Interview with Author – COLIN FALCONER
Colin Falconer has published over two dozen historical novels and thrillers and his his work has been sold into translation into 20 countries around the world. How did he start?
“I was 18 years old, I’d just left school and got a job in London, working in an insurance company. I was working inside – in an office! My mother thought that was like being CEO of Shell Oil.
“I was late one morning, I took a short cut through the church yard to the station to catch my train. I’d just finished reading The Sun Also Rises the night before; and here I was looking at all these gravestones, I remember thinking: Gee, we’re not here very long. Better make it count.
“So I went home, told my mother I was quitting my job and going to Morocco. She damned near fainted.”
He emigrated to Australia where he helped a mate establish a new advertising agency. “We could only afford this derelict building for an office. Once we were pitching to a client during a thunderstorm and the roof flooded. A piece of the ceiling fell down and just missed his head. Fortunately he had a sense of humor. We got the account!
But I really wanted to be a writer, not a copywriter. When I told my mate I was leaving to try my luck in the Big Smoke, he offered me 40% of the business. It was 40% of nothing at the time. I saw him a couple of years ago, and he’d just sold the agency for twenty million dollars. I worked out what 40% of that was on a pocket calculator. It’s quite a lot of money, apparently.”
Colin went to Sydney and worked in TV and radio and freelanced for many of Australia’s leading newspapers and magazines before becoming a full time novelist over 20 years ago.
He lived for many years in the beautiful Margaret River region in WA, and helped raise two beautiful daughters with his late wife, Helen. While writing, he also worked in the volunteer ambulance service. “I’d be at my desk typing, then thirty minutes later I might be crawling into an overturned car or running along a beach with the oxygen for a near drowning. It was an interesting time.”
He travels regularly to research his novels and his quest for authenticity has led him to run with the bulls in Pamplona, pursue tornadoes across Oklahoma and black witches across Mexico, go cage shark diving in South Africa and get tear gassed in a riot in La Paz..
His fiction comes from dedicated research and what he calls a quest for Hemingway’s ghost; characters with a passion for life, for love and the courage to face down their demons.
‘When I was walking through that graveyard I made two promises to my gawky 18 year old self; one – that I would not die feeling that I had not lived, and two – that I would follow my siren call to write, no matter where it lead. I feel like so far I have my promise to that 18 year old kid.
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