Stanley Donwood

Stanley Donwood talks to Tim Barnes for the It's All True podcast about Catacombs of Terror!, his comic detective novel set in Bath, while scraping mud off canvases in his studio. He had mixed mud from different parts of the country with glue to paint with, left the results on the wall for a couple of weeks and hated them more every time he looked. The novel was a dare. Back in 2002 or 2003 the man who had printed Slowly Downward, his book of miserable short stories, on hemp paper bet him five pounds he couldn't write a novel in a month. Donwood went at it like the farm work he did when he was young, paid by what he picked. He checked the word count instead of rereading anything, and padded where his serious writing gets cut down until a story is almost a sentence.

English humour, he says, is about people with ideas above their station being derailed by events, like his detective, Martin Valpolicella, who thinks he is Bogart and is useless. He once wrote off to a romance publisher for their A4 list of requirements and was turned down as unsuitable, because his couple had sex much too early. Nobody beats Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. He can't paint and write at the same time, and hopes to finish a new novel by the end of 2017. The headline he would most like to read tomorrow is “Trump chokes on pretzel. Recovery unlikely”.