What happens to private detectives when they solve their final case?

Do they get out of the city and settle down and live happily? Or does their past call them back to their old ways?

In Cut Out, Tom Fletcher has left behind his PI business - and Cambridge in general - in favour of a smallholding in the countryside. He has an apple orchard and bee hives. He works with his hands. He's finally married Cathleen, and they now have twin daughters. They're not rich, but they're independent and happy. It's the perfect life. 

His trouble starts, though, at a large Army barracks a few miles away. The regiment based there are about to ship out to Afghanistan as part of a radical anti-heroin operation which is high on the government's spin agenda. They've even allowed a TV film-maker to get embedded with the troops to shoot some  film of the action. But the TV man can't take Army life - he's found dying of a gunshot wound one morning, with a pistol in his lap.  His last words are 'Tom Fletcher.'

Cut Out is the third and final book in the Fletcher series, and I wanted it to be rather different from the previous two. Corn Dolls and Steel Witches were multi-layered books with an historical element, reflecting Fletcher's own troubled family background. Cut Out is less complex in structure, just as Fletcher's life seems to be more settled now. But it also reflects a certain changing of interest of my own when it comes to the nature of crime stories.

Some crime books are about solving puzzles and unlocking secrets. This motif stems from Arthur Conan Doyle, who presented the detective as the epitome of the Victorian thinker-engineer: 'There is no problem that the British mind cannot solve.' The theme was adapted by Agatha Christie - writing, most significantly, in the aftermath of the First World war. In the 1920's, the overriding question in so many people's minds was 'How did this happen? How did my husband/father/son/brother/cousin/friend die like that? How did it come about?' The vast success of the Christie model was due, in my opinion, not to the pleasure of solving puzzles per se.  Rather it was due to the (worldwide) unconscious need to answer - at least in a tiny, microcosmic way - the question of 'How did that person die?' 

(Tragically, Conan Doyle responded to the death of his son in the trenches by abandoning Victorian rationalism and chasing after photographs of faeries).

Towards the end of the twentieth century, this model evolved into books which saw the family or childhood as the central puzzle to be solved (a development which mushroomed into the 'misery memoir' phenomenon).  

I must say that my first two books were partly based on this classic model - the unlocking of secrets and the issue of 'How did it happen?' 

But I've  come to think that there is another model which is simpler and more exciting.

This says 'Ok ok! Enough puzzles  for today. We know what happened, thank you. Now what are these people going to get up and do about it?'

The epitome of this model is probably Elmore Leonard, whose books contain (I think) not a single fingerprint or microscope sample, but who is often considered the finest living crime writer.

In Cut Out, I wanted to try this approach more fully. That meant moving the 'unlocking' moment to an earlier point in the book and using it like the spring in a pinball machine - launching the characters into the final act without further puzzle-solving, but with the kinetic need to reach their goals.

Many of the scenes in Cut Out take place in Afghanistan and on a RAF transport plane making its way back from there. I tried to use this journey as a kind of 'pinball spring' to drive the characters and their needs into the last act without the use of mystery or concealment.

Why Afghanistan?

I wanted the context of the book to be completely contemporary, and focused on the increasingly weird relationship between the government, party politics, the media, the military and the security services which has characterised the British government under the New Labour regime. 

That meant setting the story in the context of a foreign war. I thought about Iraq and  Sierra Leone, but finally I wanted to bring in one of the themes that have appeared in both of the previous books: the historical issue of opiate consumption. That fusion of high-end politics and low-end opiates meant only one context: Afghanistan.

In Corn Dolls we saw a boy sedated by his father for thirty years using poppy seeds, and in Steel Witches Evie Dunton knocked out her sister for a fateful evening using a similar poppy brew.  In Cut Out we're dealing with the contemporary global market for finished heroin product.

Along the way, I discovered some suprising things. Back in the 1920's, the German pharmaceutical company Bayer AG developed two revolutionary products which they brought to market. One was Aspirin - the name was chosen to give the idea of 'hope.' The other was in fact Heroin - the name chosen to suggest 'heroic strength.' Aspirin the painkiller and Heroin the diamorphine nerve tonic  - Hope and Strength, the two brands which Bayer intended to conquer the world. Aspirin certainly did. Heroin was found to be too addictive, though it continued to be sold until it was withdrawn in the 1950's. The Times even ran a persuasive editorial in 1955 entitled 'The Case For Heroin. ' Only after the withdrawal of the commercial brand did widespread illegal duplication begin, and so the illegal market for the drug developed.

When I conceived of this book, back in 2007, the Afghanistan war was fading to some extent from public awareness. But I'm writing this article in August 2009, and Afghanistan appears daily in the news, almost always for the most tragic of reasons.  Somebody asked me in a bookstore last week whether I now regret using this war as the context for the book, considering the level of suffering being inflicted on both sides. The answer is no, I don't. I believe that Cut Out portays the Government as short-term in its thinking, obsessed with image and cynically thrifty in its prosecution of the war. I think a lot of people would agree with that.

I dedicated the book to Alf Lennon, my grandfather. During the First World War, Alf lied about his age in order to join the British Army, at the age of fifteen. He then fought on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, shortly after his sixteenth birthday.

Patrick Lennon

August 2009