Killer

When Peter Benchley’s Jaws came out, Tonkin inhaled it. “It still raises the hair on the back of my head,” he says. When Spielberg’s movie was released a year later, he and a friend went, and it raised the hair on the rest of his body. On the way out of the theater his friend asked if he could do better.

“Not better,” Tonkin said. “But I can do bigger.”

Tonkin’s math was simple: the great white shark in Jaws is 25 feet long, but killer whales are 40 feet long. They’re also highly intelligent, can communicate with each other, and work in pods to hunt their prey. The Natural History Museum let Tonkin climb inside one of their killer whale skulls to count its teeth. His father, a crash inspector for the RAF, helped make sure the opening plane crash met the bar for realism.

“I love research,” Tonkin says. “It’s a weakness in a writer. I spend far more time finding stuff out than getting stuff down.”

For a year, he came home from a full day’s teaching and banged out a first draft on an old manual typewriter (“I’ve never done a lot of drafts,” he says). If he had to write a scene he was worried about he’d write it longhand and type it up later, a terrific way of editing, he felt, because he’d just skip unnecessary sentences. “Sheer laziness is a very useful tool.”

His agent sold Killer to Hodder & Stoughton, who were very happy with its performance, and then his agent sold it in America, and made a paperback sale to Signet. It did well, and Tonkin would eventually use that Killer cash to buy a flat, as well as trade in his manual typewriter for a word processor that he never actually used. Now, with one hit book under his belt, Tonkin got to work on book number two. Which is where things went off the rails.

Catastrophe One was based on “catastrophe theory,” the study of small mathematical shifts that can lead to dramatic changes, such as landslides. Tonkin set his novel on a space station orbiting Earth that was armed with nuclear warheads and manned by a single astronaut. The book would revolve around attempts by Ground Control to get the astronaut to return command of the space station back to them. Tonkin had the plot, he had the characters, and he had the station designed in his head. He labored over a plot outline for months, but the book wouldn’t come together. Finally, after a year of hard slogging, he abandoned the manuscript.

“I knew giving up on it was a stupid thing to do,” he says. “But it is what it is.”

After Catastrophe One, Tonkin tried a vampire novel called The Journal of Edwin Underhill. He still had his British Museum readers’ card from working on his Master’s thesis in Shakespearean literature and he had a love for horror, and so he began a novel about a man who believes he’s going insane but is actually turning into a vampire. Stretching across centuries and clocking in at around 250,000 words, his editors insisted he edit it down to a slight 75,000 and they released it as The Dead. It came out just as the popularity of Anne Rice’s vampires peaked, and in the shadow of Lestat and Co., it withered.

Tonkin’s post-Killer life wasn’t all misery and bad luck. He met his future wife, got married, and the couple moved into the flat he’d bought with his Killer windfall. And, after The Dead, he spent about eighteen months assuming a new position at one of the Haberdasher Schools, taking on the English Department and organizing poetry competitions and dramatics, and even a school opera, with his students.

After he’d settled into this routine, Tonkin got back to writing. Some American expats hired him to come up with a plot outline for a novel about a mission to rescue American POWs still trapped in Vietnam, but nothing ever came of it. In fact, nothing caught fire until around 1983 when he heard about the Salem, a supertanker carrying 200,000 tons of crude oil that disappeared off the charts, secretly sold its oil to South Africa in violation of an international embargo, then got scuttled by the crew to cover up their crime. It resulted in a massive trial, and Tonkin started doing interviews, and then more research, and then he began to write. The book became The Coffin Ship (1990), and returning to the sea reinvigorated him – it spawned a series of 30 books in his Richard Mariner series, all of them seafaring thrillers. Today, he’s even turned his love of Elizabethan England into a series of detective novels about a sword master solving crimes in the 16th century.