CityLife

Michael can't forget day of murder

THE Hungerford Massacre was a crime so momentous that it left an indelible mark on the whole nation. At the time, Michael Symmons Roberts was a junior reporter on The Newbury Weekly News. "I was called out to report on a murder in the next town," he remembers. "By the time I got there, it had become a double murder and then another." The killer was Michael Ryan. Armed with a Kalashnikov, an automatic rifle and a Beretta pistol he took to the streets of this small market down, gunning down 16 people, including his own mother, and seriously wounding another 15. He later barricaded himself in a school where he shot himself. "He was a bit of a loner, but everyone knew him," Michael says. "It was that kind of place where everyone knew everyone else and one of them has done something so violent and seemingly motiveless." It was the memory of that day that led Michael to write his debut novel, Patrick's Alphabet. It is not a strict record of the Hungerford massacre, but is set in a small town, opening with a double murder and recreating the dark atmosphere of anxiety and fear that arises when the residents, who know everyone in their community, also know that someone among them has committed the worst acts of motiveless violence, and is likely to do it again. "I didn't set out to be a crime writer and I'll probably come out of it as quickly," he says. "People have been calling it a thriller, but it's not a whodunnit. It's a novel told from the perspective of a slightly disturbed character, a photographer, who tries to observe, rather than participate in, the action around him. Through a series of violent events the book documents the breakdown of that." The story begins with a teenage couple found murdered in their car. Photographer, Perry Scholes, is mixed up with it from the start. His hero is Weegee, the original ambulance-chaser photographer and he spends his time listening in to police radios to get to the scene of crimes first and taking photographs to sell to the tabloids. But as the murders continue, Perry can't remain a detached observer. It was the development of these characters that pulled Michael towards a different literary genre. He has already published four collections of poetry, the latest of which, Corpus, won the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Prize and Babylon was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. "In Babylon I had taken stories and characters as far as I wanted to without it becoming a verse novel," he explains. "I decided to write some fiction, but I was worried about writing the cliché of a poet's novel, with expectations that it will be full of metaphor and description." He needn't have worried. The result is a fast-paced, page-turner with filmic qualities that reflect Michael's 12 years of experience as a documentary maker for the BBC. Now a full-time writer, Michael keeps involved in radio and TV through script-writing. He has penned the narrative for a new opera, The Sacrifice, composed by James McMillan, to be shown at the Cardiff Millennium Centre. And he also recently scripted a BBC dvd, Write, for schools, to help encourage creative writing skills. "We think today's generation is not literate, but kids are probably writing more now that I ever did, only in a different form," he says. "It might be through text or the internet, but kids are dealing with words all the time. At the same time they are used to a high quality moving images, so we've tried to get through the boredom and embarrassment that can create barriers to creative writing."