, formerly of Edinburgh, Scotland, like Larkin, has his own demons, the result of witnessing too much violence and of a personal loss: His sixteen-year-old daughter, Karen, ran away from home and is lost in the gritty underworld of London.
• Joe Donovan is a former hotshot investigative reporter for the London Herald. Devastated by the disappearance of his six-year-old son, David, during a birthday shopping spree two years earlier, Joe quit his job to search for his boy. Divorced from his wife, Annie, and neglectful of his surviving daughter, Abigail, who resents his obsession with her brother, Joe has turned to alcohol to ease the pain of his loss and has suicidal tendencies—until he is revived through the investigative work that is his strength. He is in his thirties, with graying hair and haggard features, and usually dresses casually, in jeans and old T-shirts. He lives alone in an old house in a rural area in the north of England, where he devotes a room to photographs and clippings relating to his missing son.

Bibliography

Cannon, Peter. “A Flying Start for Pegasus.” Publishers Weekly, vol. 253, no. 31, 7 Aug. 2006, p. 20.

Douglass, Dave. “Miners Then and Now.” Review of Born Under Punches, by Martyn Waites. The Weekly Worker, vol. 487, 3 July 2003.

“Martyn Waites Books Series in Order.” Book Series in Order, www.bookseriesinorder.com/martyn-waites. Accessed 23 July 2024.

Penzler, Otto. “The Mean Streets of Anytown.” The New York Sun, 19 April 2006.

Publishers Weekly. Review of The Mercy Seat, by Martyn Waites. vol. 253, no. 8, 20 Feb. 2006, p. 135.

Stasio, Marilyn. “Crime.” Review of Candleland, by Martyn Waites. The New York Times Book Review, 11 June 2000, p. 32.

Stone, Andrew. “Our Friends in the North.” Review of Born Under Punches, by Martyn Waites. Socialist Review, April 2003.

Williams, Wilda W. “Dark Is the New Cozy: Crime in Translation, the Dominance of Noir, and Conjuring the Paranormal.” Library Journal, vol. 131, no. 6, 1 Apr. 2006, pp. 36-39.