A pop agent who represents Elvis Costello and Van Morrison is busy reshaping the detective novel genre, writes Kim Janssen

WHEN it comes to literary coppers, Britain has always been more Hampstead Village than Camden Town.
Think of English detective fiction and the images you’ll likely conjure are pastoral, belonging to a bygone age – Inspector Morse meandering down a country lane in his vintage Jag, Miss Marple quizzing the vicar in the library or Sherlock Holmes with his deerstalker and pipe tramping across the moors.
But author Paul Charles wants to change all that.
Sure, his creation DI Christy Kennedy prefers a nice cup of tea to a bottle of scotch in the drawer, but he operates in a highly recognisable bustle of rock musicians, drug-users and nightclubs in and around Camden Town.
Charles, an Irish 57-year-old pop agent who represents, among others, Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Ray Davies and Van Morrison, knows the music scene as well as anyone.
And after 16 years living in Primrose Hill, he knows the area pretty well too.
Sipping on a cup of tea in his Parkway, Camden Town offices – like DI Kennedy he has a 10 cup a day habit – he explains: “For books it’s brilliant – you don’t have to invent anything.
“The school over the road from my office is perfect for a police station and there’s so much energy on the streets.
“Whenever Kennedy needs to clear his head and think about a case he takes a walk around Camden Town and that’s something I do, to.
“The books have been optioned for a TV show although I’ll believe its going to happen when I’m sitting at home with my wife watching it – show me a crime writer and I’ll show you someone with a TV option that hasn’t been exercised.
“But if it did get made, Camden would definitely be the star. It would be difficult to film around here but if they did it would look great and it’s never been done before.”
If the urban milleu and unique methods of murder mark Charles’s eight DI Kennedy books out from the crowd, Kennedy’s easy manner and lack of demons mean they aren’t exactly hard-boiled either.
“I wanted him to be believable and likeable”, he explains.
A retired Camden police superintendent advises Charles on the accuracy of his plots – his intervention on the first of the series resulted in changes to the character of ann rea, Kennedy’s hotshot journalist lover, who works for the Camden News Journal (sic).
ann rea, whose byline, like the singer kd lang’s, is always spelt out in lower case (she’d never get away with that in real life), was originally intended to be Kennedy’s crime-solving sidekick until it was pointed out that police can’t tell journalists much about the crimes they’re investigating. Nevertheless, rea, who Charles admits is based on an old flame, seems to solve half the crimes herself – quite a trick for someone who must spend half her time covering school fetes and council meetings.
Charles said: “I spent years trying to write The Great Irish Novel, but every time I started the first page turned out to be rubbish and was binned.
“When I started reading British detective fiction at the start of the 1990s, I found it was something I could do.”
These days, Charles divides his time roughly 50:50 between writing and the music business.
He has no plans to give up one or the other, and it’s clear that the day job continues to inform his writing.
Although his big name clients are well established acts who count their time in the industry in decades rather than months, Charles is always on the lookout for new bands, something he believes many record labels lost the knack for when CDs were introduced.
He said: “The major labels concentrated on marketing their back catalogues, getting people to switch over to the new technology and stopped looking for new acts.
“That nearly killed the industry and it did kill the singles market.
“Back in the 1970s you started out playing in the back of pubs and worked your way up – it doesn’t really work like that anymore.
“Nowadays marketing companies, which give away singles at a loss in return for prominent shelf space in the major chains, will tell you a record will go into the charts at, say, number nine and, two weeks later, they’ll be exactly right – they’ve got it down to a science.”
Paying to manipulate the charts, of course, is nothing new – Charles remembers when the tricks where more straightforward; paying a DJ to play your records or sending out a “granny squad” of elderly women to buy up your own stock at the handful of shops where the charts were determined.
The effect of the internet and piracy has been overstated by the industry, he says, and is used as an excuse for poor performance.
Talented new bands from Camden will continue to break through, he insists, despite the encroaching homogenisation of both the High Street and the music industry.
He said: “There’s still a bit of a vibe in Camden, still an undercurrent, still the spirit that’s in there.
“It will never be a Chelsea – Camden is something that’s never going away.”